nd marketing: How AI can help you right now

Artificial Intelligence promises a bold future, but seems to be stuck in the present. Microsoft’s AI-powered Bing, and Google’s Bard, are now more well-known for their failures than their milestones. But AI is more than these two. We are not aware of its successes, but they are all around us.

Grammerly are you using? That’s AI. That’s AI. Gmail will finish sentences for you. It decides what content is shown to users on Google and YouTube.

What does it mean for marketers?

Paul Roetzer, the founder and CEO at the Marketing AI Institute, spoke to us about this and what new capabilities we can look forward to in the near future.

Q. How should a marketer think about AI and how it could help them?

A: It would be applied in three areas. For most people, intelligent automation is the best starting point. You can make a list of everything you do in your marketing role, such as advertising, email marketing, analytics, social media, or any other marketing function.

Do ChatGPT pose a threat to marketers?

Let’s take podcasting as an example. Each podcast we produce each week has 17 steps. These include developing the brief, putting it together, recording it, transcribing, and publishing it. The same steps are used every time. It’s a tedious process. So you can just say “Okay, has anyone made AI tools to perform any of these steps?”

Start with what you do every day. Content strategists are responsible for creating content strategies, subject lines, headlines, and other related tasks. Email is all about deciding who, when, what subject line, and what copy to use. It’s all part of marketing. There are so many repetitive tasks we do.

Q: OK, that’s one.

A: The next step is to increase creativity. Not just with language. There are four types of multimodal content: images, text and audio. Everywhere you create content in these four areas, ask yourself, “Is AI opening new ways we can accomplish this?” Not only writing tools, but also image generation, video generation and analysis. Intelligent automation and creativity should be the main focus of marketers.

Q. Some people I have spoken to say that the ability search and gather information from all four modalities will be available very soon.

A: It would not surprise me if it happened in the next six to twelve month. It will be possible to feed a language model all of your text, video, and images, and it will learn from them. You could adjust the weights by saying, “Hey, give more weight to our proprietary data when you create outputs.”

Deeper: MarTech’s AI marketing experts to follow

You’ll be able train language models to individual writers, I believe. Let’s say that this is Jane’s personal assistant for writing. It has been trained on Jane’s podcasts, webinars and articles. The assistant learns Jane’s style and voice and can write as Jane does. This to me seems like the inevitable result of where we are now. The amount of computing power needed to accomplish this stuff and the ability to build those capabilities will determine how fast we get there. However, I do not see technical limitations in that happening in the near future. This includes personalized writing assistance and generative AI assistance.

Q: But…?

A – If you ask ChatGPT, GPT3 or any other writing tool to create something from data and numbers, it might get things wrong. It isn’t custom-trained to do this. However, I have seen people train models to analyze data. It’s not going hallucinate or make up a bunch numbers. That’s possible now.

With a model like this, I could have it look at marketing data, email data and ad spend. It could write me a story about what was happening. It doesn’t need to analyze the chart.

However, if you imagine that you could just use ChatGPT to say “Write me an overview about this topic and here are some source data,” you’d need to edit it.

However, I believe that this is a positive situation. I don’t believe we should try to get the human out the loop. That is not my goal. The more that the AI can do, the better. There are many things we each have on our daily to-do lists that never get completed. There are many things that we could do with our spare time. I can now spend more of my time doing the things I enjoy if the AI does more repetitive data-driven work that I don’t like anyway. This should be our goal.

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