For a moment, disregard the question of whether AI will transform the way marketers work. Instead, marketers need to be compelled to ask ourselves, how can we prepare ourselves for what's already well underway? How can we identify key tools and tips to work more efficiently and effectively? Many marketers are fearful that the more closely aligned AI and human behavior becomes, the more obsolete humans will be, but maybe that does not need to be the case.
Indeed, AI expert and futurist, Dale Bertrand, doesn’t believe this at all. Instead, he believes marketers should leverage what no machine ever can, our unique human traits, to work with AI and other technological advances to keep us thriving.
Let’s examine some key insights from Dale that will help as we think about transforming the way we work.
As marketers, we have relied on automation, but incorporating modern AI has proven to be more impactful for enhancing ease and efficiency. Marketing automation is reliable because it's well-designed and practical. However, these software tools are not very intelligent when compared to the epic potential of AI. Scheduling emails to arrive on time to a desired audience is no longer enough. Our customers and audiences demand more from us. They can research what the rest of the market has to offer as quickly as you scroll through your TikTok feed. The technology to meet these demands is already here, but we are not taking full advantage of it. We have natural language processing algorithms to understand customer feedback, deep learning algorithms to spot patterns in data and email engagement, and GPT-3 algorithms for text generation.
Furthermore, organizations working on embedding AI tools in their services are all around us including: HubSpot, Grammarly, NETBASE, and many more.
At HubSpot, Alex Kuznetsov and Josh Miller from the ML team jointly share Dale’s sentiment on the growing impact of AI transforming the way we work. “AI will be prolific in customer workflows including email, messaging, and social media. It can creatively use the “voice of the customer” across these channels. It can draft more contextual emails, assist in writing content for their websites and reply to enquiries intelligently. It can understand customers' needs by analyzing sentiment and protect them by flagging toxic or offensive content. For support teams, Chatbots powered by language models and facts from a company's knowledge base will be able to handle even higher percentages of inquiries. That can enable support reps to focus on the most sophisticated cases requiring a personalized human touch.”
In order for this transition to work, these tools not only need to be smart, but creative. As Dale asked his audience at INBOUND 2022, “can software ever emulate human creativity?” He believes that this is possible in a multitude of ways (but don’t run in fear!). He goes on to say that if marketers work to truly comprehend the workflows being created by AI and then work to build new and improved workflows with this technology, they will in turn be a valuable asset to this area of the workforce. The call to action here is not to run and hide, but to take his advice and evolve with AI, instead of ignoring its influence on the marketplace.
Now that you’re ready to dive in, because who are we kidding this is an exciting moment, here are some suggestions from Dale on what we should see as fact or fiction when navigating this uncharted territory.
- A computer science background is not required to start using these tools, as AI will be integrated in the tools already in use.
- You will not be replaced by AI as long as marketers don’t ignore this evolution, and choose to instead adapt to the changing landscape.
- Instead of organizational management leading the charge on AI, adoption marketers doing this work daily will discover the opportunities on the horizon.
Dales says it best — “The future is bright for marketers who lead the adoption of AI tools.”
Take this moment and embrace a growth mindset. Begin learning which tasks can be automated with AI, educate yourself about this growing trend (AI cannot and will not do it all), and pull yourself away from feeling apprehensive, and instead start to imagine how you can start to accelerate your career and your organization in new and exciting ways.
