Brand Marketers and Agencies Weigh in on AI in the Workplace

With all the recent, and likely to continue, buzz around generative AI tools like ChatGPT and DALL·E 2, we were interested?in getting the opinion of our advertising and marketing industry peers.

A recent poll asked the question:

Brand marketers and agency folks, are you open to using artificial intelligence (AI) employees on your teams? The responses to the poll:

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YES – It helps efficiency and cost: 17%

NO – It impacts quality and SEO: 83%

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Not surprising to see that eight of 10 surveyed were not currently on board with new generative AI tools. We would agree that there is reason to be cautious using these as a legitimate source for content creation for our clients and their customers. So let’s unpack some reasons this is heavily weighted toward a hard no and why there are some who are an optimistic yes as well.

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One reason may be the trepidation surrounding the validity, accuracy, and morality of these tools. It can be a concern among many of those considering using or fully adopting these content creation methods. Another reason is the artificial generation of output does not currently have the abilities that human creatives do—to collaborate, express emotion, and think outside the box. The methodology requires human input to generate the ideas from a neural network. In addition to the lack of human touch required to be truly creative, there is also a cost factor to getting up to speed on these tools and immediately reaping the rewards of instant home run content. However, this will likely become less of a barrier over time. So we’ll just need to wait and see how long before it becomes widely adopted. Additionally, the most important consideration for being bearish on AI content tools is that they cannot currently leverage the important up-front aspects of content development like the customer insights and research, persona development, consumer testing, and cultural understanding necessary to make an impactful connection.

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There are many more reasons for not leaning toward adopting generative AI right now, but let’s consider some of the upsides that drove two out of 10 surveyed to choose yes!

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The first and most obvious reason would be the boost to productivity of content creators. It gives an immediate head start that could positively impact costs for enterprise-level and independent creators. It allows faster generation of ideas early on that increase the number of potential approaches generated that can eventually be whittled down to the best ones to refine. AI applications can be very efficient at search engine optimization as well. And finally, the use of these graphic AI tools could help eliminate the reliance on stock or custom photography needs down the road.

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So, regardless of whether you are on the 80% NO or 20% YES side, it would be interesting to ask—in a follow-up survey—who is a creator and who is an administrator, so we can see what is driving these perceptions.