What marketers should keep in mind when adopting AI – MarTech

AI applications and generative AI tools are becoming more widely available to marketers, but are marketers ready for them? Do they have the skills needed to adopt this technology and take full advantage of its capabilities?

That was the focus of a panel at The MarTech Conference, here are some of the takeaways from that discussion.

As AI evolves, capabilities will expand. Can AI take over a specific business function and run it unaided? Not yet, according to Ricky Ray Butler, CEO of BENlabs, which uses AI to place brands products in entertainment and influencer content.

Artificial general intelligence or AGI is the kind of technology that is completely automated, and thats simply not available yet.

There is still human supervision [required] when it comes to data inputs or [telling the AI] what the purpose is to have successful outcomes, said Butler.

What AI really brings to the table is when it comes to the feedback loop, he said. It can structure data and a massive amount of data in a way that the human mind cant even comprehend or compute. And it can do that at a scale where it can look at millions and millions of videos and monitor, prioritize and then alsomake predictions with successful outcomes or or potentially unsuccessful outcomes. We are literally building a brain when were leveraging this type of technology to do what the human mind does, but to be able to do it even better and even more accurately.

Dig deeper: A beginners guide to artificial intelligence

Generative AI writing tools position themselves as writing assistants, not writers, said Anita Brearton, CEO of marketing technology management platform CabinetM.

[These tools] describe their value prop as productivity, she said. They can help you write faster, they can improve SEO in fact.

They can also help writers get started when all theyre staring at is a blank page. Theyre good for refining texts and creating some A/B versions of texts, Brearton said.

Generative AI continues to improve in order to help creatives make text-based and visual content.

I think were entering a very disruptive phase for creativity for designers, illustrators, video producers and writers, said Paul Roetzer, CEO of the Marketing AI Institute

As AI gets adopted for more marketing functions, marketers using these tools are needed to guide the technology and point it toward specific marketing objectives.

The issue right now is the AI doesnt have your knowledge of your product, it doesnt have a knowledge of your customers, it doesnt have knowledge about the internal politics of your company, said Pam Didner, VP of marketing for consultancy Relentless Pursuit. [AI doesnt] have knowledge about even the road map that you are going to produce for your company. So AI can write very well, but you still need to add your own point of view. Thats where a human comes into play.

When AI is adopted by organizations, leadership needs to know how work has changed so they make the right hires.

ChatGPT woke everyone up to AI, so were all testing the tools, said Roetzer. Theres pressure on CMOs and CEOs from boards and investors to figure out AI. Everybody needs to have a plan, and you have a whole bunch of leaders who dont understand the underlying technology that now have to make decisions around staffing.

He added, We need to rapidly accelerate the comprehension of what AI is and what its capable of doing, what its limitations are. But, also [we need] to come to grips with where its going.

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What marketers should keep in mind when adopting AI - MarTech