OnBase: Smashing Sales and Marketing Misalignments Ep. 589 | Leading through the AI shift: Why generative AI demands new thinking, not just new tools
Generative AI is not just another tool, it’s a complete shift in how decisions are made and work gets done.
In this episode of the OnBase podcast, Paul Gibson sits down with Jim Sterne, author and AI thought leader, to explore how organizations must rethink leadership, culture, and ROI in the age of generative AI. They discuss why AI moves us from deterministic systems to creative ones, why traditional ROI models fail, how leadership misalignment slows adoption, and what it really takes to embed AI into workflows without losing human judgment. If you’re navigating AI transformation in your organization, this episode will fundamentally change how you think about it.
About the Guest
Jim Sterne focuses his forty-five years in sales and marketing on using technology for marketing. He sold business computers to companies that had never owned one in the 1980s, consulted and keynoted about online marketing in the 1990s, founded a conference and a professional association around digital analytics in the 2000’s, and has lately been advising companies on the adoption of generative AI. He has written thirteen books on Internet advertising, marketing and customer service including the humorous Devil's Data Dictionary. His first book on AI was “Artificial Intelligence for Marketing: Practical Applications” (2017) and his latest is “The New Science of Customer Relationships: Delivering on the One-to-One Promise with AI” (2025).
Sterne has consulted to some of the world's largest companies; lectured at MIT, Stanford, USC, Harvard, and Oxford. Since 2002, Sterne has remained active producing the Marketing Analytics Summit and spent 20 years with the Digital Analytics Association as cofounder and Board Chair Emeritus. He was named one of the 50 most influential people in digital marketing by one of the UK's premier interactive marketing magazines and was included in a list of the Top 25 Hot Speakers by the National Speakers Association. Sterne is on the Advisory Board of a variety of startups, has served on the Boards of his local library foundation and the Better Business Bureau, and the Editorial Board of the Applied Marketing Analytics peer-reviewed journal. His current passion is leveraging generative AI as a catalyst for innovation as seen in his TEDx talk.