Tom Allen is a leading Artificial Intelligence speaker, best known as the Founder and CEO of The AI Journal, which now serves over one million monthly readers with deep AI insights, market trends, and expert analysis.
Recognised as a “marketing virtuoso,” he is frequently featured in Harvard Business Review, Forbes, and Entrepreneur UK, where his commentary demystifies the complex terrain of AI for business leaders.
Tom blends deep technical know-how with strategic business acumen, advising Fortune 500 executives, contributing to global think tanks, and serving as an ambassador for SwissCognitive and board advisor at Alphalake AI.
His keynotes span disruptive technology, AI-driven marketing, and growth strategies, consistently offering practical, high-impact guidance for organisations.
In this exclusive interview with The Motivational Speakers Agency, Tom Allen reveals how to embed AI into everyday business workflows, the creative power it brings to marketing, and why patience remains a critical, yet often overlooked, factor in realising long-term ROI.
Q1. Modern businesses are increasingly keen to integrate AI. What’s the most effective way to introduce AI into a company’s operations?
Tom Allen: “I mean, before you look at the integration of AI into the business, you need to look at how you’re structuring your business. And this is what people normally, from what I understand, get backwards. It’s more like an assistance tool.
“So, to integrate it, you’ve really got to think, and there’s plenty of experts in this area, about understanding how you want to transform your business.
“And to make things…and that usually starts by just very small tweaks by understanding what it is you’re looking to do better, looking to do faster. What is it that’s going to be beneficial either for the customer or beneficial for your time and usage?
“It’s quite interesting because there’s a lot of tools. Like, if you use Google Workspace, or if you use, I don’t know, any form of large language model, they’re building it into workflows. And a lot of SaaS companies such as Salesforce, Workday, Monday, Notion, they’re building it in.
“So, it’s actually quite easy to integrate into your day-to-day workflows because any big vendor that you’re buying from probably has that capability.
“But it’s normally a step-by-step process of thinking: where are the gaps? What do we need to do faster? What’s being required from the customer? Because people expect it more these days.
“So probably two sides: on the talent side, but also understanding what your budget is for it, and understanding how it…like I was saying before, how does it fit with what you deliver as a business, as a service for your customers?
“And I think that’s where a lot of people go wrong. It’s very easy to get caught by the flashy tools and new plugins and new benefits. But it’s always quite key to focus on how you do business, because it’s still very much relationship-focused, and whatever can make that better usually is the right tool to go with, or the right upskilling to go with.”
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Q2. AI is being touted as a marketing game-changer. In your view, how can it enhance marketing?
Tom Allen: “Oh, loads of ways. Anything from content creation to analytics, to building templates, to…I mean, you look at Canva, they’ve built it in so you can use that from imagery to designing websites. You can do coding, or get platforms to build it for you like Replet or Lovable or Bolt.
“All of those are the face of your brand, the communication side – what you need to do in terms of showing what your brand is to a customer, but also just having a lot more fun. Like, I mean, there are video generation tools where you can create campaigns and create 10 different variations very quickly.
“I mean, you think about how hard it was – because I used to work in marketing just five years ago, three, four years ago – to come up with a campaign. You’d have to really think and iron it all out, and now you can just tell a large language model, whether you’re on-prem or it’s a private one or whatever, to…an agency should, I’d imagine, be building their own models that are in tune with previous data.
“And they can do anything from testing ad copy to testing entire multi-million-pound campaigns for how it will resonate. And then it’s not so much the…this has been around a while, but you can analyse the performance.
“I mean, that’s a big reason why people use Meta ads and places like that, because you can analyse performance on cost per lead and all those kinds of things that marketing people get very excited about.
“So yeah, it really varies. It depends. How an energy company markets themselves is going to be very different to how an energy drink company markets themselves. How a Red Bull markets themselves compared to how a day-to-day living cost or a Tesco markets themselves can be very different.
“And my point to that is how you use those tools can be much more in line with who your customer is – connecting them better. And that’s essentially what the key thing of marketing is: to connect to your customer better.
“So yeah, there are God knows how many ways, probably millions of ways if you really look at it, but there are a lot of good ways to do it. Yeah.”
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Q3. Many business leaders expect AI to deliver immediate returns. What’s the biggest misconception they have about AI?
Tom Allen: “How quickly it can get you return on your investment. I think when people ask me this, I look at it from the perspective of how we use the internet. I’d say only really recently we’ve been using the internet at the high capacity we have, and we’re going to use it more and more. We want things faster, our attention span’s less.
“And I think with AI, the model is going to get better. The data is going to get better. It’s going to learn more. People that aren’t so tech-savvy are going to learn it better.
“But in my experience, there are still a lot of people, when I speak to them, that think they can just plug something in – it’s like a toy or something – when really it’s quite high-sophisticated for what you want to get out of it.
“And I think, you know, people will spend a lot of money on these tools or with vendors expecting high returns, but it’s like trying to get your business to double its revenue every year. It takes time. You can’t wake up one morning and just find everything fixed.
“And I think people misunderstand that. With those fixes come problems. Even in the big companies, like Google, when they release new models, they have a lot of backlash on it. And the model gets better because of that. And I think that’s a very positive thing to have, because you need to improve the model.
“But I do think people go into it thinking that they’re going to get return on their spend, or it’s not going to create any problems. And that’s daft.
“I think that’s a misconception. Do people want to use it? There are a lot of people questioning: do they want to use Alexa? And Alexa hasn’t done as well as it should have done.
“You look at any kind of industry – whether it’s travel or sport or entertainment or media or construction – there are a lot of applications.
“But to get people using it day in, day out, the adoption, it takes a long time. And to use those in sync and to get your data in place, you’re going to have to go pay either some very good developers/consultants, or you’re going to have to use some sort of company like an Accenture or something to understand how you, especially for the big companies, assess all that you’ve got and then try and make sense of it to apply an AI layer over your business.
“Which will ultimately benefit you. And the people that are sacking it off and not doing it today will be the ones that will lose out in five years. But it’s just very hard to take your money and put it into something you might not see a return on in five years.
“But fortunately, most people that run businesses and make those decisions can see the vision for five, ten years from now. So a lot of people are doing it, but that’s a big misconception: you’re not going to see a return on it quickly.
“Occasionally, you might, but it’s very rare that I’m seeing a return on investment in less than six months. I don’t see it happening. Not saying it doesn’t happen, but I don’t see it happen.”
This exclusive interview with Tom Allen was conducted by Mark Matthews of The Champions Speakers Agency.
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