C-Suite Perspectives On AI: Scott Parker Of Social Factor On Where to Use AI and Where to Rely Only on Humans
An Interview With Kieran Powell
Rely on AI when the issue can be reduced to something purely factual. Rely on people when things like context, emotions, politics, or other intangibles will influence the outcome.
As artificial intelligence (AI) continues to advance and integrate into various aspects of business, decision-makers at the highest levels face the complex task of determining where AI can be most effectively utilized and where the human touch remains irreplaceable. This series seeks to explore the nuanced decisions made by C-Suite executives regarding the implementation of AI in their operations. As part of this series, we had the pleasure of interviewing Scott Parker, CEO of Social Factor.
Scott Parker is the CEO of Social Factor, a Social CRM and Strategy agency that helps enterprise social media teams move from digital chaos to human connection. Social Factor streamlines the digital CX journey by handling various operational challenges, like strategy, technology, engagement, and intelligence, to create authentic and safe social spaces. Over the last 18 years, he’s worked with world-recognized brands, including Tyson Foods, Essilor,
Verizon, Cisco, Google, LinkedIn, Toyota, Smith & Nephew, and many more.
Thank you so much for your time! I know that you are a very busy person. Our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your ‘backstory’ and how you got started?
“I wish I could tell you that my whole life I had dreamed of running a social media agency. But, we didn’t even have internet access at my house until I was a senior in high school, so it’s actually a much different story than that.
I grew up in Memphis and, in many respects, there was nothing overly remarkable about my story. I grew up in a middle-class family and am a product of Memphis city schools. I love sports, but that’s definitely not my calling. I studied classical percussion from about the 7th grade all through college and spent many of those years thinking that’s where I would try to establish a career.
By the time I got to college, I had earned bachelor’s degrees in both music and in business. And after a short stint working at the corporate headquarters for ALLTEL Wireless in Little Rock, I got married and we moved to Dallas where I did an MA/MBA program at SMU — with the thought that I could stay around the arts, but just in an administrative capacity.
However, it was through one of those totally unplanned connections that came from a common interest in the arts in which I got connected with an internship while a student at SMU. That offer eventually turned into a full-time offer at an advertising agency.
But…I knew literally nothing about advertising.
After 11 years at the agency, which was an incredible learning experience thanks to working with some of the most talented people I know, I had an opportunity to explore another area where I had very limited professional exposure — social media.
After just a year and a half, there were some leadership changes, and I had the opportunity to interview for the CEO role. It seemed like a great learning opportunity to just go through that process, but lo-and-behold — I ended up getting the job!
So, I’ve spent the last five and a half years as CEO of Social Factor. We’ve grown to three and a half times the size we were when we began, and I think we’re about 20% of the way to our next inflection point. We’ve transitioned from working with local brands and nonprofits to $1B+ revenue clients who do business globally. We have industry leading technology partners, the kind of leaders who’ve forgotten more than I’ll ever know, and account teams that I would put up against anybody. And we’re just getting started.”
It has been said that our mistakes can be our greatest teachers. Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
I once had a direct mail job of 250,000 pieces that printed without postage. It did not seem funny at the time of course. I learned that even if you trust a 3rd party that you have worked with many times before, you should always personally lay eyes on things that are mission critical — like if letters have postage.
Are you working on any exciting new projects now? How do you think that will help people?
We continue to build new capabilities in helping our clients leverage their significant investments in technology to fulfill the constant request to “do more with less.” Through platform partnerships, extensive training, internal exploration of new technologies (like generative AI) and open ears and minds from our Client Service teams we’re bringing very practical solutions to common problems that often are couched in very esoteric language of technology and/or strategy.
And, I think the help for people there is at least two-fold. From an internal perspective, it provides opportunities for upskilling our current team and creating new professional opportunities. From a client perspective, when resources are not devoted to behind-the-scenes, operational issues, attention can turn to the significant work of creating connections with the people in our online communities.
Thank you for that. Let’s now shift to the central focus of our discussion. In your experience, what have been the most challenging aspects of integrating AI into your business operations, and how have you balanced these with the need to preserve human-centric roles?
There are several challenging aspects for “integrating AI” into any organization:
- Learning Curve — The technology is so new to the market, and it doesn’t come with a pre-built user manual. Applying it well inside of an organization requires gaining and understanding of the technology before you can think about how to utilize it effectively.
- Imagination — By definition, a “revolution” is something that brings fundamental change. It’s a “paradigm shift” or a “new operating system” or a “different lens” than has previously been used. In a world primarily driven by left-brained functions, this kind of thinking is often undervalued in organizations. Until there’s a revolution…
- Communication — Not every vision has a clear articulation. But every vision that is implemented in an organization must. There must be a bridge between the “blue sky” creative thought and the operational details of implementation, and motivation by both sides to create that roadmap.
- Fear — Change is scary. Especially when it threatens, or we believe it threatens, our most basic needs. “Will AI take my job?” is a common fear that is still pervasive in many circles, and it is really hard to get buy-in to do something new from someone who is afraid they won’t have access to life’s necessities if it is successful.
- Value — Implementing “AI” across the organization is a great deal more complex than just “using ChatGPT to do stuff.” That requires an investment in people, platforms and processes to realize true revolutionary success. Diverting a significant amount of resources to a new technology still just starting to gain traction and experiencing rapid expansion of its capabilities is a calculated risk, and only companies with a short time-to-value being able to articulate a clear, recognizable value to all stakeholders is a necessary element for any such investment.
For Social Factor specifically, our business is not built around the high volume of simple transactions that technology can facilitate with great speed. Our tagline is “digital chaos to human connection” which, by definition, cannot be delivered without people. For us, human-centric roles are non-negotiable in our service delivery. Understanding AI, and specifically the applications of generative AI in an enterprise social media context, is part and parcel to understanding the “digital chaos” our clients are dealing with. Like all companies, the ability to accelerate the completion of repetitive tasks is appealing, but even in that, it is people that have to guide the technology to that end. So, our focus is equipping our people to learn to be the bridge with a new, different, exciting, revolutionary technology.
Can you share a specific instance where AI initially seemed like the optimal solution but ultimately proved less effective than human intervention? What did this experience teach you about the limitations of AI in your field?
Generative AI initially appeared as a significant threat to parts of our business that have written communication as the final output — things ranging from social intelligence reports based on listening data to interactions with people on social media. But, in an outcome that now surprises no one, the overly simplistic idea of “just type in a question and it tells you the answer” has proven to be unequivocally false. Things like data privacy, model quality, sentiment analysis, data intake capabilities, and style of delivery quickly eliminated generative AI platforms from creating anything close to a final deliverable.
How do you navigate the ethical implications of implementing AI in your company, especially concerning potential job displacement and ensuring ethical AI usage?
I view “potential job displacement” not as an opportunity to cut costs from services we are currently delivering, but rather as an opportunity to upskill our people to lead our agency and our clients into the future we will build together.
Regarding ethical AI usage, there are many areas of thought to explore that would take a good deal more time and space than this allows. However, in the end, I think “don’t tell lies” is a pretty good policy to have regarding AI use. Not to gloss over the details, because these are complex and important issues, but while we are in our infancy in terms of dealing with those we use general rules like:
- Don’t take information you promised to keep confidential and give it to an unauthorized user.
- Don’t take credit for something you didn’t do.
- Don’t leave out sources that contribute significantly to your thinking.
- Don’t use the technology without telling your audience, especially in this rapidly evolving time with many ethically-difficult questions still in early stages of discussion and resolution.
Could you describe a successful instance in your company where AI and human skills were synergistically combined to achieve a result that neither could have accomplished alone?
In our business, to this point the thing we accomplish together that we cannot do alone is high volume and high speed.Typically, for me, this looks like a document that I need to create to organize a lot of disparate thoughts into an organized whole. We leverage Google’s platform and our own SOC-2 policies to ensure that any of our intellectual property is always secure, and from there AI can be very helpful in many ways. I typically use it for things like
- Summarizing long documents
- Suggesting additional questions to ask/answer
- Suggesting other perspectives on a particular topic
I have never used an output from an AI platform as a final document, but I do find that “conversing” with generative AI about a topic can help me clarify my own positions, address perspectives I would not have considered, and tremendously compress the amount of time that it takes to do those things.
Based on your experience and success, what are the “5 Things To Keep in Mind When Deciding Where to Use AI and Where to Rely Only on Humans, and Why?” How have these 5 things impacted on your work or your career?
1 . Rely on AI when you have large volumes of data that need to be processed quickly for summarization or categorization. Rely on humans when you need that data used to inform the creation of something new.
2 . Rely on AI when you have a templated solution based on the findings for your data. Rely on humans when the final output is something that needs to be unique or is nonobvious.
3 . Rely on AI when the issue can be reduced to something purely factual. Rely on people when things like context, emotions, politics, or other intangibles will influence the outcome.
4 . Rely on AI when 80% is good enough. Rely on people when it has to be perfected.
5 . Rely on AI when expectations are for something impersonal. Rely on people when a personal touch is needed. This cannot be faked.
Looking towards the future, in which areas of your business do you foresee AI making the most significant impact, and conversely, in which areas do you believe a human touch will remain indispensable?
Certainly as we develop our proficiency to train the right models for the way we need to use them, the ability to process data and provide reasonably accurate summaries of the major trends can be a very significant accelerator of our work. However, computers are not human, and as long as our primary focus as an agency is building human connection with audiences on the other side of the screen, we will never be able to move away from the human touch.
You are a person of great influence. If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂
Global estimates are that over 5 billion people now use social media. If I could wave a magic wand and start a movement where kindness, compassion, and empathy were the expectation in our shared social spaces so that we could truly have civil discourse and human connection, I think the impact would be global
How can our readers further follow your work online?
https://www.linkedin.com/in/cscottparker/
This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for joining us!
C-Suite Perspectives On AI: Scott Parker Of Social Factor On Where to Use AI and Where to Rely Only… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.