Why We'll Always Need Sales People | Salesman Podcast

Roland T. Rust is a distinguished University Professor, David Bruce Smith Chair in Marketing, and author of The Feelings Economy: How Artificial Intelligence Is Creating the Era of Empathy. In this episode of the Salesman Podcast, Roland explains what the “feelings economy” is and why more artificial intelligence might be a good thing for sales professionals whilst it wrecks other industries. Resources: Roland on LinkedIn Book: The Feeling Economy: How Artificial Intelligence Is Creating the Era of Empathy Transcript Will Barron: Hi, my name is Will, and welcome to the Salesman Podcast. On today's episode, we'll be looking at selling with emotion in the feeling economy. Our guest, Roland Rust, is a distinguished university professor at the School of Business at the University of Maryland. He's the author of The Feeling Economy, which we're going to cover in this episode of the show. And with that, Roland, welcome to the Salesman Podcast.   Roland Rust: Oh, thanks very much. Happy to be here.   What is the Feeling Economy? · [00:45]    Will Barron: You are welcome, sir. I'm glad to have you on. I try not to cover it too much before on our pre-call, pre-recording chat, but I think we're on the same wave length with a lot of what we're going to talk about today. So it'll be interesting if there are any points that we do diverge, but I think we're all on the same wavelength with a lot of this. To get us started, this is seemingly a lazy question for an interviewer to ask, Roland, but I'm going to ask you it because I want you to set the scene here. What the heck is the feeling economy?   Roland Rust: Yeah. Okay, very good question. The feeling economy is maybe an unexpected consequence of artificial intelligence, because there have really been a couple of main shifts in technology in the last 150 years. The first was the move toward the thinking economy from the physical economy. So in other words, you had people in the physical economy who were doing things like farming and mining coal and doing physical exertion, and men really dominated at that time. And then around 1900, you really started to see an expansion of the thinking economy, and one of the things that you saw was a very much larger percentage of people became educated, because they had to, to compete in the thinking economy as thinkers. During that time, then women became much more equal. You see many more women in high positions than you did in the 1800s or 1700s.   “The shift that's happening now is from the thinking economy to the feeling economy, and the reason for that is that artificial intelligence is getting good at thinking. And the more thinking artificial intelligence can do, the more humans are pushed into doing things that they can do better than AI. For the most part, that's things like feeling, interpersonal relationships, and to some extent, we're also going to have an advantage on things like common sense and intuition, but even that will probably go away in a little bit of time.” – Roland Rust · [02:05]    Roland Rust: So now the shift that's happening now is from the thinking economy to the feeling economy, and the reason for that is that artificial intelligence is getting good at thinking, and the more thinking artificial intelligence can do, the more humans are pushed into doing things that they're better than AI at. For the most part, that's things like feeling. Feeling, interpersonal relationships, to some extent, for a while, we're going to have an advantage on things like common sense and intuition, but even that will probably go away in a little bit of time.