The Biggest Thing Missing from AI? Strategy

We are a year out from the day generative AI in marketing became mainstream. We’re a year out, and while the majority of marketing teams say they’ve experimented with AI, only a fraction of them have gotten beyond the pilot phase to truly incorporate AI into their workflows and drive results more meaningful than short-term efficiency gains. I’ve talked with all sorts of marketing leaders since I took an AI marketing role just over a year ago – those at companies that have broken through to seeing real transformation through AI and those that haven’t yet. Do you want to know the biggest difference between the two?

Strategy.?

I don’t just mean that the teams adopting AI are missing a strategy for getting the most out of the technology (although that is true for many of them), I mean that the tools themselves are not rooted in strategy. And without having that foundation and business context, the outputs, though impressive, aren’t reaching their potential.?

Marketing is about ideas -- informed by research, sharpened by strategy, and deepened with insights.?

I have worked with creatives my whole career. The biggest complaint that creative teams have is when they are brought into a particular campaign too late. When they’re told to make an image or write an article but not given any sense of the bigger picture in which that creative asset sits, that’s a problem. It’s a problem because it means that whatever content they create is going to be surface-level at best. We’re doing the same thing with AI tools. We use them as accelerants to finish up a paragraph for us or write a LinkedIn post we don’t feel like writing (not this one, I promise). But those generations are very nearly devoid of the context or strategy that would make them impactful.

We just released a slew of new features inside Jasper to expand it from an AI writing assistant to a true end-to-end marketing copilot. There are some incredible things in this release, (I’m looking at you performance analytics & insights), but the thing that has me most excited personally is something we're calling the Company Intelligence Hub.?

The Company Intelligence Hub acts as the brain and central nervous system for all your content. So when you tap into AI, you’re not generating words without meaning. Instead, you’re tying your content directly to things you’ve taught Jasper about your strategy, your audience, your competitive differentiation and style of communicating. If Jasper knows that your strategy is to hit a certain audience with a specific message informed by research on what matters to them, it’s going to be more effective. It’s going to be more reflective of the kind of marketing strategy you are trying to build.?

This goes both ways. Securely storing your strategy in the company intelligence hub also means that it stops collecting dust in some digital drawer or internal wiki and actually gets used in practical ways through each piece of content you create.?

For too long there has been a divide between research, strategy and execution. Bringing all of those together in an AI copilot can mean that you get better outcomes, not just faster outputs.?

Strategy is grounding. Strategy is what has been missing since this era of generative AI began a year ago. Paired with performance analytics for seeing real results, it is what can take AI from a party trick to a genuine business driver. And I can’t wait to see how people put it to use.

Want to see more of these features in action? Watch the replay of Jasper’s 2024 Vision & Product Announcements