Generative AI is ushering in a new era of innovative and personalized communication, empowering marketing teams to deliver tailored experiences at scale, aligning with the ever-heightening customer expectations of today. The potential of this cutting-edge tool extends across the entire spectrum of marketing, from internal operations to customer-facing interactions and product support. Recent surveys indicate a significant shift in the marketing landscape, with 67% of CMOs planning to incorporate generative AI within the next year, and a whopping 86% aiming to do so within 24 months.
AI has long played a role in optimizing various marketing functions, such as seamless cross-platform connectivity, instant issue resolution, and location-based personalization rooted in purchase history. However, generative AI solutions introduce a new dimension to marketing, enabling enhanced personalization at scale and the elevation of employee skills and performance.
The advantages of generative AI are immense for enterprise marketing teams, yet its integration requires adaptation in terms of skills and processes. CMOs, when questioned about their primary concerns with adopting generative AI, identified three key challenges: managing the complexity of implementation, curating the necessary data, and addressing concerns related to brand and intellectual property (IP).
To successfully harness the potential of generative AI, a solid foundation in data is essential.
Data is the Fuel for Generative AI As with any AI implementation, the quality of data is paramount to achieving high-quality results. The adage “garbage in, garbage out” still holds true; superior data quality is imperative to produce accurate content. In marketing, generative AI can revolutionize content development and audience targeting. Effective data curation, along with stringent oversight to combat bias and ensure brand consistency and product/service information accuracy, is essential.
Consider a retail clothing company using generative AI to customize emails or online experiences for diverse customer personas. Generative AI’s advanced capabilities in text, visuals, and video can create personalized and engaging experiences, such as showcasing virtual models wearing outfits tailored to the customer’s body type, style preferences, and interests. Moreover, the tool can factor in external variables like weather, upcoming events, or the shopper’s location.
However, there’s a potential for generative AI to generate unexpected or off-topic content, referred to as “hallucination.” To mitigate this, teams should customize their models with proprietary datasets, in addition to relying on open-source internet data.
Crafting a Data-Driven Generative AI Marketing Strategy Before introducing effective generative AI solutions into your marketing arsenal, it’s imperative to formulate a strategy for implementing AI foundation models. Given the vast landscape of available data, both external and internal, defining use cases upfront is crucial. Understanding the benefits and risks associated with each use case will help create a prioritized roadmap for model training.
Marketers must collaborate closely with IT to establish the necessary data architecture for secure model building and deployment, while adhering to IP and confidential data protection measures. Establishing appropriate usage guidelines will safeguard your brand’s integrity and IP.
The Human Touch in Generative AI Even after deployment, the journey with generative AI continues. Foundation models continually evolve as they interact with customers and collect more data, enhancing their capabilities. Human oversight, including supervised fine-tuning with human annotations and reinforcement learning from human feedback, is essential to align the output of generative AI apps with human intentions, ensuring they remain ethical, helpful, and reliable.
Despite generative AI’s ability to produce human-like content for customers, it still requires human guidance to navigate ethical and legal concerns surrounding data use. Human reviewers play a vital role in identifying and correcting instances of bias or hallucination that may have crept into the generated content.
Adding Generative AI to Your Marketing Toolkit CMOs have identified content creation and editing, SEO, and social media marketing as the top B2B use cases for generative AI capabilities. They also highlight lead generation and sales nurturing as the top functions within B2B marketing. When it comes to concerns, data accuracy, privacy management, and the availability of skilled resources top the list. Therefore, adopting generative AI technology necessitates a pragmatic approach to building, testing, and learning about its capabilities, ensuring data protection, relevant customer experiences, and streamlined, cost-effective marketing processes.
Embark on your journey into generative AI with the right data sources and architecture that support access, quality, richness, and the safeguarding of your brand.