Kinesso’s Tom Amies-Cull on how being a parent reshaped his view of the future workforce

In the fall of 2023, Tom Amies-Cull went on parental leave after the birth of his daughter. That’s pretty standard practice. What wasn’t standard was putting that as experience on his resume as well as his LinkedIn page.

As the global COO of Kinesso, part of IPG, Amies-Cull wants to be a role model for taking time off for big life moments.

He shared what he’s learned through parenting and how it’s changed the way he thinks about the future of the workforce in a conversation with The Current’s Editor-in-Chief Stephanie Paterik.

What is the best piece of advice you've ever received about building smart strategies?

Something that was drilled into me early on in my career was, when thinking about strategy, to make sure you think about the execution of that strategy. If you don't, then you end up having a great idea that risks never living or breathing anywhere.

The other thing would be making sure that early on in that strategy process, you bring in diverse thinking. People with different perspectives, backgrounds, different framing on the problems so that your strategy has the best chance of being unique and differentiating.

A few years ago, marketers were so focused on brand building and creativity. They were dipping their toes in performance. I've heard some say that that dynamic has flipped, and now there's a mindset that everything is performance. What's your view on that?

I'm a performance marketer by background, so I love this question. Previously we were thinking about it as a binary ‘either or’ in performance. What we're seeing now is the definition of performance changing.

Performance should be anything and everything we do ...

Now the time horizon and the metrics you use to find that success might change. But I think we're looking at performance with perhaps a capital P these days in terms of the more holistic definition, which allows us to think about creativity and media more holistically in that frame.

If you're spending millions on a Super Bowl commercial, you want it to perform.

One hundred percent.

Kinesso is really focused on data and insights. Are you experimenting with AI on the data side of things as well?

We look at it through a few different levels. We are building AI in to our platforms so that the tools our teams can use are AI enabled and they exist already. But we're also democratizing across our organizations.

Within our interact platform, we have an AI console that anybody and everyone in Interpublic can access. They can create agents, they can share agents. They can use that to experiment how to think about creative and building audiences. And so we want to embed that just as a way of working into our organization.

Something that is so cool is that you list parenting as a skill on your LinkedIn page, and you also have your parental leave blocked off as experience on your resume. How has parenting changed the way you work?

I list it because I think it's actually important to role model taking time out. I think there is an unfortunate misconception in the industry that people take time out, they can't return to career. And I think it's important to role model, certainly for men.

Myself and my husband took time out after the birth of our daughter. We found it really rewarding. That's not for everyone, but I think it should be an option for everyone. And so I want to role model that and use it as an example that people can do that.

In terms of what I've learned and how that's influencing me, there's two examples.

One, very pragmatically, I've had to be super focused on how I prioritize my time. I want to maximize my time at home with my family. So my work has to be optimized, and so the laser focus on optimizing my work life has really kind of changed.

And then the other point, which is slightly broader, is we spend a lot of time talking about the future workforce and what skills people will need in the future.

Having a child I think really brings that to life, because when I talk about the future workforce and the skills they need, now I'm talking about what my daughter will need to do. And we don't have all the answers yet. There's a lot of unknowns about what she might need to have to do in the future.

There is one certainty I think we can all agree on, which is that those skills we all learned and we're all using today, will not be the skills that people need in the future.

So it helps you with your forward thinking, like what's coming down the pike.

Often you have these hypothetical conversations about what will future people need to do. And just as a very personal level as a human being, seeing my child grow up and start to think about what experiences in the school education system might she need? That needs to link to what we think we'll need to succeed in the workforce of the future.