It may seem like, in just a quick year, generative AI tools like ChatGPT sprung from nowhere.
But these tools are based on long-developed research from disparate fields. Generative AI just pulled them together.
And AI will impact marketers the most.
In this talk from B2B Forum 2023, Matt Roberts from Demand Spring shares his insights into generative AI and how marketers can use these tools to innovate and succeed.
Watch the video or read the transcript below. And for more on using AI in your marketing, check out MarketingProfs’ series, AI for Content Creators and AI for Digital Marketers.
So, I dunno if anyone saw this. But about four weeks ago, McKinsey put out a report which was really interesting. It was talking about the future of generative AI.
And it said, out of all the business functions out there, marketing and sellers are going to be impacted the most across every single industry.
Which, to me—as the British say—is absolutely mental. I can’t believe that we collectively are going to be impacted the most.
So I thought it’d be interesting—before we dive too deep—to see, why is generative AI exciting? And to do this, I always think it’s interesting to go and look at the history of something.
So the history of AI was really based on independent research fields. So we had a field that was looking at robotics. A field that was looking at image recognition. A field that was looking at video or voice.
And there were separate groups of people building separate models, not talking.
And what generative AI has done—and this is the real big thing, right—what generative AI has done is, it’s created one model that’s capable of looking at multiple content formats and producing multiple content formats.
So we now have a singular focus. We had these disparate fields, right? Now we have a singular focus on one model that lots of people are working on and lots of people adopting. And it’s super powerful because of what it can do by consuming all different content fields.
And this is why the singular focus is bringing innovation and adoption at breakneck speeds, right? You see the big vendors out there, Adobe, Salesforce, all these people, they’re cramming generative AI into their products right now because there’s just this big singular focus on that field of AI.
And we don’t expect that to slow down. We see generative AI spend, I dunno if you people have seen this, but it’s predicted to hit 1.3 trillion by 2032. That’s according to Bloomberg.
Microsoft are investing 14 billion in Open AI. Netflix just hired a director of AI for $900,000 a year.
I dunno about you, it’s maybe because I spent my career in marketing, but that sounds like one hell of a salary, particularly for a director.
And we take these powerful models and we lay over generatives AI’s incredible ability to understand natural language, which opens it up, right?
We can now use natural language to produce code, produce images, and I know it’s been talked about throughout the conference, but the latest release of chat GPT, you can actually upload an image of your bike and through natural language, have a conversation about how to lower the seat.
And this stuff is just not slowing down. I didn’t know we could change our presentations, I heard that in the keynote, but I built this three weeks ago. And things have changed in those three weeks. Absolutely crazy.
So the end result, as you can see on the slide here, is that we can rapidly generate new contextually relevant content that appears to be generated by humans in many formats at speed and scale that we haven’t seen before.
So what does this mean for B2B marketers?
The first thing is we’ve got to stay focused on delivering revenue expectations, right? There’s some shiny things out there, but it’s not slowing down for B2B marketers. We will continuously be asked to perform, especially in this economic climate.
The best executives and the best marketers focus on both short- and long-term revenue. So what do we mean by that?
Short-term means yes, we should be looking at dynamic marketing, leveraging generative AI to meet short-term business goals, whether it be revenue or some other non-commercial goal.
But we should also be laying the groundwork for a longer term transformation into dynamic marketing and how we use generative AI.
So the way Demand Spring thinks about dynamic marketing and generative AI is, there’s really two layers, right?
You’ve got the experience layer. This is the bits and pieces that we as marketers put into market. Digital experiences, events, all these things that our clients, customers, prospects interact with.
And this is powered by an operational layer. So what’s in the operational layer? This is the data, this is the technology, it’s the operating, it’s the people in this room, how we collectively work together. And it’s the experience designers, the people that are designing what these experiences are going to be.
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AI will certainly change the way the world works. And those who adopt it early will be leaders in their fields and businesses. That’s why MarketingProfs has invited marketing+AI experts to share their knowledge at the AI for Content Creators and AI for Digital Marketers events, to help our community be on the leading edge of this transformative technology.
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Published 12/13/23
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