How Gen AI will impact Marketers?
A few years back, in a chilling November Chicago, the conference room was quite hot at the largest radiological society meeting. I could palpate the insecurities many radiologists were expressing citing the invasion of AI in their reading room analyzing radiological images. The fear was genuine since AI, with its vast dataset training, was able to match or often beat the radiologist’s diagnosis. Addressing the group, one of the prominent professors declared, “AI will not take your job, however, someone using AI will.” That turned out to be the case. AI made radiologists more efficient and allowed them to focus more on patient-centered clinical tasks.
With the arrival of Gen AI (Generative Artificial Intelligence), we see the same questions floating in the air for marketers. Will Gen AI replace marketers? Interestingly, the answer is similar to what the professor told fellow radiologists in Chicago-
Gen AI will not take your job, however, a marketer using AI will.
Despite lots of hype about Gen AI, it is early days and many organizations are still figuring out use cases. Some of the big categories are listed below-
1. Customer experience
Customers are central to what marketers do. With Gen AI's capability to analyze large amounts of data, Gen AI will help create super-specific customer segmentation. Knowing the customers intimately will allow marketers to provide them with hyper-personalized valuable content at the right place and with the right frequency. Gen AI has the power to integrate a multitude of data points on customers’ behaviors with market trends and other external contextual data sources to help marketers better anticipate customers’ needs and then delight them with proactive services and support.
2. Content creation
Marketers spend lots of time writing effective messaging and stories which must resonate with their target customers. This creative process is painful and requires multiple iterations. Gen AI tools such as Chat GPT and Bard are already transforming content creation. With its impressive capabilities, marketers are already starting to use these tools to generate reasonably good quality starting content. This is a big use case and time saver for marketing teams. However, the Gen AI output should never be used as it is, for end-customers. As marketers, you still need to review it, edit it, and make it a human-to-human conversation and not a machine-to-human.
3. Operational efficiency
For years, automation has been changing the blue color work landscape and now it has arrived for the white color workers too. Gen AI will drastically transform digital marketing operations by utilizing predictive data analytics, content deployment, personalized outreach, funnel management, and resource optimization. Many organizations are actively investing to incorporate Gen AI tools in their workflow.
What it means for Marketers
Marketers! If you are still pondering on the fringes of Gen AI, start the engagement and start building expertise. It is here to stay and will greatly change how we do marketing today. Few things to consider-
Educate yourself and follow the market trends, for example, set up Google alerts for keywords like AI and Marketing for your industry. Some industries such as retail are changing faster than healthcare.
Start experimenting with the tools like ChatGPT and Bard for your content creation. The more you play with it, the more comfortable you will become with the technology and how to best leverage it for your goals.
Be aware of the pitfalls too. There is still a lot to be resolved such as biases in data, security, and privacy before it is fully ready for primetime.
I strongly believe it is a great time to be a marketer since Gen AI provides huge empowerment. We need to utilize the power of Gen AI and infuse it with the power of empathy and human emotion touch.
After all, despite all the bits and bytes, in the end, it is all about building a connection between one human with another.