Generative artificial intelligence is top of mind for many marketers, and for good reason. Accessible and easy to experiment with, it opens up powerful possibilities for automating, optimizing and creatively solving challenges. Marketers who are not exploring it risk missing out on a game-changing tool.
Gen AI can also help ease the mounting pressure on marketers to prove their value, especially now, as many teams are viewed as cost centers instead of profit drivers. When we use AI to tackle specific challenges, it can even simplify the marcom stack, making life a whole lot easier for marketing professionals.
So yes, we have a lot to gain, but let’s not look at gen AI as the be-all and end-all for every marketing process. We still have a big gap between gen AI’s hype cycle and its actual usage in practice. As AI continues to evolve, marketers have a unique opportunity to pause and dream big. Take a moment to set realistic expectations, so you can take advantage of gen AI’s current strengths and figure out how to make this game-changing technology work for you.
Reframe how marketing teams think about AI
When it comes to applying AI to marketing workflows and marketing experiences, consider the technology itself and the processes behind using it. There are several things to keep in view when looking at either dimension.
The first is thinking about AI not as a new form of work, workstream or tool unto itself; think instead of how it can be applied to business problems, outcomes and considerations as you try to achieve marketing objectives. One way to do this is to think of AI as an assistant, not a program. As a marketing campaign manager, instead of requesting a dataset about my target audience, I could use AI to explore insights about their lifestyle and behaviors. By treating AI like a conversational partner, I can engage in a more dialogue-driven approach to research.
On the process side of things, think in terms of, “What am I trying to achieve, and are there ways that I can use the value of AI to augment that?” AI is good at abstracting problems and questions, joining data sets and processing through multiple scenarios. If there is a clear business objective to start with, then it's a lot easier to apply AI.
Marketers build creative briefs and campaigns via conversations and insights. They learn what makes that audience tick and how to connect with them. By applying this same construct to gen AI, teams can begin with a simple set of questions that conceptualize what they’re trying to achieve and then build from there.
Anticipate gen AI as the future hub for the marcom tech stack
We’ve seen some early examples of how martech businesses incorporate gen AI into their local domains to make certain marketing processes more efficient.
Canva, for instance, is doing a lot of work to make one part of the marcom stack much easier to use with its Magic Studio suite of AI-powered creative tools. Zoom now has an AI-powered agent built in to generate summaries, to tell you who talked the most in a meeting and to even gauge what the emotional tone of the meeting was. Smartsheet has AI-powered solutions focused on the planning, tracking and execution of marketing operations, projects and campaigns.
Then there are the more revolutionary, future-looking capabilities that could completely upend the marcom tech stack for the better.
One tool, Amazon Q, a gen AI-powered assistant for accelerating software development and leveraging companies' internal data, could create a sort of “hub” that branches out into different systems. This will massively help marketers cut through fragmentation in the martech landscape, connect to different systems and interact with them more effectively.
For this use case to become a turnkey reality still requires some innovation, but the foundation is being laid today. Marketers can start by assessing current martech stack gaps and experimenting with AI integrations to prepare for the future.
Apply new thinking to gen AI
Due to where gen AI’s evolution currently sits, it’s the perfect time to lean in and begin experimenting with it. For example, you could test the AI in a low-stakes campaign or pilot it in a specific creative process. You can use it to inspire new ideas or to create a one-time social media post. No business large or small has figured it all out yet; gen AI is still new (ChatGPT isn’t even two years old) and its full capabilities have not yet been realized.
To set your brand up for success:
- Understand the constituent parts of your system: When using current AI solutions, make sure you have enough clarity about how the technology you use makes decisions and recommendations, and that you know what it’s actually capable of.
- Remember the human imperative: Use ethical, responsible and appropriate tools that give you reasonable outcomes and respect intellectual property while also incorporating human oversight to question any outputs that don’t seem right.
- Invest in doing the things you want to do: Don’t apply AI to what you have to do, but what you want to achieve, such as upskilling how you think about a campaign and its target audience.
Marketers are past the point of being scared of gen AI, but the tech also has a long way to go before realizing its full potential. We have a lot of exploring and iterating left to do. Think about AI as applied to your business goals, ethics and marketing objectives, and proceed intentionally from there. That’s absolutely the right way to start.
