Ndidi Oteh, the newly appointed global CEO of Accenture Song, is a leader with a wealth of experience and a proven track record of driving growth and innovation.

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These are live-blogged notes from a session at NEXT25 in Hamburg. Posts will be improved over the next few days.

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How would you fancy being interviewed on stage about your new job, less than three weeks after you took it on? That’s exactly what Ndidi Oteh chose to do at NEXT25, in her first trip to Europe after taking over from David Droga as CEO of Accenture Song at the beginning of September. Her fireside chat was with David Mattin, a regular NEXT keynote speaker, who’d opened the conference just a few hours before.

Mattin acknowledged the huge influence of her predecessor on the industry as a whole, and asked how Oteh felt about succeeding him. Accenture Song is a big bus, she pointed out — but she’s excited to take the wheel. We all know the saying “on the shoulders of giants”, and she used that phrase to describe her situation with former CEO David Droga. And, as she said, he’s not gone. He remains as vice-chair of Accenture.

Still, she’s working with legendary clients. The future is bright. But it’s not without its challenges.

Brands and speaking up

Mattin brought up one of the biggest challenges facing all consultants — and businesses — this decade.

“We’ve been on a journey over the past five to seven years, where brands have to decide when they speak up and not, and on what issues,” he said. How will she deal with that?

Her answer started from a position of relevance: “If it’s relevant to customers or client, is it relevant to the brands?” She was clear that we’re in a cultural moment where brands have been required to speak out in a way they weren’t before. And that there are studies that show employees and customers are looking for companies to be a moral north star, in a way we haven’t experienced before.

”We have a responsibility as brand-builders to think about how we shape the future, and part of that is building trust with your consumers,” said Oteh. “And that starts with consistency.”

And, she suggested, consistency can be surprisingly challenging. It feels like every minute there’s new news, new technology — but that also means new opportunities.

”What do you, as a brand, stand for every single day?” she asked. ”How are you going to communicate when you make a misstep?”

However, Oteh was also happy to challenge some received wisdom. There’s a lot of language around “giving the customers what they want” and “chasing the customers” out there.

”But sometimes they’ll lead you in the wrong direction,” she said. “So you need to do much more than that.”

Consistency and mission

Mattin pushed further, asking how she navigates conversations with brands around what they talk about, and when they stay silent.

“You need consistent criteria,” Oteh replied. ”And it needs to start with what your mission is. Sometimes brands want to speak out on things that maybe they haven’t yet built trust on, to a degree where they will be listened to.”

Trust creates room for expansion, she said, making the comparison with convenience stores that expand the range of what they can sell, such as hats and umbrellas, through the trust they’ve built with regular customers. And she pointed out the parallels with banks that also serve as coffee shops, and can provide more general life planning advice.

”It all has to be connected and harmonised with your mission in the same way,” she said. ”It’s not about giving a singular experience, but giving the right experience at the right moment. It’s about your mission, and how that carries through all the experiences you want your customers to have.”

Deploying AI to stay ahead of the curve

Mattin moved on to the theme that had been hanging over the entire conference: AI. How is it changing the ways brands show up in the world now?

“We’ve never had a more educated – and miseducated — consumer group before,” said Oteh. ”Everyone has a favourite model.”

And they’re using them. They’re using them to narrow down brand selection and to find the cheapest price. And they’re using them to feel pre-informed about the product or service they want to buy.

“You’re getting clients walking in more informed than ever before — but not all that information is 100% true,” Oteh said. ”They might ‘know’ things that are wrong, or out of date.”

So, that’s one end of the challenge: making sure customers get access to the right information. But it also has a role in the company’s work.

“We need to use AI to understand how our consumers are changing over time,” she said. “If we only address the challenges of now, we’ll never get ahead of the technology. If we understand their challenges, we can solve them in different ways.”

But she was also clear that AI has its limits:

AI automates tasks. It does not automate imagination, courage, empathy, and ingenuity. It will take what’s OK and make it good. But to make something great needs human ingenuity. Good work will be democratised. But no brand wants to look the same as all the others.

She’s OK with AI taking over some things. For example, she never wants to go back to the days of printing out a map and using it to navigate on a road trip, a sentiment I suspect we’d all agree with…

“There were always things we didn’t enjoy doing in a campaign,” she said. “Or which we couldn’t do because it takes too long. Yet now we can.”

And she’s keen to explore how AI can create rapid variations on a campaign, or automate tasks, freeing up time. “And that time means we can focus on excellent, creative, distinctive work to a degree we never could before,” she said.

The technology-forward creative

She’s pleasantly surprised by how much their creatives are already embracing technology. But then, she’s clear that Accenture Song needs to attract people who want to build the future, not just navigate it. And that means a level of comfort with culture shifts.

“I remember when designers moved from sketching to 2D CAD,” she said. ”I remember those conversations.”

Those conversations included people saying that customers would never buy things on their phones. People who rejected those ideas are, it’s safe to say, not exactly relevant today. Those aren’t the people she wants in the company.

”We want to attract individuals who would like to build and shape the future,” she said. ”David Droga is an amazing creative, but also an amazing brand-builder. He allowed people to work with creativity and courage, and I think that’s crucial, too. There are things you can do today that you couldn’t five months ago, thanks to technology. And unless we embrace that, we won’t stay relevant.”