How to stay sane in the AI chaos with Cameron Partridge
Want to know why marketers need to stop trying to keep up with AI? How about what they should focus on? In this episode, Cameron Partridge, the Australian growth leader who helped scale Invisible Technologies into a $2 billion unicorn, talks staying focused in the AI noise. Across brand credentialisation the death of channel specialists, the rise of systems thinkers, and the danger of chasing shiny tools, the new Humanforce growth officer shares a simple message: GenAI hasn’t changed the fundamentals of marketing. It’s just made them harder.
From working with Google, Meta and Microsoft, Cameron has witnessed the industry evolve at breakneck speed. We can now create more content than ever, but standing out requires sharper thinking, deeper focus, and an unshakeable commitment to consistency and trust. Unicorns aren’t built on noise; they’re built on discipline. If you want the truth about AI, growth and the future of marketing roles, this episode is your blueprint.
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This episode of The CMO Show was brought to you by host Mark Jones, producers Niall Hughes and Kirsten Bables and audio engineer Ed Cheng. This is an edited excerpt of the podcast transcript.
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Mark Jones
One of our biggest challenges as marketers is trying to figure out what's the signal and what's all the noise? And it's no more important in the field of AI. The trouble is how do you keep up?
Welcome back to the CMO show. Mark Jones is my name. Thanks for joining us for this episode. The CMO Show is brought to you by Impact Institute in partnership with our friends at Adobe. Now today's quite fun because I was reflecting, we always ask ourselves at events and in podcasts the compulsory AI question, but what if we had a whole episode that was a compulsory AI question?
We're going to look of course at AI in marketing. My guest is Cameron Partridge, who is chief growth officer at an HCM company here in Australia called Human Force. And what's also interesting that he's worked for a $2 billion company in New York, and he's got incredible experience working with Google and Meta and Microsoft and all these big platform providers bringing that inspiration and expertise back to Australia. So let's dive in to find out what he's got to say about AI in marketing. Cameron Partridge, thanks so much for joining me on the CMO Show.
Cameron Partridge
Thanks for having me. Really excited to be here.
Mark Jones
I've got to say, I don't know if we've had any actual unicorns on the show before, or at least someone who's worked for a unicorn, so just to kick it off there, well done.
Cameron Partridge
I appreciate it. Yeah, I mean, takes many people to sort of get to that status and I was only one small part of a much larger machine, but yeah. There's a few more of them in the US and Australia, but hopefully we can change that.
Mark Jones
I think so. So the story I'm talking about here is Invisible Technologies, which got up to a valuation of 2 billion or so. Let's start with that story. How did that all come about, an Aussie who went to America who's boomeranged back to Australia?
Cameron Partridge
I was working in Australia up until about 2016 for the likes of the big Australian brands, Medibank and Telstra and GE Capital and then jetted off to New York in 2016 thinking it was going to be easy to get a job. Wasn't that easy, I can tell you that. It took me a long, long time and many, many attempts. The market over in New York is really that insanely competitive. But look, at the end of it, lucky enough to land a job at BBGO and then moved to Macquarie Group. And after finishing up at Macquarie, I consulted for a few months here and there and ended up consulting for a small start up at the time, which was called Invisible Technologies and went in on a four to six week short-term thing to sort of rebrand the company. And I must've been doing something right and there were enough problems in the business at the time that at the end of that sort of six week contract they asked me to stay on and I became CMO. And for those listening, Invisible Technologies is and was at the time an AI training company. And that means they're really helping those models, those AI models that you use every day, ChatGPT, Meta, Google, all of that. We're one of the companies that those foundational model providers outsourced a lot of their sort of model building to and model training. And so really exciting, crazy journey, Mark. Insane growth, insane.
Mark Jones
I love a good right person in the right place at the right time kind of story. The training bit is interesting, just to pick up on a moment because although we'll get to the marketing stuff in a second, but AI training is I think a bit of a mystery to most people. It's a bit of a black box kind of process. Give us a bit of an insight into what that is like.
Cameron Partridge
There's kind of pre-training which is sort of taking stuff that already exists from the internet and getting the models to learn off that. And then there's the post-training things, which is really refining those models and making sure they're doing exactly what they're meant to do. And these are not just the large language models that we sort of use every day and the sort of chatbot type experience. They're also multimodal things like all the video generators that are out there now.
And the process of that is typically called RLHF, which is reinforced learning from human feedback where you go in and you ask a model to perform a task and then it sort of produces that task and a human will provide feedback on that. And it's a really iterative process. It can move from the most simplest things as in is this a picture of a dog? Which was what it was like years ago, to extreme specialisation and extreme expertise and you just need a lot of people to do that. And so it's a field that is really dominated by gig workers worldwide training these models and the ability to win there is really being defined by that expertise now. So really, really cool space to be in but changing so rapidly.
Mark Jones
Oh yeah. So what did you learn from that work, that experience that helped Invisible to take off? What was the sum total of your wisdom in 20 seconds or less? That's all.
Cameron Partridge
20 seconds or less. Well mate, it's probably going to take me 20 seconds to think about it. I would say don't try to keep up, don't get distracted by the noise. We see that in marketing all the time, everything on LinkedIn, everyone's an AI expert. I think the sum total lesson is you're never going to be able to keep up with this technology, so just stay focused, focus on the fundamentals and do the good things well.
Mark Jones
So you're now in Australia at an HCM company. We will get to that, but I am interested in the journey as it relates to thinking through brand growth and development. So this is the startup journey which is creating value in a brand. And you saw that Invisible through all of these learning experiences you've just been discussing, but I'm sure lots of other experiences too. What was the sort of big aha that you had coming out of that?
Cameron Partridge
Well, I mean, it's really hard to create a brand when you're really, really small and there's a lot of other giants out there and I think GenAI has contributed to that, Mark. I think the biggest problem marketers have right now is that GenAI has made marketing much easier to produce, but conversely made it much harder to win. We've got so distracted over the last 20 years since the dot-com boom and the move to performance marketing and the likes. And I think we just need to get back to the fundamentals. So build for consistency, build for trust. Don't keep changing your messaging, don't keep changing your channels. Just hold the line, but make sure you do a lot of thinking at the front end of that to ensure that it's going to resonate in market.
Mark Jones
So rounding back out to the unicorn thing before we move on, what do you think was one of the big contributors to that in terms of the brand growth, the way that you took it from this seed of a thing with its problems that you referenced up to this glorified status?
Cameron Partridge
Well look, it wasn't just me unfortunately.
Mark Jones
No, I know that.
Cameron Partridge
Look, mate, a big part of our success was our culture, honestly. We were really hell-bent on hiring the very best people, making it very, very clear that this wasn't the easiest place in the world to work. But if you were willing to sort of roll with the punches, you could do some incredible work. And so that attracted some very special people who wanted to make an impact. And I think the real key to our success was just hiring the very best people who wanted to do great things. and it's also... One of the things that really unlocked it for us was focus on getting... This is B2B, but focus on getting a few marquee clients where they can really credentialize your brand. And so when you're a small startup and you don't have those credentials in market and people don't know about you, sort of attaching yourself to another brand that people know and love is a really quick and surefire way to generate success and trust.
Mark Jones
Yeah, brand transference. It's always a good strategy. I've used it myself in terms of setting up an event and bringing in amazing partners. I think that's a great lesson right there.
Cameron Partridge
Mate, it doesn't change.
Mark Jones
Right. Yeah.
Cameron Partridge
And we'll get into this, right? But I sort of maybe shout this from the rooftops a little bit too much. But yeah, the fundamentals don't change. It's be smart about what you're doing, be consistent with what you're d-oing, stick to the fundamentals, don't get caught up in all the noise and I think you'll ultimately be successful. And I think we've forgotten that over the last 20 or 30 years.
Mark Jones
Well that's because we're chasing shiny toys with AI. So why don't we dive into-
Cameron Partridge
You took my line. Yeah, that's a hundred percent true. Let's get into it.
Mark Jones
Right? So the interesting thing is on shows we always say the compulsory AI question, whereas this whole episode is compulsory AI questions, so I'm really enjoying that. Let's start from the big picture and we'll work our way down. What's your take on the impact AI is having in marketing right now?
Cameron Partridge
Yeah, look, I think I touched on it before, Mark. I think it's easier to produce marketing harder to win, but that's creating a lot of slop. And so I think that means a few different things. Get better at creative thinking, think more before you prompt. That's something a lot of people don't do at the moment. But I really think the big thing is, and it's kind of related to your shiny things, is over the years we've built up these really complex systems and workflows and in order to make the most of that and sort of adjust to the speed of change, I think marketing needs to move, keep the fundamentals, but start thinking more in systems and operations.
And I think when you look at marketing and how it's traditionally been done, most CMOs are probably not prepared for that operating burden, right? Now you take a CMO or a chief growth officer out and you're like, yeah, you're responsible for governance and workflows and standards and QA, they probably go pale. And I think that is the world we're sort of moving into alongside. We probably need to own more of revenue. I don't think we've done a really good job of that.
Mark Jones
There's a distinction I want to make, which could I think help unlock some ideas here in this conversation. There's consumer AI and there's the large language models that we all use to a different extent and that occupies a lot of the noise, or if you like, is the focus of a lot of news coverage if you like. Then you've got the use of AI in marketing tools themselves and if you like enterprise marketing. What's your take on the distinction between the two? It's easy for anyone working on their own or in a small shop to get a subscription to one or more of the large language models. It's an entirely different proposition to start redesigning your workflows, to start building out agents in really intelligent ways across an enterprise marketing team to reinvent the way that you do the work that you do to go deep on any of the big platform providers. There's a gulf there and I don't know that that as a distinction is particularly well understood.
Cameron Partridge
Well yeah, I mean look, there's so many different ways to think about AI, right? There's this sort of consumer grade stuff that I think most of us use, which you talked about. There's the AI in product, you go to a CRM and they claim to have AI in product. You go to most SaaS providers, they claim to have AI in product. Honestly, they're mostly these sort of large language models in a wrapper or a ChatGPT or a Claude in a wrapper or there might be these open source models where people can train them in-house to do a specific thing. So I don't actually think the distinction is that far apart. I do think there are obviously different types of AI as well. And this has sort of been around as a concept for 50, 60, 70 years now, but we're mostly obsessed with GenAI and I think what we see in products is just a variation of those large language models to be completely honest.
Mark Jones
So how is it changing strategy implementation, the way teams work though? Because my experience has been that we're still... You mentioned the fundamentals, but we're really re-evaluating how work gets done and by what or whom.
Cameron Partridge
Yeah, I love this question. I could talk about this for days Mark, so you might have to bear with me on this one. But yeah, there's absolutely no doubt that AI is fundamentally changing how we work and operating models as well. You've only got to look to Silicon Valley and see that there are companies out there worth billions with 20 employees. It's obscene. I think the thing to remember is AI doesn't just change tasks, it changes the overall economics of business, speed, cost to serve, margin expansion, and so our expectations have fundamentally changed. And so the value chain kind of splits from zero or low cost activity in marketing, the repetitive kind of production tasks, all the way through to the premium, really strategic and creative thinking.
And I think marketing is lucky because I think you look at other disciplines, not to sort of poke any holes in finance, but a lot of their workflows are deterministic. It's like this must equal that. And marketing's lucky in itself as a discipline because there are things that must be true, and if this is true then it must equal that, which is like a deterministic flow. But there's also this idea of probabilistic where you need more thinking and contextual judgement and I think marketing's really lucky because we get to do both. And so the nature of work will change. I think the channel specialists, the single lane owner where I just do paid search or I just do email marketing, I think that disappears and I think the value goes up and we get more generalists doing more strategic thinking and you've got more systems level thinkers stitching together agentic workflows.
Mark Jones
Which gets to the next important point or the thing most marketers think about now, which is how many of us will still have jobs?
Cameron Partridge
Look, I wouldn't want to give you a number. Look, honestly, there are a lot of things here. I'm somewhat concerned for junior marketers and these channel specialists who've done one thing or learned to do one thing over the sort of early part of their career. If AI takes away what they do, then it creates a problem for marketing in the future because they're no longer on the tools, they're no longer learning what good marketing looks like. So there's that primary concern, I call it the hollowed out middle. You've got the really genuine ones who are probably going to adjust, but you've got the people who've been doing it for a few years who are now potentially at risk of their whole work life and workflow changing and in 10 years who's going to be leading marketing? So I think that'll happen.
In terms of how many people will lose their jobs, I don't know. I think we've gone through this before. The nature of work will change and I think you'll have less people in an organisation doing less of the repetitive task stuff, but you'll probably have more people doing actual human thinking. And so overall maybe 20, 30% of jobs will change, but like I said, the value will go upstream. And I think I'm just hopeful that the marketers early in their career see that this is happening and go into these challenges with, okay, I can see what's happening, now I need to work across different disciplines and become a marketing generalist.
Mark Jones
Tell me about your new company, Human Force, where you've recently started work there. What are the big ideas you brought across? This is obviously HCM, so human capital management, you've got a bit of a niche in the deskless workers if I understand correctly.
Cameron Partridge
Yeah. Look man, I got back to Australia. There's multiple reasons why I joined, right? I got back to Australia almost a year ago now and I wanted a few things. I wanted a very fast operating environment where outcomes were important. Human Force is private equity owned, and so we're going to get that from that sort of environment. The other thing that really made me interested in joining, you talked about this deskless focus.
Mark Jones
Yeah.
Cameron Partridge
That's really important to me. We were just talking about how AI is going to disrupt knowledge work and desk work. I think what AI isn't going to replace, at least in this point in time and not for a long time, is these frontline workers, these shift workers, these contract workers, the real heartbeat of the economy. And I think as AI disrupts desk workers, more and more people are going to move into that world. And so I think there's a certain level of protection from AI because of that.
And also the HCM aspect. This is not fluffy software as a service that someone can vibe code in five minutes. This is core system of record stuff. So all of those reasons were why I joined. And honestly, the leadership's amazing. Clayton, the CEO there, he's really driving the AI mindset in that business to the extent that he vibe coded a website over the course of a weekend mate and showed the whole business what's possible. And it's a great website. That's just really cool to have someone who's on the tools, which I think is what marketing leaders have forgotten to do, right? It's like, lead from the front.
Mark Jones
So I think we are at an interesting point right now where the stock market has recently reacted heavily against SaaS platform providers, and there's an idea that AI agents either within some of the major hyperscalers or externally in some other platform can challenge the dominance of SaaS platforms. And you mentioned the phrase system of record by the way. So there is a changing mindset, or at least a traditional mindset that's being challenged by AI around these sort of core software business models. And again, this is all caused by AI. What's your take on that as a marketer, as a brand guy? It kind of taps into one of the fundamentals around don't change anything about consistency of brand and consistency of message. Things come along like this and suddenly it sort of casts doubt on traditional narratives.
Cameron Partridge
Yeah, but that's why it's really important when you're building out a brand narrative or a brand position, you're sort of not just thinking about now. That's the really hard thing about building a brand that lasts is that you've got to somehow think into the future and think of all the different applications, think of all the different ways this can be disrupted and build your brand in a way that is somewhat consistent, but is flexible enough so that you can pull that consistency through time. Look, as it relates to SaaS, yeah, and it's sort of connected to why I joined Human Force, I think some really basic small subscription seat-based SaaS is probably in a little bit of trouble. I think the core really important critical business infrastructure, SaaS is pretty safe for now. In fact, I think it's going to be safe for a while and I think that becomes actually something to differentiate on to be honest, because these things are incredibly complex and they need to be built over time.
Mark Jones
With the marketing teams, how do you think that's going to change? And if I pick on Microsoft, one of their primary messages is it's humans plus AI. So humans in teams from all departments working with groups of agents that they manage. Is that a mindset you're bringing into how you grow your work?
Cameron Partridge
Yeah, I think so. I think typical marketing teams have done 70% production and execution, 30% thinking. I think this is a real opportunity to really flip that to be 70% thinking, 30% execution and production. I do really believe humans in the loop are critical. We just talked about quality. In order to win in marketing, quality is the new standard, right? And so I think humans need to stay in that. But I do think agentic workflows are becoming more and more common. Some people have different definitions of what agentic workflows are. They're meant to be autonomous and sort of make decisions without too much human intervention. But I do think there'll be more and more shift to the agentic workflows, and I do think that means if they're doing most of the production, it probably means a few less people in the organisation. I think those workflows move up to a systems and sort of QA layer supported by a go-to-market engineer who's helping to stitch these workflows together.
And then you've got really strategic thinkers and outcome owners who sit over the top of that. The sort of one thing I'm actually building for Mark that I think is quite interesting, it goes back to the slop thing. I'm trying to sort of build this kind of independent insights function that's going to work across all of my different teams. I have a growth and new business team and a customer team and a brand and comms team, and typically they'll work on their own outcomes. I want someone to sit over the top of that and basically get more signal from all the noise because the slop has created noise and the systems that we've built, every marketing technology stack, it's like 500 pieces of technology now, we've got away from real signal and I'm trying to introduce a little bit more capability and a little bit more discernment at the top to decide exactly what we should be working on and why.
Mark Jones
So that's an insights analytics decision-making engine of some type.
Cameron Partridge
Yeah. Over the top of your most senior people. It's kind of the person who decides what we do and why and they have to stand their ground on, I've seen all this information and we're going to go for this and stand behind the decisions. I think that's really important.
Mark Jones
What will that do existing tools and platforms can't do?
Cameron Partridge
Because I think they're really siloed at the moment. If you go into a growth marketing function, they're going to be looking at performance marketing, paid search, maybe a CRO platform, some social stuff. They're going to be looking at that in isolation. Then in B2B, you might have a customer marketing team. They're going to be looking at CSAT, expansion, next best action. Brand and communications are going to look at brand tracking. What's our competition doing?
And I think if you don't have someone who sits above those three layers, humans and marketers are inherently selfish and we want to keep our jobs and we want our job to be the most important job. And so if you're not careful, that growth person is just going to do nothing but growth when there might be a higher order, like goal and objective that we can support as a team, particularly for lean teams. I think there are going to be, as AI takes up more of the production, I think there's going to be a need for generalists who can move between functions to solve much larger problems. And this kind of insights layer that sits over the top will help with that.
Mark Jones
Really what you're talking about is a chief operating officer style role where they do in an organisational structural context have that oversight of all those different things. So you're saying this is now becoming an important part of the marketing function, or at least as it stands from your view?
Cameron Partridge
Yeah, because I think, and this is sort of the bed we've made ourselves, you talked about it earlier, the sort of marketing obsession with the new and shiny. And so over the years we've gone out and acquired hundreds of marketing technology tools. We've gone out and reported on activity, not outcomes, going to the CFO and saying, we've got 12,000 impressions. That's not going to work. And I think we've gone and acquired all these systems because we haven't really truly known how to prove our value. And attribution is the sort of flag in the ground that kind of proves that. I very rarely see anyone who's sort of solved attribution. And so the goal of this is really to sort of simplify a lot of that and bring it back to first principles.
Mark Jones
It's interesting. If I flick back in my memory many years ago on the CMO show, we used to talk about innovation as a topic, what it took to be innovative as a marketer. As I'm listening to you, I'm hearing another reflection of this always on approach to iterating and developing our systems. There's an aspect of our marketing world that is always sort of leaning into the unknown as it relates to what these new technologies can do. So we're holding intention, the basics that we began speaking about, but also how are we going to possibly reinvent some of these core executional and strategic issues? So perhaps that's a good way of summarising the tension that a lot of people are feeling at this moment as professional marketers.
Cameron Partridge
Yeah, I mean, honestly, we've just got to stop over-complicating things as well. When we talk about innovation, it's just getting... Look, maybe I'm going to oversimplify it, but it's getting smart people in a room, having a really clear objective and sort of basically unlocking barriers to really thoughtful processes.
Mark Jones
Yeah.
Cameron Partridge
And so I don't think it's that complicated. And I also think we see it every day with marketing. People are like, what should we do with SEO today? What should we do with AI summaries? What should we do with large language model advertising? And they're just different channels. They're different mediums. And if you sort of look at the evolution of, let's say advertising on all these platforms, everyone's worried about like, is ChatGPT going to move into advertising? But it's a path that has been walked many, many times. And so we're getting caught up with this idea of innovation when it's really just adjusting to what's happening in front of you.
Mark Jones
Well, they are in advertising of course, and we know the answer to that one. That's already happening in the states as we speak. And yes, you're quite right. The GEO I think is the term we're all circling around now. So generative engine optimization, which still as I say it out loud, doesn't quite work for me. But that is also forcing us to rethink a lot of tactical strategies in terms of how do we make sure we get our message out there, that we get caught up in these engines? So I guess these things are always going to need to be top of mind.
Cameron Partridge
Yeah, look, when it comes to different channels or different tactics, the GEO thing is really interesting. Obviously, Google dominates in the search world and large language models have come in lately, but I don't really subscribe to this idea that your success should be determined by any one company like Google or Meta. I kind of think that's lazy marketing because it changes so rapidly these days that we talk about SEO now, and the algorithm changed a few years ago as well. We managed to survive that. I think we'll survive this as well. I know I'm sounding like a broken record here, Mark, but we've just got to stick to the fundamentals. You need a multifaceted approach to marketing. Digital is not the only solution, despite what we believe. Fundamentals matter more than just channels. And so I think if you go back to them, you're going to be in a really good place rather than getting distracted by what's new today. Because what's new today is going to be really old tomorrow, I can tell you that.
Mark Jones
Well, Cameron, a really interesting take on how to stay grounded on the basics in the middle of all of the change and some really great experience too in terms of bridging the US to Australia gap. I know the feeling of coming back to Australia, by the way. You're like, this is not New York, and I think that's okay.
Cameron Partridge
Honestly, Australia's an amazing place, right? We're not always at the front of a lot of different things, but there's a lot to love about Australia, and I think from an AI perspective, we're getting there.
Mark Jones
Cameron Partridge, thanks for joining us on the CMO Show.
Cameron Partridge
Mark, appreciate it. Good to talk to you.
Mark Jones
I love it when marketers talk about getting back to basics, getting away from the shiny stuff, and really the dilemma that we've been talking about on the show, which is how much of the work we do does it get distracted by trying to figure out where AI is going? Of course, we don't really have an option, do we? Have to be understanding where all of this is going because AI is one of the most transformative technologies that any of us have seen. And so I don't think that the dilemma is going to go away at all. But at the same time, we need to remember that as marketers, those core fundamentals that Cameron spoke about still matter today as much as they ever did.
So maybe as one of the things to take away is just how many of the fundamental marketing principles that you know work continue to work in your business? What changes do you need to make to bring those things back online? So that's it for this episode of the CMO Show. We'll see you next time. As always, this programme is brought to you by Impact Institute in partnership with Adobe. See you next time.