Putting AI to Work for Marketing

glass can give us New Perspectives from the microscopic Universe to the farthest galaxies but before glass could do or be any of those incredible things it was something else sand we learned how to transform the unremarkable into the extraordinary for marketers that moment of Discovery and transformation is right now with the arrival of generative AI welcome to the AI Academy my name is Alexa zamco I'm the global off ing leader for intelligent marketing at IBM and as such I do a lot of thinking writing and Publishing about marketing technology but at the core my job has two parts the first is I have the unique opportunity to work with Chief marketing officers to figure out what their needs and challenges are and how technology can help them and Lead their teams to deliver exceptional performance now I take that insight and Industry knowledge back and share with the technical teams within IBM to help them build Solutions to meet those challenges today all of my conversations increasingly revolve around AI specifically how generative AI is going to change marketing how we work how we create and how we deliver exceptional experiences for customers marketing has come a long way from the Decades of mass advertising and untargeted Direct Mail Ai and Technology have helped marketers be more precise as to who we reach out to with what message and offers that we feel are most relevant we've moved towards customization but personalization continues to be a future State goal we're trying to create moments when marketing helps us identify exactly what we need or maybe discover the one thing we didn't even know we wanted and that's where generative AI comes in with large language models and multimodal models that have the ability to make use of structured unstructured unlabeled data across internal and external sources to discover patterns correlations and insights that we couldn't see before for and to help us gain insights and take action on those discoveries and we don't yet know everything that's going to come out of this huge moment of generative AI disruption but for marketers Genai is already making its Mark in two key ways content creation and personalization the first wave of generative AI content creation is happening right now with marketers exploring and using apps to generate marketing blogs web banners posters and so much more generative AI is unleashing the power of advanced creative tools to companies both large and small with the ability to engage in the creative process through Simple Text prompts that provide guidance to the models as well as flexibility to iterate and regenerate at the Press of a button the creative process for large Enterprises though that requires us to step back and recognize the need for the generative models that we use to have a clear and concise understanding of the brand the company values the product portfolio even the legal considerations for generative AI to be used scale within the Enterprise tuning and training models to be brand knowledgeable it's a necessity once we have models that understand your company your brand your products and services and most importantly your customers how are we going to take advantage of this powerful capability let's start at the beginning of the creative process and change the way creatives ideate provide guidance as to the customer need Persona concept and put gen to work creating a raft of ideas to jump start your product teams writers and designers once you get past ideation you can land on your idea and move into what I'll call the creative production process the magic of a big creative idea it needs to be brought to life through a series of discipline steps we call this the content supply chain and for Enterprise clients it's truly like a production line once you've landed on your target parameters your message your offer and your creative got to put it into the assets that can then be executed across channels and all those steps are incredibly timec consuming and a lot of them are very manual like I need to take this ad I've got to put it into 16 different languages five different formats executing on all these derivative versions of your creative is a production task that can be automated with confidence that's where generative AI can play a big role because it can take those tasks and quickly and effectively move them through the production process a lot faster and that's going to free up marketers from doing very mundane and routine activities to allow them to put their Focus back on strategic and creative work now the second disruptive opportunity is personalization where generative capabilities may have even more impact for years AI has been helping marketers identify targets predict attrition recommend products and more but the AI couldn't create content generative Ai and its ability to create or customize its speed means it's now possible to personalize messages in much more granular ways this allows for micro segmentation addressing very specific needs and attributes while still ensuring a Brand's voice and offer is properly represented with the power to generate and create in near real time it opens the door to much more relevant perhaps even individual messages and we call this personalization at scale Imagine A system that can predict read and react to customer inputs on the Fly responding to and engaging with customers now let me share an example I'm a marketer for a chain of movie theaters and I see a bunch of complaints coming in I want to be able to respond very quickly and even zero in on appropriate responses to retain my customers and the shared wallet so let's say a customer named Stephanie complains that the projector broke during the movie she's watching generative AI can read her complaint summarize it back and generate a response very quickly Stephanie I'm so sorry the projector broke down yesterday at Queensway mall and as a valued customer your next movie is free gen can assemble the information from her viewing history with the incident she experienced and provide a highly personal response now that's just one example but you can imagine that same type of scenario playing out across almost any point of customer contact what we know about customers and what we can infer from data about prospective customers can let us create a really engaging experience in near real time but on a practical level how do we get started in our recent Global survey 67% of CMOS stated that they plan on implementing generative AI in the next 12 months and 86% in 24 months the writing's on the wall so to speak but there's still a lot of uncertainty as marketing leaders look for ways to incorporate AI but to do it safely responsibly and effectively and complexity of implementation is the number one concern Enterprises are naturally cautious I get it how however this movement toward generative AI is driven not just by the big Tech firms but by customers themselves they're interacting with geni Solutions now in their everyday lives and their expectations of Highly personal interactions are setting a new bar for companies 76% of CMOS we surveyed indicated they must Implement gen or lose their Competitive Edge in the market you want to put some thought into what you can effectively buy and use Off the Shelf versus what you should curate yourself and how a blend of those things might look in your organization there will be generative AI baked into a ton of products and we're already seeing it this is AI at a pervasive level think about gen AI built into your word processors your image editors it's a business accelerator but it's not a differentiator everybody will have access then at the next level you'll have ai as a service with marketing Centric offerings and API Integrations available you'll start to see some separation here as you can get clever about how and where you implement it but you may only have limited control over the model or the data and ultimately if the service is available to you it's available to your competitors too and finally you have the platform approach where you have the power and capability to customize and oversee your own AI you can pick and update models you can train and tune with your proprietary data and you can build the specific Solutions you need when you need them this is your AI lab atory to experiment with all the tools and infrastructure you need to get creative and start inventing to really differentiate you need to get to the platform level that's where your proprietary data becomes an extraordinary source of value it holds the key to everything that makes your business your business and for marketers it truly reflects your brand data is everything when it comes to AI there's no AI without data so treat it like a precious resource for marketers the foundation of any any gen programs ensuring that your model has a deep understanding of your brand to do this you need to collect digitize and connect the data that reflects these elements that's what you'll use to tune train and refine your models legal compliance to local laws is something we're all going to need to consider as countries Define how they're going to protect consumers and customers in this new world of generative capabilities and since the data you leverage for customization is sensitive you'll need to ensure security and governance is built into your processes now you can start doing all this right now even before you have gen in place one powerful yet challenging aspect of gen modelist is is they're continually learning so it's important to build out a program that continually refreshes and monitors your models with access rules and evaluation to ensure they're on brand and not demonstrating bias you might think of this as your gen model Steward it's all part of a critical AI governance practice I talked earlier with a focus on customer facing applications but we shouldn't Overlook the value of internal employee applications There's an opportunity to accelerate productivity but beyond that internal Transformations create an invaluable opportunity for Learning and experimentation your marketers will experience organizational change management to embrace and harness these powerful new tools this is a human and Technology change we're experiencing just think how generative AI can be an active assistant you know riding along with marketers to help them ideate create and innovate this might mean streamlining automating processes aligning tasks to roles and building real-time Dynamic training just think how gen can be a GameChanger for market research all that unstructured data you've collected May hold customer or product insights that you may not have even known to look for but they're visible with Gen and accessible to marketers through simple natural language queries the sky is the limit here there's real value to be uncovered internally and as you build Ai and data skills in this environment you'll be better prepared to create external applications that wow your customers generative AI is going to change the way marketers work and almost every activity will be affected in some way but that doesn't mean that everything has to change at once your company is going to build up your AI marketing capability the same way you built up security expertise the same way you learn data management find one great use case and tackle that as you build your gen muscles you're not alone we're all learning and reimagining together and there's help available if you need it now thank you for watching I hope I've brought some clarity to the road ahead with Gen and maybe lit a fire to start your transformation but AI does go so much farther than marketing if you'd like to learn more about other aspects of AI for business you can check out the rest of the AI Academy library and watch this space for upcoming sessions

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