In this three-part series I will take you on a journey through the world of Generative AI (GenAI) and explore all it offers the marketer today … and tomorrow.
First, let’s consider whether GenAI can live up to the hype? If I had written this article a year ago, we may have been discussing customer data platforms, the golden child of the marketing world in 2023. Is GenAI the new golden child?
In my opinion it is. And leading experts in the field believe there is genuine reason to be excited.
When seven Google scholars wrote “Attention Is All You Need” in 2017 they opened the door to making large language models (LLM’s) a reality from what had, to that point, only existed as a theoretical concept (LLMs are complex machine models that track and learn relationships in sequential data to respond to prompts using similar text). So, GenAI is a genuinely new capability that we have not seen before. The trick is to work out it’s potential.
Early use cases have been centred around the automation of customer service and support teams. However, there are many anecdotes about chatbots giving inappropriate or plainly incorrect answers so what is going wrong? Well, in the rush to use the latest and greatest tech some organizations went straight to automation and bypassed augmentation.
The problem lies in the underlying data we use to train the LLM’s. If we jump straight into a ‘black box’ GenAI approach, then it’s like trusting a teenager to drive the new all-singing-all-dancing family car with only a couple of weeks driving experience. However, with the development of GenAI chatbots with better guardrails and more relevant data to train the LLM’s, we will begin to understand more about how customers are interacting with them and help the chatbots begin to understand sentiment and emotion. This will drive the ability to build customer profiles in a way we’ve never done before and support much more personalized customer journey orchestration, including tone of voice.
GenAI and Insight Generation
We will also see expansion in GenAI use in more process automation of marketing workflows where the delivery will be through a digital marketing assistant or copilot that helps marketers curate, understand, and respond to all the customer touchpoints within the marketing strategy. This will be underpinned by another application of GenAI – that of insight generation. Rather than our fixed marketing dashboards based on static KPI’s we will receive a more dynamic set of insights with trends and behaviors, both historic and predicted, which our digital marketing assistant will help interpret and then recommend actions for. This will include generated content, messaging and journey plans. Who knows? It may even be possible to get to a true 1-2-1 marketing strategy for every prospect and customer that touches the organization.
In my next article I will explore what happens when we start to embed GenAI into our products. What happens when we go beyond the service-based role of today? What happens when we reach the next stage of development when we move to multimodal Generative AI and can deliver multisensory immersive experiences based on outputs from a combination of multiple data types? Please check out my next article that will address these questions.
