Ready or Not: AI is Your New Marketing Co-Pilot

The last 48 hours were particularly eventful for the AI world. First OpenAI , which is accelerating to a billion dollar annual run rate,? launched its new enterprise product, Chat GPT for the Enterprise. Then a day later, Google Cloud announced a slew of AI products poised to change how we will work and collaborate. Hidden within these announcements are signs pointing to the imminent transformation of marketing. What remains unclear is whether the field of marketing will survive this seismic shift. Allow me to elaborate.

Putting Performance Marketers at risk

Approximately a third of all advertising dollars go to Google today. Armies of marketers and agency executives service those spends by managing keywords, bidding, budget optimization, audiences, creatives, and attribution elements of Google campaigns. The tools they use have increasingly become automated over the years. Some veteran marketers even argue that Google’s automation tools are more reliable than both agency and internal teams.

However, Google Cloud's recent announcements indicate that these tools will become even more automated, and not just as individual features or disparate tools but in seamless orchestration, leading to full automation of the entire marketing campaign process. When everything is automated, fewer human beings are required.

Imagine choosing an objective and setting a budget (as you do today in Google), and then completely leaving it to Google to do the rest. That means letting Google pull first, second and third party data from various systems that it has access to, create unique customer segments off of them, identify the right keywords to target and then set its own budget parameters for each account in the campaign.?

What if Google also automatically created headlines, ad copy and creative, using your own website and brand style guide as reference points? And then imagine if it took this a step further and automatically triggered the campaign, assessed the results, optimized based on the performance and made new choices on its own across search, display, youtube, social media and connected television. Think of it as Google’s Performance Max product, but far more potent and with a mind of its own.

In this Google-engineered future, your teams will likely have significantly less to do. Extend that line of thought to include similar capabilities from Meta, TikTok, Amazon, and other advertising platforms, and you begin to question what the future of marketing will actually entail. Each of these platforms already possesses some essential components; it's only a matter of time before they connect the dots to fully automate the campaign creation process, potentially in collaboration with Google Cloud, ChatGPT for the Enterprise or some other player. These platforms together capture the majority of the advertising dollars in America. So if they change dramatically, so too will marketing.

AI Competing with Creative Directors

I recently had an eye-opening conversation with a fellow CMO, who described how an advertising agency leveraged Generative AI to secure a project. The agency was under the gun to present concepts for a large-scale mural intended for a public space. Normally, they would have pushed back on the tight timeline, but that wasn’t feasible this time around. Summer vacations had depleted their staffing levels, making it difficult to even rally a team for night and weekend work.

Enter a "Midjourney " generative AI solution, which utilized a series of increasingly focused prompts to quickly generate a mural concept. This concept was not only strong enough to present to the client but also compelling enough to win the project.?The client never met the team that created the work!

This raises critical questions: whose capability should be depended upon next time round? Should the agency use prompt engineers instead of creatives for future pitches? Was it the advanced technology of the Generative AI, or was it the skillful prompt engineering by the agency's staff or raw luck that led to the win? Imagine another scenario as well. What if the client had actually employed Chat GPT and Mid Journey to provide prospective agencies with a more detailed specification, thereby requiring a more modest project scope in the first place??

Of course, we're all aware that generative AI tools can occasionally produce odd results—like famously messing up the depiction of hands . But while human oversight is still needed to refine the output, there's no denying these tools are improving and saving us time. The more efficient they become, the fewer of us human beings will be needed, especially if the AI's creative output begins to match our own. It's a challenging reality that the marketing world must come to terms with- fewer of us in marketing or at the very least, fewer of us creating and more of us prompting AI tools.

AI is Already Upending the Corporate World

I wish I could say this is hyperbole, or at least akin to what we witnessed with the advent of the World Wide Web. That technology was indeed transformative, but as the dot-com bust revealed, we collectively misjudged the timing of its impact. Many business leaders are hoping for a similar grace period with generative artificial intelligence, recognizing its transformative potential but hoping the transition will be more of a glide path than a cliff.

However, we may be deceiving ourselves if we think the timeline will be forgiving. OpenAI fast-tracked the launch of ChatGPT for Enterprise precisely because they've observed businesses already redefining their operations through the new technology. Citing OpenAI's product launch blog post , organizations are using ChatGPT "to craft clearer communications, accelerate coding tasks, explore complex business questions rapidly, assist with creative work, and much more." In June alone, ChatGPT garnered 1.8 billion visitors, and OpenAI revealed that 80% of Fortune 500 companies have already adopted its use.

Walmart, the world's largest company, also made a significant move just yesterday. It announced that 50,000 of its non-store employees would be given access to a generative AI app trained on corporate data. Walmart envisions this technology liberating employees from repetitive, monotonous tasks and aiding them in creating new content, summarizing lengthy documents, sorting through benefits, and streamlining new hire orientations. The implications are vast and varied.

While this may not directly relate to marketing, a brief review of your organization's marketing operations will show the significant amount of manual work involved—work that could be revolutionized by generative artificial intelligence. If Walmart can adapt so rapidly, it's a clear indication that other organizations can—and will probably need to do the same.

The Marketing Revolution: Are You In or Out

At the most fundamental level, the marketing campaign process is poised for significant automation in the near future. The quicker you and your team adapt to this change, the better positioned you'll be. Although resisting the transformation could jeopardize your job, embracing it might carry similar risks. Either way, it's not a matter of choice.

Similarly, content creation is on the cusp of a major overhaul. Whether it's murals, digital ads, or video-based campaigns, generative AI will increasingly come into play. Will this mean fewer of us are needed, or will the quality of work improve? Likely, it'll be a combination of both.

Generative AI is also set to revolutionize how we operate and communicate internally, offering greater efficiency (hat tip to Walmart for pioneering this change). The unanswered question is whether automation will progress so quickly as to diminish the need for human roles. Or might it usher in a new era of productivity, spurring innovations and elevating our economy?

Is the future of marketing and business undergoing a transformation? Undoubtedly. Are we prepared for this shift? Probably not. Moreover, I suspect that most of our organizations aren't considering as critically the competitive advantages—or disruptions—that generative AI could bring. One thing is certain: the days of going it alone are over. You'll have generative AI as your co-pilot.