Lean in — cautiously. That’s the advice that was offered by Spencer Lee, Head of AI Solutions and Email Marketing, and Simon Golding, Senior Digital Marketing Consultant at Intero Digital, during our recent workshop on the role of artificial intelligence in digital marketing, humanity, and practically everything in between.
Both agree that AI isn’t likely to outshine the human brain’s unique ability to take leaps of intuition or engage in truly strategic thinking. Nevertheless, AI’s impact isn’t trifling and needs to be taken seriously, especially given its sudden expansion.
To illustrate how rapid the adoption of AI has become, Lee pointed out that it took Netflix three years and five months to reach 1 million users. It took Pinterest 20 months. And it took ChatGPT just five days. Across generations, users are excited about AI and what it can do.
That means businesses can’t stick their heads in the sand and hope AI goes away. They need to find ways to ethically, responsibly, and successfully fold it into their workflows. Otherwise, they’ll be at risk of falling behind competitors who are ready for major leaps forward.
How to Start Embracing AI
If you’re still unsure about what AI means for your organization, you’re certainly not alone. AI can be confusing. Fortunately, Lee shared some practical insights during this presentation that can help you get started on the journey toward embracing AI and the good it can do for you, your team, and your clients.
1. Ask the right questions.
AI’s output is only as strong as its input. Keep this in mind when working with generative AI products like ChatGPT and Google Bard. The way you prompt AI will change what you get from it. This means you have to refine the way you ask questions so that AI’s “scalpel made of data” can effectively deliver valid and relevant responses.
2. Educate yourself on popular AI use cases.
To get the greatest impact from AI, start looking at other companies’ use cases. For instance, many developers are leveraging AI to create other AI-constructed code. Tesla’s former head of AI has even admitted that a large majority of the code generated for its electric vehicles was produced by AI.
3. Remember the things that AI does really well.
AI is great at a lot: ideation, planning, iteration. Now, there’s no need to ask your marketing team to come up with 40 subject lines to split-test your upcoming email marketing campaign. With the right prompts, you can ask generative AI to turn out 40 contenders in under a minute. At that point, humans can take over to select the most appropriate suggestions to take for a spin.
4. Remember the things that AI does not do so well.
AI is not foolproof. When its advanced pattern recognition networks start going astray, they can continue down some error-prone paths. For example, at a launch event, Bard incorrectly answered questions asked by users, causing Google to fall more than 7% on the stock market, which equates to about $102 billion in lost market value.
How to Get Started With Generative AI
After doing some homework, you should feel less apprehensive about bringing generative AI into your company. Consider starting in marketing with the following:
• Paid search results
Use generative AI to create search engine marketing ad copy. While not perfect, AI’s copy tends to be workable. Your team can look it over and make edits, which is often faster than writing dozens of ads from the ground up.
• Social media
Generative AI can do more than just produce content calendars with hashtags. Google Bard, for example, can interpret and analyze video images from YouTube. You could use this to discover potential social media influencers for your brand. As a side benefit, you could audit your influencers’ content for compliance and authenticity.
• Content generation
Prompt generative AI to push out massive volumes of potential content topics and then set up page frameworks with backlink suggestions. The result is first-draft content that only needs an editor’s touch to ensure accuracy, grammatical correctness, and the right tone.
• Graphics
From infographics to iconography, the graphics world is becoming AI-driven thanks to AI’s ability to copy not only an image, but also its stylistic nuances. To avoid copyright infringement, remain conscientious about using AI products like Adobe Firefly, which is trained only on Adobe-licensed images.
• Web design and development
AI can speed up the development of engaging websites, and it’s also enabling people without a full-stack development background to debug at almost pro levels. Soon, a website rollout won’t take months, it’ll take weeks — maybe days.
Every 50 years or so, society goes through an overhaul. The explosion of AI is the latest “new big thing,” but it won’t be the last. Now is the time to get ahead of the curve and start implementing the technology.
Are the threats around AI real? Yes. But they’re overstated. There’s no reason not to play around with an AI-enriched system like InteroBOT® and ChatGPT. The sooner you lean in (carefully), the more future-protected you’ll be.
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