IN CLEAR FOCUS:Peter Benei, remote work expert and AI marketing practice lead at Intercept Scale, explores the evolution of marketing leadership. Benei shares frameworks from his book “Leadership Anywhere,” including the Transparent Leadership Triangle and Asynchronous Communication Matrix. He discusses AI adoption in marketing, highlighting implementation challenges and opportunities. Learn how transparency, remote leadership strategies, and AI are transforming modern marketing teams.

Episode Transcript

Adrian Tennant: Coming up in this episode of IN CLEAR FOCUS

Peter Benei: The marketing team and every business team will get fundamentally restructured, not because of AI and how it helps, but because how we work in general will change fundamentally.

Adrian Tennant: You’re listening to IN CLEAR FOCUS, fresh perspectives on marketing and advertising produced weekly by Bigeye, a strategy-led full-service creative agency growing brands for clients globally. Hello, I’m your host, Adrian Tennant, Chief Strategy Officer. Thank you for joining us. The landscape of marketing leadership continues to evolve rapidly, shaped by two major forces: the shift to remote and hybrid work models, and the emergence of AI-powered tools. These changes fundamentally alter how teams collaborate, how agencies operate, and how marketing professionals approach their craft. Our guest today has unique insights into both of these transformative trends. Peter Benei is a business consultant and remote work expert specializing in helping companies optimize their operations and leadership in distributed work environments. He’s the author of “Leadership Anywhere: How to Become a Better Asynchronous Leader,” and currently serves as principal consultant at Intercept Scale, where he leads their AI marketing practice. Peter’s career journey includes a decade in traditional advertising, working with Fortune 500 brands in London and Budapest, followed by years of experience helping start-ups scale through remote operations. He’s worked remotely with companies since 2014, leading marketing teams as a CMO and COO, and has developed frameworks for building effective remote-first organizations. To discuss the evolution of marketing leadership and the impact of AI on our industry, I’m delighted that Peter is joining us today from Tuscany, Italy. Peter, welcome to IN CLEAR FOCUS. 

Peter Benei: Thank you for having me. 

Adrian Tennant: You started your career in traditional advertising agencies in Budapest and London. What inspired your transition to remote work in 2014, well before it became mainstream?

Peter Benei: Yeah, that’s a good question. I think everyone can relate – that we either seek more revenue or more freedom and we are trying to balance that with our own personal lives and needs. There was a very practical prompt that happened at that time. I just started to see some of the senior producers who worked for the agency, mainly from, you know, editors, graphic designers, and like practical people who supply the creative materials, not the ones who are thinking about the strategy and managing the client’s relationships more like, you know, producers. They started to show up – well, not showing up in the office and showing up on a screen from Thailand or Bali or whatever. Some weird remote locations with beaches and internet. That’s all the two things that you only need, I guess. And I thought that I can give it a try. I mean, I’m working mostly in strategy, so I wasn’t on the accounts in the agency and all the agencies that I’ve been working for. At that time, and most of the work that I supplied or contributed to these agencies were all strategy-based: team leadership, branding, creative campaigns, marketing campaigns, stuff like that. And all of this can be done online, I figured. Plus the rent in London was really high. I assume everyone can also relate to that too. And I was foolish enough to live in the center of the city, not in the outskirts, so even that contributed to rent. And originally I’m coming from Budapest, so I’m Hungarian by birth, and I just moved back, it was cheaper, and I could earn the same wage that I earned in London, so why not make the switch? The only switch that was there was that in London I worked for agencies that worked for blue chip companies, so like British Telecom, Vodafone, T-Mobile, you know, the big companies. And it was 2014, so like ten years ago, and again, as you said, it was way before it was cool – the whole remote work aspect. We didn’t even have tools, by the way, we used Google Suite and stuff like that – so no Slack, no Zoom, nothing – and the only change that happened is that i started working with startup companies more and mid, scale-up companies. They were more open to working remotely with others, especially they were usually based in the US and their production team and the people who aren’t the people who are delivering the sales and the account management, again, they were all based in the US. But everyone else, they usually were based either in Europe, Asia, you know, usual stuff. And yeah, that was a turning point, and I’m so glad that I made that call ten years ago because that allows that intro that you just said that I’m dialing in from Tuscany, Italy – I’m not Italian by any means. I just live here.

Adrian Tennant: Well, I think it’s fascinating that you lived your experience, obviously got a really great understanding of what problems managers would face dealing with remote employees. Your book, “Leadership Anywhere,” introduces several frameworks for remote leadership. Peter, could you explain the Transparent Leadership Triangle and why it’s particularly important for distributed teams?

Peter Benei: Sure. Let me explain why I wrote the book in the first place. I think it’s important to understand. Again, I started working remotely 10 years ago and spent another almost 10 years in the office as well. So I had this, like, I could relate to both of that side of the coin’s right? Especially because I worked in the office. I worked mainly in like big agencies. So like, you know, I mean, I’m sure, you know, or everyone knows it’s lots of bureaucracy. Things are slower. Managers are walking the floor and, you know, this kind of stuff. And that fundamentally changed when I started working remotely. But I saw a lot of misconceptions and missteps, mainly from the management perspective at these companies. I was never a CEO of these companies, so I was usually in the upper tier mid-manager. So I was able to see the problems on the mid-tier level and also on the high-tier level of the companies as well. After like, I don’t know, eight years, I figured that, I mean, I’m just distilling all of the stuff that I learned. And I figured most people would understand from these frameworks, like the Transparent Leadership Triangle. So the Transparent Leadership Triangle is about transparency, but if I say to most of the people that, you know, “The more transparent your company is, the more trust you have within your teams,” it’s all fluffy, and we cannot really grasp that and hold that in hand. It’s not very practical, but I’m a very practical person. So I figured let’s find something that can attach as a practical way of explaining what trust is. And I think trust in a remote environment, especially is providing access. So the more access you provide to your team members, the more trust you have and the more transparent your company becomes and so on. It’s like a snowball effect. But you have to start with a practical way of providing access. And there are five levels of access. Most people do the first two in a remote environment. So the first level is the basic one, information. Provide as much access to information as you can. To translate it to practical terms again, have a knowledge hub online, document everything that you do, so people can understand what the heck is going on around the company, what you stand for, what this company is doing, etc. Most companies, nowadays at least, it wasn’t the case 10 years ago, but nowadays they are doing it really well. When you have like a normal company hybrid or office space, you should think about like the internet or the intra hub or whatever you have. It’s pretty much the same for remote companies as well, but it has to be transparent for everyone because that’s like the single source of truth about the company for the people who are working remotely. Again, there is no office, right? So you have to start somewhere. The second is the operations. You have to provide as much access to the operations as you can. This is also most people and most companies are doing it. It’s called project management, pretty much. Use a project management system that’s transparent, that’s online. You can see what’s going on and who’s doing what. The pitfalls that usually people make is that they don’t do it fully transparently. So they have like these silos where you cannot see the entire project. Only just dislike on a pod or silos and small teams can see one single part of the project management case. That shouldn’t be the case: everyone should see everything if they want to the third level – and this is where most companies stop on the triangle – is the communications that they usually do. If it’s Slack or some sort of like a chat communication network where everyone is logging on, but the way they set it up it’s not transparent. And a lot of things are happening in the DMs – direct messaging, one-on-one chats – and that’s when this information can happen. So yes, have a chat, whatever you have, Slack or Teams or I don’t care what. Tools doesn’t matter that much, by the way. But when you have those tools set up in a way that it’s default to everyone when you’re sending a message, default to everyone when you’re creating a project, default to everyone when you are creating performance report, which is the fourth level. So performance is the fourth. Usually, we leaders measure the performance of our team members, right? But we don’t share how the company is performing, and it’s so easy when you have a company in an office. It’s easy to see how the company is performing, right? You need to have the corner office. Your agency is located in the square mile somewhere or in the outskirts of the town. In the warehouse that’s different, you know? Like status symbols around the office do work. But in the remote work, they don’t work. The only thing that works there are the numbers: “How we are delivering with xyz KPI?” So share as much as you can with your team members so they can understand how the company is performing. The more the company is performing and more you know the better the performance is probably they will be more loyal to stay because it’s so easy to switch jobs especially in a remote work environment. If I’m not happy, I mean, I can switch a job within a week and then, you know, I’m not bound to location. So the entire job market is the entire plan for me. I can get a job anywhere. So loyalty is super key when you’re a leader to make sure that people who are working for you are loyal. So they have to understand how the company is performing what they are doing what are the operations how do we communicate? And the last thing is how you, as a leader, make decisions. And I’m a big believer in transparent decisions and decision-making, so most decisions can be either reversed or can be collaborated with others so put them in I mean they are equally as smart as you, probably – maybe more – so just have an open mindset and decide together transparently it’s also easier to communicate the decision because everyone is involved in the first place.

Adrian Tennant: Of course, you currently work with an organization based out of North America. You’re in Tuscany, Italy, which brings up the question of time zones. And in “Leadership Anywhere,” you also introduce the concept of the Asynchronous Communication Matrix. Can you explain how this helps teams decide when to use synchronous versus asynchronous communication?

Peter Benei: So synchronous means that everything happens at the same time, right? Asynchronous means that everything happens when you have the time. I know it’s very reductional, but still. In the office, most of the work that you do is synchronous, right? And remote work, some parts of your work will, by default, become asynchronous. I think the good analogy, if you have an office or you’ve worked in an office, you think about the open-plan office environment, which I hate so much, by the way. It’s so hard to work, like deep work in those places. And you put up the headphones to make sure that no one is touching you, and no one is coming at you, and no one is disturbing you, and no one is interrupting you. It’s pretty much the same if you work remotely. So if you are always on the chat on an unscheduled synchronous workflow, like a Slack group or Teams or whatever, you cannot do the work. If you are always in online meetings, which happens for most of the remote companies who started non-remote and switched to remote because of the COVID pandemic back in the days, right? They immediately doubled their meeting number because the managers just didn’t know what to do. If you are flooded with meetings, you obviously cannot do work. So, the Asynchronous Workflow Matrix means that you need to set rules between scheduled, unscheduled, and synchronous and unsynchronous workflows. Synchronous, that’s the easiest part. What should be synchronous in the company? Meetings, right? Sometimes you do need to have meetings. I’m a big non-believer in stand-up meetings. Everything can be an email or a PM summary from the PM tool that you use, but for other cases, you do need meetings. Just don’t have more than two per day, please. Meetings emergencies so what happens. In the office it’s easy you walk to the weather and you solve the problem in the remote – who is online? What is the messaging or the platform that you are using? One of the suggestions that I usually do for other companies is that set up a WhatsApp group. Never ever use WhatsApp, ever! That’s private for people. Please don’t do that but if the site is down or something happened with the company with the work and you need to text people. Text the mobile text WhatsApp and you should have a public transparent policy within your people that you will use WhatsApp only if there is an emergency, and you can easily call people up if that’s a need. You know, usually these things don’t happen, but sometimes they do, and you have to figure out how to do it. In a remote environment it is different. Asynchronous is deep work. It’s pretty much like I sit down, no one can disturb me, and I do my work. I love working with the US. Personally, I think that’s the best ever combination that you can have. Get the US market advantage of job market, money, and everything, but live in Europe. Amazing. Because not just because Europe is amazing, but also I have like the six hours time zone difference. So I usually like officially start working from like one or two o’clock my time PM. That’s when I do have the meetings currently, by the way, during this recording, it’s almost six o’clock my time. Your is morning. But I do all my deep work before that time. Why? No one can interrupt me. No one can interrupt me. That’s amazing. I cherish that so much. Without that, I wouldn’t be able to do my work, I think. So I like this distinction between time zones. I don’t see this as a problem. It’s a big opportunity.

Adrian Tennant: Let’s take a short break. We’ll be right back after this message.

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 Adrian Tennant: Welcome back. I’m talking with Peter Benei, Principal Consultant at Intercept Scale, and the author of “Leadership Anywhere: How to Become a Better Asynchronous Leader.” Peter, you’re now leading business-to-business marketing agency Intercept Scale’s AI marketing practice. I’m curious, what prompted this evolution in your career focus?

Peter Benei: Sure. So I started as almost like an employee for companies 10 years ago, moved to consultant, like a one-man show consultanc,y two years ago. And I think that’s a natural evolution for every consultant that you come back to the game once in a while, especially if you are at the point where you don’t need that amount of the revenue leverage that you need, but you more willing to ride the wave that is coming up. And I was more interested in the AI wave that is coming up right now than anything else. And I just realized that I’m alone, I’m a one-man show, and my resources are limited by that. And by joining Intercept, it’s a Toronto-based B2B marketing agency, and their arm is Intercept Scale, where we deliver AI solutions for B2B tech companies. It’s pretty much the best combination that I can have. My expertise with their resources together, I don’t feel that limitation anymore.

Adrian Tennant: Intercept Scale recently conducted a study on AI adoption in marketing, and you surveyed over 200 CMOs. Peter, what were some of the most surprising findings?

Peter Benei: Yeah, so AI is here. We have no idea how to use it! Yeah, that’s one of the main insights that we learned from the study that the AI wave is here. Almost everyone is using somewhat of an AI tool, either text-based, video-based, whatever, like 80% or more, they are using it. But more than half of the leaders that answered the study – again, this study was only answered by leaders, so not the practitioners of the marketing teams, but the ones who are making the decisions – they never understand. Half of them, they have inconsistent outputs from these tools. They feel that the learning curve is very steep. They don’t know how to use those skills or what skills they need at all. They experience really bad results from the AI, generic ones. Usually, this is like, “It sounds like AI,” or “it reads like AI.” Plus, they don’t know what is the long-term objective and the long-term result for AI. So we see a trend, not just in the study, but in general, that those special enterprise companies that invested heavily in AI adoption, now they are scaling a little bit back because they are trying to figure out what is the actual return on their investment. And I don’t think it’s because of the AI itself, it’s because of the lack of the skills and lack of the strategy that they have because they treated as a tool. So, to sum it up nicely here, everyone is using but most of the people experience bad results because they treated as a tool not as a holistic approach to everything that will be changed around marketing communications operations and everything else in business.

Adrian Tennant: I think it’s a fascinating report. One stat that stood out to me is that your research showed about 78% of marketers are using AI for text generation, but there are concerns about output accuracy. Do you have any tips for how marketing teams can ensure quality when using AI tools?

Peter Benei: And so this is what I said, that inconsistent outputs are present and they have bad experience using AI. Text is the more prevalent, obviously, because the AI tools within text generation are the most advanced. Video and audio are lagging a little bit behind, but it will get there in half a year or so, or even less. The problem with the results is that, again, they treat it as a tool. They think if they just input something without any context, they will get some results. Yes, but the results will be generic because your input was generic. So my advice is to treat the AI tool, and I’m making the quotation mark here, to treat the AI as a member of your team, so it’s a teammate. I wouldn’t say treat it as a human, but treat it almost alongside humans. If you hire someone new to your team tomorrow, there is an onboarding sequence that you usually go through with your new hirings, right? One or two weeks, getting more information in, they should be attending an internal course about the company meeting with everyone just to get the feeling and learn the brand and so we humans learn from other humans in a way with time. With AI, it’s different. It’s you know, zeros and numbers – it’s data. You need to provide data immediately set up the tool accordingly. Provide as much context as you can. You probably have a lot of brand materials, guidelines, brand book, anything, all flying around. Upload that to your AI, your custom GPT or whatever you use, doesn’t matter that much. Customize that tool and when you prompt that tool, provide context even more so. If you do that, your output will be much better. You wouldn’t ask a newly hired copywriter who just joined your company today to do client work on the same day that they joined the company without any background knowledge don’t do the same for the as either.

Adrian Tennant: When we were preparing for this podcast, you mentioned to me that contrary to many industry observers’ fears, you don’t believe that AI will replace marketing jobs in the short term but rather enable professionals to be significantly more productive. Peter, can you elaborate on that?

Peter Benei: Sure. Short term, when I say short term, it’s like two to five years. I don’t think that we will see a huge drop in marketing jobs in general or a complete restructuring of marketing teams – agencies or client side, it doesn’t matter in the marketing practice. But we will definitely see that the same amount of people that you have will have 10x or 100x, depending on their use cases, more output or performance delivery than you have now. So same people, more stuff to done. On the long term, five to 10 years, I don’t know. It’s hard to guess, right? So it’s like we are in future-telling territory. But in the long term, I do think that the marketing team – and every business team by the way,  not just marketing – will get fundamentally restructured not because of AI and how it’s used but because of how we work in general will change fundamentally. I think we will spend more time on strategy ideation, figuring out the things, right? There is less time for execution, especially when the execution means these very niche, expert-related stuff like a niche copywriter, a niche graphic designer, or a video editor. We had separate jobs for these production workflows before AI, right? We had video editors, we had certain copywriters, certain designers and stuff. All of them were led by the creative director or whatever you call it. Some mid-manager or leader were dealing with the creative production. That mid-manager or leader will stay on long-term, but the ones who are doing the work, I think it will be AI mostly. Sorry for juniors who are just joining the marketing industry. It’s a tough world.

Adrian Tennant: Peter, having experienced the remote work revolution firsthand and now being on the bleeding edge of the AI transformation, what advice would you give marketing leaders navigating these changes?

Peter Benei: I will sound super old and sorry, but just stand firmly on the ground. Yes, AI is a big fundamental leap and change in how we work and what we are doing right now and what we will be doing, but it is also just a change. I personally have seen, and again, it will sound super old, but I personally have seen the Web 1, Web 2.0 change and like, I don’t know, 15, 20 years ago, everyone was losing their minds! Media will change we will have democracy and transparency everywhere with social media … and i know how much you remember those moments and you know look at the world right now. It’s almost like kind of like funny in a way, how it didn’t work. Or before that, the entire interaction on the internet, how it’s changed, how we communicate with each other. So I don’t think AI itself is a big, huge change that it will, you know, you need to drop everything and whatever. Stand firmly, be confident. We are human, after all. At the end of the day, we are here to market and sell things to other humans. It’s just a new way of doing things right now because we have new tools available in our cases. So yeah, just be confident.

Adrian Tennant: Earlier this year, Amazon CEO Andrew Jassy told workers that they would be expected to report back to the office five days a week starting in January 2025. X owner Elon Musk has also consistently opposed remote work, saying he believes workers are more productive when working from a corporate office. Peter, what do you believe is behind these return-to-office initiatives?

Peter Benei: Regaining confidence by leaders and how they are managing their teams – it’s certainly behind that. Heritage and tradition, sorry for being the European here, but if your company hasn’t started remote first at all anyway, and you were forced to work remotely during the pandemic, right? That was the big shift for most of the people, I think, here. That shift was forced. It wasn’t like, “Oh, we should try and experiment with remote work now.” No, everything was just like locked up and you couldn’t go to the office. So you had to deal with that. I think those companies will fundamentally make their employees return to the office. Most of them won’t stay remote forever. They might go to a hybrid approach, you know, when you are two days in the office, two days in whatever. I will certainly contribute to that by the way because it will be more efficient and more optimizing how we work, so we will need to do less work. Plus commercial real estate, I think that’s also a big issue because you will usually see enterprise companies like Amazon, Microsoft, whatever –  you know these kind of companies that they heavily invested in big offices especially before the pandemic. They are just sitting there empty. No you need to pay for heating and stuff right? So it’s like it’s weird. So obviously it’s easier to just ask people to come back. I’m not judging, by the way, so I think it’s your company, so whatever you decide, you decide at the end of the day. You just need to understand the consequences. If you have your HQ in, I don’t know, New York, where jobs are abundant and people can go to another office immediately or just, you know, digital office anyway, because they have a hybrid semi-remote company that they are working for, they will jump immediately because of the consequences of your decisions that you are moving everyone back in the office. So location does matter, but at the end of the day, it’s your business, it’s your decisions. So just, you know, make sure that you are aware about your decisions and their consequences. I think you can collaborate a little bit better. Might be a sacrilege for hardcore remote believers, but I think you can collaborate a little bit better when you do have an office within a team. And culture obviously works better in an office scenario because proximity builds trust. What you can see, you believe in. So that’s a given. That’s how we rule as humans. Other than that, efficiency and how we work, the deep work stuff, I don’t think you need the office. Actually, you’re better off without it because you have less interruptions.

Adrian Tennant: Peter, if listeners would like to learn more about your work with Intercept Scale, or your book, “Leadership Anywhere,” or indeed connect with you, what’s the best way to do so?

Peter Benei: Yes, LinkedIn. I killed almost all my social media profiles, except LinkedIn, because I’m not sure that everyone got the message here, but I hate interruptions. So I don’t usually… I’m very private in how I work and live. Yeah, LinkedIn. My name is Peter Benei. That’s B-E-N-E-I. Very unusual name. I’m probably one of the few ones who wear this on LinkedIn. Or you can check interceptscale.com. That’s the company website, and my book is available on Amazon. 

Adrian Tennant: Excellent. Thank you very much for being our guest this week on IN CLEAR FOCUS.

Peter Benei: I hope I gave some valuable insights for those who are listening. Thank you for the invite.

Adrian Tennant: Thanks again to my guest this week, Peter Benei, Principal Consultant at Intercept Scale, and the author of “Leadership Anywhere.” As always, you’ll find a complete transcript of our conversation with timestamps and links to the resources we discussed on the IN CLEAR FOCUS page at bigeyeagency.com. Just select ‘Insights’ from the menu. Thank you for listening to IN CLEAR FOCUS, produced by Bigeye. I’ve been your host, Adrian Tennant. Until next week, goodbye.

TIMESTAMPS

00:00: Introduction to IN CLEAR FOCUS

00:17: The Evolving Landscape of Marketing Leadership

00:59: Guest Introduction: Peter Benei

02:04: Peter’s Transition to Remote Work

05:06: The Transparent Leadership Triangle

10:44: Asynchronous Communication Matrix

15:47: Bigeye Book Club Promotion: “Be Data Literate”

16:51: Peter’s Role in AI Marketing at Intercept Scale

17:13: Findings from AI Adoption Study

20:08: Ensuring Quality in AI Outputs

22:30: AI’s Impact on Marketing Jobs

24:36: Advice for Marketing Leaders

26:13: Return to Office Initiatives

29:25: Connecting with Peter Benei

30:13: Conclusion and Thanks