Is AI Tech adoption all downhill from here or are there any hurdles left to avoid?

With the snowballing effect of the many AI powered tools which are landing in both companies and consumers' hands, the level of user adoption has been unprecedented over the last 12 months.

Chat-bots

As someone who is used to comparing web traffic for the brands I work with, I must admit the current user figures are nothing short of mind-blowing:

ChatGPT by OpenAI currently has?180+ million?users and gets an average of 1.4 billion monthly visits from around 250m unique users.

Can you imagine an E-commerce website that had this many new shoppers to handle within its first full year of being online? The financial implications of an audience this size are huge and that is acknowledged by OpenAI seeking a company revaluation of $90bn due to higher than predicted revenues. They are now re-forecasting $1bn in revenue over the next 12 months to their investors.

This demonstrates that many people have taken a step towards increasing their productivity or efficiency by leveraging this service, which in turn shows that AI powered tools are successfully building trust with us 'mere mortals' who wish to benefit.

This is of course not without its pitfalls as we saw earlier in the year from what happened with Samsung when they adopted Chat GPT. A member of their team uploaded some business critical proprietary information and that was then regurgitated by the Chat-bot to other non Samsung users. Full article here for those who have not read what could be viewed a cautionary tale.

Outside of the chat-bot space there is a much broader and to a degree, more specialist area of AI development and deployment which I think more businesses are engaging with.

Images & visual design

As one example, the popular image generator Midjourney is at the bleeding edge of user experience for creating incredible pieces of digital art. They have seen user experience surge to 16m+ registered users and with a large portion of those accessing the tools at any one time (around 1.25m active users) the system is already creating large volumes of entirely bespoke content. Due to the market for AI to Visual content being less broad than the AI to Text market, this will be a slightly slower burn in terms of becoming the norm for creative folks to use each day. I fully expect that once the access point is slightly easier for some to try, this will be another behemoth of a system.

There are also new challengers to this arena who offer a slightly less complex user experience like imagine.art which uses text to image creation. This is one I have personally enjoyed playing with, despite it not having the full toolset of Midjourney. It has made me curious to see how much farther I can go with this tech, so perhaps we should consider these lighter versions as a Gateway to the really big AI Tech.

Don't panic yet though if you are better with a pencil than a keyboard and mouse, as not everything that AI does makes perfect sense. Particularly in the visual space.

When you prompt for an image that includes humans, there are often a few strange anomalies around faces (empty eye sockets), limbs (sometimes there's an extra one) and particularly around hands. I am not sure what AI finds so challenging to understand about our human hands but you will often see hands that seem to bend the wrong way or are just fixed on in the wrong way etc. (Perhaps this is worth noting as a potential weakness should the machines ever try and take over, we can just "confuse em with our hands")

AI for Insights & Marketing

Within the Marketing sector, Generative AI is an area where many companies are building our their technology offering. Whether by creating their own methodologies from the ground up, or by licensing one of the existing AI technologies in market, there are all sorts of widgets that can be used to save a significant amount of time and ultimately brain power. Whether the brain angle will come back to bite us as dumbed down humans one day is yet to be seen, but for now let's remain optimistic that this will be a useful extension of our reach within our position at work.

As an example if you are a copy writer who needs to create a large volume of email sequences that are tailored to many specific scenarios, you can push that to your friendly Chat-bot and within minutes you can be editing down from a first draft. Need to translate it into different languages? Also no problem. These tools are now appearing in greater numbers of Email Service Provider platforms rather than just being present in a select few. This is great news for those looking to increase the cadence of their output, however I would always note that unless you tweak what the system spits out, you may end up sounding the same as the next company in your space.

In terms of using AI to make predictions about potential customers and new audiences to engage, there are a number of platforms entering this space with a real sense of purpose. With the acknowledged goal of creating truly personal experiences for brands, there is an inherent need to absorb as many signals around browsing context, user intent and purchase activity as possible. Being able to absorb and analyse 1st party data sources at scale and then to leverage them against other 3rd party sources with the help of AI is the stuff that many dreams have been made of for the last few years.

Now a reality, we at Zeta Global have placed our flag firmly in the soil within this space. Through significant investment in AI tech developed from the ground up we are now seeing the real life use cases emerge that confirm our bets about the direction the market was heading were well placed. We are proud to share the sector with some other very talented and exciting companies, so I foresee a bright future for all of us.

Straightforward from here?

I do think that in order for companies to avoid delivering 'cookie cutter' based communications that are not differentiated to that of their competition we need to ensure that we place these tools in the hands of people who plan to use them as an extension of their reach within their roles, as that will maintain the personality of the company. This will be especially true within consumer marketing and to a degree within B2b as well.

A partnership between human and machine has both the potential to be a powerful alliance or a complete disaster if we humans no longer seek to improve our own intelligence and stay at the cutting edge of understanding this ourselves.

For me this is not the alternative to human designed communications but more of an Augmentation if we handle our new AI creations correctly.