Hybrid Artificial Intelligence in Future B2B Marketing
Hybrid artificial intelligence (AI) refers to an approach where offices deploy tools like ChatGPT or Google Bard in ways that complement rather than eliminate existing jobs. Find out how B2B content managers are allocating tasks between AI and human staff and what tomorrow’s content marketing departments will feel like.
Artificial intelligence (AI) seems to be on every office worker’s mind these days. Whenever a disruptive technology or “killer app” comes along, its implications for the quality and quantity of work we’ll have to do in the future come scrutiny.
Even the United Nations got into the act this week. Its International Labour Organization (ILO) released a study analyzing the “potential exposure of occupations and tasks to generative artificial intelligence.”
Like most experts who’ve researched AI’s effects on the workplace, the report concluded that, “The most important impact of the technology is likely to be of augmenting work – automating some tasks within an occupation while leaving time for other duties – as opposed to fully automating occupations.”
“Human Touch Needs to Augment Generative AI Tools”
Lane Ellis at TopRank Marketing writes that, “For B2B marketing to truly thrive during what has become AI’s prime-time spotlight, the expertise of the human touch needs to augment generative AI tools and form a new hybrid AI.” He goes on to explain that, “Hybrid AI includes the best of both worlds, and B2B brands have much to gain from defining and implementing their own best practices when it comes to just what hybrid AI means in their organization.”
So, while every brand will define this hybrid AI concept in its own way, we can already say a few things about how this approach will look, and how it will transform B2B content marketing work. The things we’ll be interbreeding to produce this new hybrid organization will be AI techniques, human insights and tried-and-true marketing strategies.
You’ll need to blend these three things within your content marketing team in ways that make your campaigns more efficient, profitable and successful. Your goal is to find the synergy between automation, human creativity, experience and sound marketing principles.
Most Obvious Place to Put AI to Work is Data Science
The most obvious place to put hybrid AI to work in your B2B marketing department is data science. Using AI, your tech stack can sift through overwhelming volumes of data to identify patterns, trends and exceptions that humans have neither the time, nor the patience nor the inclination to process and analyze.
Even so, once AI has generated the results of these big data exercises, real, live people are going to have to interpret those findings. Even more importantly, it will be you and your fellow humans who choose strategies and tactics to respond appropriately to the data analysis findings.
More sophisticated AI tools can use current data to make predictions. Your team’s apps may be able to predict which leads are more like to generate sales, or which additional products customers are likely to need, based on logic that wouldn’t naturally occur to humans.
AI Projections Will Only Come True if Humans Act on Them
Once they’ve made those predictions, your team will need to give those forecasts a thorough reality check. More to the point, those projections will only come true if humans from either the marketing or the sales team act on them.
It’s a truism that successful marketing depends on knowing your customers. Hybrid AI is the ideal tool to analyze customer behaviour and preferences to support personalized marketing messages and buyer’s journeys.
At the same time, your human team members will have to take on the tasks of personalizing marketing messages. They’ll also need to tailor the messaging to take subtle cultural and contextual difference into account, and to make sure it resonates with the target audience, who are still human, after all.
Most Important Human Role is Ethical Oversight
There will be some other roles that will have to remain exclusively in human hands. The most important of these will always be ethical oversight.
You and your team are accountable for retaining control over business compliance issues. You’ll also have to ensure that hybrid AI decisions comply with your brand’s code of ethics and respect client privacy, intellectual property and trade secrets.
Although apps like ChatGPT, Bard and their competitors can draft content, like emails, blog posts and magazine articles, most of the results are not ready for prime time. Humans still need to redraft, edit, and align content with your brand’s voice, goals and values.
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Potential Clients Interacting With AI Agents and Human Team
Increasingly, buyer’s journeys will involve potential clients interacting with both AI agents and human team members, especially in your brand’s sales force. AI tools can interact with customers on a basic level as chatbots, and they can work behind the scenes to recommend content, guiding leads from the interest to desire stages along the path.
Once potential customers reach the conversion stage, your sales team would emerge to customize solutions and close deals. These are more nuanced interactions, and customers get frustrated and annoyed when they have to conduct major transactions with clumsy, soulless computers.
We hear a lot about machine learning in the context of hybrid AI. It’s true that AI applications can generalize from past experience and improve their performance in future situations.
Machine Learning Tempered Using Human Feedback
However, these capabilities will always need to be tempered using feedback loops. Humans need to? fact check and reconcile the conclusions hybrid AI applications come up with so they make sense beyond the data centre and out there in the business world.
Given this hybrid AI approach to future work, walking into B2B content marketing offices will feel different in the coming years. There will definitely be humans at work in the office, or dialled in remotely.
The difference will be that they’ll be spending more time formulating strategy based on timely access to accurate information. They’ll be working with content, but most of that content will be AI-drafted; they’ll be editing, refining and aligning it with brand guidelines.
Thinking About and Discussing Ethical and Compliance Issues
They’ll also be spending a lot of time thinking about and discussing ethical and compliance issues. They’ll have acquired the technical skills to impose policies, procedures and guidelines onto the AI tools with which they work.
As with any team, future content marketing managers will be responsible for building synergy between AI and human staff. Success will depend on your ability to capitalize on your human and technical resources’ strengths and minimize their weaknesses.
More Creative, Strategic and Compliance Work
Management will have to focus AI on processing and analyzing big data, drafting routine content, and making logical predictions. That way, you can free your team up to spend time on the more creative, strategic and ethical work that only they can accomplish. As the ILO concluded in their report, “It is humans that are behind the decision to incorporate such technologies and it is humans that need to guide the transition process.”?
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