The Rise of Self-Service AI
There is far more to AI than just copy generation. A new generation of AI app stores have the potential to revolutionise marketing operations.
2023 has undoubtedly been the year of Generative AI. Everyone has long been aware of the potential risks and benefits of Artificial Intelligence - many science fiction novels and films have spoken about the subject. It was only ever a question of when the tremendous potential of AI turned into an everyday reality.
Yet, for many data scientists, AI and machine learning have been a critical part of their daily workflow for the past decade. Martech vendors have been announcing major new AI features for the last six or seven years. Machine learning in the realm of data management has been around for far longer than that. The revolutionary change brought about by ChatGPT was the introduction of those capabilities to the general public.
Custom Applications
AI models are no longer the domain of specialists. It is now possible for non-technical users to utilise advanced AI in their everyday workflow. Developers have been integrating the ChatGPT API into their apps precisely to enable the kinds of AI-enabled workflows that are now starting to emerge. Every martech application is working on an AI feature set, leveraging one of the major LLM models, such as OpenAI or Google Bard, in the backend.
In the last few weeks, the major AI vendors have started rolling out self-service AI tools for business users, launching no-code tools for creating custom AI applications based on ChatGPT. OpenAI kicked off the trend with the announcement of their GPTs app store early last month, while Microsoft announced CoPilot Studio at their recent Ignite customer conference.
Custom Workflows
These new AI builder tools will expand the reach of artificial intelligence to every corner of marketing operations. It is already possible to embed AI into the custom applications and integrations that are endemic across many enterprise organisations, but these AI builders will allow AI to be integrated at scale into manual workflows too.
The use of AI in data cleaning, audience selection or predictive analytics is hardly new functionality, but such capabilities have previously been restricted to expensive add-ons or niche enterprise products. Soon, AI builder platforms will allow marketing operations to leverage custom automation in their day-to-day data or reporting workflows without purchasing additional technology.
Custom Personalisation
In particular, AI can support first-party data initiatives by collecting analytics data across channels and then using it to determine customer interests, as well as the optimum content and channels to reach specific accounts or contacts. Any AI-derived data and insights can then be used to expand campaign personalisation through content sourced from generative AI. This is functionality that technologies such as 6sense have built highly successful businesses on.
Concerns about readability, accuracy and brand compliance mean that some level of human review will always be needed. However, AI can be used to initially generate hyper-personalised versions of the same content for different verticals or segments, as well as to automatically publish the approved versions to the final asset. AI-enhanced automation tools can then select the most appropriate content version for each account, without needing a resource-intensive manual review of the entire target list.
In a market where generic content is no longer good enough, AI has the potential to supercharge campaign performance. Using the right AI-enhanced automations will enable marketing teams of all sizes to deliver effective personalisation to customers of all sizes. Soon, good use of AI will become a vital component of a successful campaign.