Pilot First, Hire Smart: The AI-First Approach to Smarter Growth

Co-hosted by Simon Dell, CEO of Cemoh, and presented by Chris Jowsey, Founder of Nugget Digital

Everyone's talking about AI. Very few businesses have actually changed how they work — or who they hire.

Since March, Chris Jowsey has been tracking more than 22,000 Australian marketing job ads and scoring how deeply AI is really embedded in each role. The results are confronting: of the 979 ads that mention AI, only 21 describe a role genuinely built around it. National small business data shows the same pattern — 69 per cent of Australian SMBs say they use AI, but only 12 per cent have made it core to how they operate.

This isn't another tools demo. It's a practical playbook for the structural layer most AI webinars skip:

• Where you actually are: the three phases of AI adoption — understanding, piloting, scaling — and how to tell which one you're in
• What AI-forward businesses look like when they hire: real lines from real job ads, and what the best ones do differently
• How to pilot AI in your business: break a role into tasks, pick two or three high-value use cases, and run a 30–90 day pilot with clear success criteria
• Scaling and hiring: how to write an AI-forward job ad, what AI means for team structure, and how to brief a recruiter

Marketing roles are the lens (that's the dataset), but the playbook applies to every role you hire. You'll leave with a one-week action plan: pick one role, break it into tasks, and circle your first two pilots.