Jose J. Valencia: “This conversation is an act of revolution”

Not long before we spoke, Jose J. Valencia watched a video circulating online that appeared to show a factory floor in India. Rows of workers, each with a camera fixed on their hands. Keeping their hands in frame was part of how their performance was measured.

Behind the camera sat a machine, learning what those hands did.

“If you think what that meant, these workers were training the technology that is going to take their job.”

That is the story everyone tells about AI right now. Jose tells a different one.

For Jose, AI has stopped being a tool and become a partner, and what that partnership produces depends on the human guiding it. Get the guidance right and the outcomes are remarkable. Get it wrong and you get what he calls representations of mediocrity: work that looks right and isn’t.

Jose heads marketing and communications for SITA in the Middle East, Africa, and parts of Asia, a technology partner to the aviation industry.

The word changed

The last time we spoke, a few weeks before this conversation, Jose called AI a tool. He had changed his mind since.

“I was referring to it as a modern tool that can help us expand and augment our capabilities in the marketing practice. Well, that word has evolved. And not only in my conception of it. I’ve seen CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, of blue chip companies, referring to AI as a partner. And this is massive, because it’s moving from tool to become a partner.”

Agentic systems are what changed it. Software that makes decisions and acts on them rather than waiting to be asked.

But he does not think the shift changes what actually determines the outcome.

“All of that is based on the guidance it receives from the human.”

I asked him what the hardest part of his job was now. He runs a team, a region, and a brand in an industry that runs on technology that cannot fail. His answer was three words.

“To remain human.”

An act of revolution

“What we are doing, you and I at this moment, sitting together, having a conversation, I see it in this day and age as an act of revolution. Because we spend a lot of time on our devices. Every time we look at the screen, there are thousands of algorithms dictating and guiding our thoughts. Disconnecting from that and giving ourselves the opportunity to sit with somebody and exchange ideas enriches us, because we connect through empathy.”

Then he offered a test I have not been able to shake.

“I was reading recently that if your opinions are the same opinions of the five people who surround you and with whom you speak the most, then those opinions are not really your opinions.”

Which is where creativity comes in.

“The best trigger for creativity is boredom. Sitting down, not having anything to do, is when the apple falls from the tree, hits your head, and boom. You discover what’s behind that.”

He is not nostalgic about it. He is describing something he wants his team to have time for, because he thinks it is the input that produces everything else.

It reads great, and it is wrong

His optimism comes with one condition, and it is not the one I expected.

“AI is amplifying both things. Amazing outcomes of thinking about marketing and communication, of storytelling, of data collection, of white papers and reports. But at the same time, with the wrong guidance, AI can create great representations of mediocrity.”

Representations of mediocrity. I asked him what that looks like in practice.

“It’s a great document. It looks great, it reads great, it provides intelligence, but it’s bad intelligence. And that’s a massive danger. It’s real. I have seen it already. Documents that seem well sourced, well structured, powerfully built, convincing, compelling. But they do not reflect reality.”

The problem is not that such documents exist. It is who has the capacity to catch them.

“The people who have the time to go and challenge and do research have the advantage of realising earlier whether what we have in our hands should go to the public or not. But not everybody has that time, and not everybody has the access or the tools to challenge everything that is coming to us.”

For a marketing leader that is an uncomfortable thing to say out loud. The output of his function has never been easier to produce or harder to verify, which is why he expects his team to understand the data before the tool ever sees it.

He extends the point to images, and to the deepfakes that have raised questions for lawmakers in Europe about who owns your face and your voice.

The tool was never the point

Jose is from Puebla in Mexico. He started out as a creative in multimedia design, and taught visual communication at the university where he had studied.

His own year group was the last to still draw by hand, laying out the grids for a logo on a drawing desk. The students he went on to teach were the first to work on a screen.

The lesson he taught them then is the one he still applies now.

“It doesn’t matter if your tool is a pencil, or if your tool is a computer.”

What matters is the process that you have in your head to create the outcome that you want to create.

“If you have the right process, the right theoretical fundamentals, there’s no way the outcome will not be as beautiful as you expected.”

He says exactly the same thing about AI.

“The outcome will be purely dependent on the quality of the brief, and the quality of the brief will depend on how well you understand what you want to achieve. Let’s say we are working on a white paper. Do you fully understand what you want to achieve with it? Why are you doing it? The data you’re getting, do you understand what it is telling you? Or are you just feeding it to the AI tool for it to tell you what it thinks the outcome is? Because if that is the case, then AI is the one guiding your thought process.”

The award he would not oversell

Near the end of our conversation I noticed an award on the shelf behind Jose. Marketing Leader of the Year, 2025.

His reaction was not what I expected from a Head of Marketing.

“It was a recognition. I didn’t know this was coming. It was really touching, and I’m careful not to claim more than it was, because to be upfront, it was not like I went into a process where every single marketer had the chance to enter, and I was compared against my peers.”

I pointed out, only half joking, that it is good for his credibility, and that someone in marketing should know better than anyone that you have to market yourself too.

He waved it away.

“It was a nice thing to have. It’s a nice detail from the people behind it.”

Sitting on top of everything else he had said, that exchange stopped being a modest aside and became the point. He had spent an hour describing how easy it now is to produce something convincing and how hard it is to verify. Then he was handed a convincing credential and he told me exactly what it was and was not. Accuracy about your own record is not modesty. It is the cheapest credibility available, and almost nobody spends it.