you ready to embrace AI as a marketing leader? //

The AI hype has been on a roller coaster for the past nine months. There’s so much fear and potential. AI is here and will continue to change the way your business operates and interacts with its customers.

Here’s what you need to know to make sure that AI-based apps are used correctly.

The pros and cons of AI

Every day I hear about how colleagues have used generative AI, either to speed up a task or create content. One colleague sent a LinkedIn posting from Eric Partaker that included a graphic created by generative artificial intelligence. Showing 120 generative AI tool. This is a goldmine to be mined!

There are a number of companies that have appeared seemingly out of thin air, offering a variety ways to use AI for creative purposes. As much as generative AI captured the imagination, AI’s potential to transform the customer experience in almost every industry will ultimately spark excitement.

Yesterday I spent 45 minutes on what was supposed to be a short-haul flight. I’ve lost track of how many screens I have clicked. I imagine a future where I could use a natural-language interface to tell a AI-driven assistant when and where I wanted to go, and let it take care of the rest.

There are still fears, uncertainties and doubts — from concerns over accuracy and hallucinations to the AI destroying mankind. One professor friend summarized the situation with a sarcastic Facebook post.

“I’ve worked a lot on developing a course with chatGPT. I am very polite when I interact with the program, because I assume that 1) everything I write in ChatGPT is saved forever and 2) if I treat our soon-to be AI Overlords well, they might not send me off to a mining settlement in the boonies …”

Dig deeper: Artificial Intelligence: A beginner’s guide

What is our future?

It’s time, regardless of how you feel about AI, to accept its presence and the impact it will have on your business. There is unlikely to be an “instant switch-on” moment. AI-based applications will be released one at a time, just like the rest of technology.

AI will often initially produce incremental changes in operations and functions. As AI technology advances, we will see an increasing impact on operations and functions. Workflows will be optimized, and customer touchpoints will become more intelligent.

It’s important to develop a marketing strategy that includes where and how AI will be used, as well as guardrails that ensure everyone works to the same set of rules.

Determining your role as a leader is a good place to start:

• Do you and your business use AI, or do you also provide AI?
• Do you deliver AI-enabled or AI-enabled products?

The majority of us (the growth of ChatGPT) will be AI users, and some of us may also be AI providers.

AI Users: What you need to know

When you’re deciding on your AI strategy, you should consider generative AI applications separately from other AI-enabled apps.

To use generative AI applications, you must engage with an external interface. The security risks are minimal and there is no dependency on internal data. As the above graphic shows, there are many AI generative tools available.

Apps and products that are already popular now have AI-based capabilities. HubSpot has, for instance, an AI assistant that helps create and polish content.

Your team is likely already using these tools for creating and editing content. You should frame your parameters for generative AI usage in your company.

• Approved tools for, and how to get approval to use them.
• 
  How and when should these tools be used?
  
  .
  • Content creation vs. content editing
  • Content propagation. The real risk of using generative AI to increase the distribution of content is that the AI will be used for this purpose. It could be good if the AI helps with personalization, but bad if multiple versions of the same content are created and then used to spam prospects and customers. I use Bard or ChatGPT often to polish the content I’ve created and I use the command to “improve” or “rewrite” — I can easily do this again and again until I get multiple variants that are decent of the same material. I then use these variants for posts, emails, etc. I would not want to create a content tsunami, which would dilute my marketing efforts.
• What should be done with copyrights? (Time to consult legal counsel) Should it be revealed if an employee used generative AI in order to create content? When and how?
• How can a reference created by one of these tools be fact-checked? We know that AI-generated references can be false. What are your plans to deal with this?
• Content ethics. What is your opinion on the use of generative AI for creating audio files that feature another person’s voice?

This is a new area, so I recommend that you involve your whole team in setting up parameters and guidelines. They should be reviewed regularly to deal with new applications or any problems that may arise.

Many other AI-enabled marketing applications can be a valuable addition to your marketing stack. These applications rely on your data for a variety of marketing functions, including prospect targeting, customer experience creation and refinement, performance analysis, and more.

Remember the old saying “garbage is in, garbage is out”? This is also true. These applications will not work if your data is not complete, clean and free from artifacts.

I am still amazed by how many marketing departments don’t have a clear understanding of the data they possess, where it is located, how it is transferred from one application to another, and how clean it is.

It is time for your department to document your stack, the data storage, distribution, and sharing mechanisms, and ensure that all the required information is collected, stored and shared.

AI will eventually find its way into almost every marketing technology. It will perform best if the data is clean, complete, and accurate.

AI providers: What you need to know

As a leader in marketing, you will naturally want to communicate how and why AI is used by your application and what benefits it brings to your customers.

You may not have thought about it, but you should consider publishing an AI ethics statement. You should consider publishing an AI ethical statement in the same way you would publish information about data privacy compliance.

As part of the qualification process, prospective customers, in particular their infosec departments, will be interested to examine this. Act now!

Salesforce is a leader in AI ethics. Companies are publishing AI ethics statements such as Adobe WellSaid, and Reresemble AI.

Several groups have been formed externally to tackle AI safety. These include:

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  Partnership for AI
  
• 
  Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence
  
• 
  Responsible AI Initiative
  
• 
  AI Now Institute
  
• 
  Gradient Institute
  

The U.S. Government is trying to address AI security and has proposed an AI Bill of Rights. The group also brought together a number of technology leaders (Amazon Anthropic Google Meta Microsoft Inflection OpenAI) in order to create a commitment for testing and securing AI development and watermarking AI generated content.

These efforts from outside are commendable, but do not negate that each AI developer must establish their own AI ethics and boundaries. We don’t really know how AI will develop.

The pace of technological development is expected to exceed our capacity to imagine what’s possible. This will almost guarantee that new capabilities and applications will be developed that we have never imagined.

Take action

Our goal should be to make sure that, as AI-based applications enter enterprise organizations we can use them effectively. This means:

• Establishing rules to use AI internally.
• Ensure that all data, including the data flow, is well documented.
• If you’re a product provider, then establish your position regarding AI ethics. Then publish an AI ethical statement.

The article Are you ready for AI, marketing leaders? first appeared on MarTech.