Lessons in AI: how to work better, not faster

A couple of weeks ago, myself, Rob and fantastic partner and founder of Curated Digital Simon Douglass, hosted and took part in a LinkedIn Live all about AI and whether it has a place in B2B PR and marketing. I thoroughly enjoyed it – but then anyone who knows me, knows I like to talk so a LinkedIn Live (well any live really) is the perfect place for me! But for those who missed it, I thought that I’d provide a quick summary of our chat.

But first some background

We are by no means experts in AI. Both Simon and I have a curious interest in AI, which started in the early days of ChatGPT. Both of us have a 20+ years’ experience in tech and both of us are 100% focused on the B2B market. This means that we’ve been exploring the world of AI: trying, playing and interacting with any apps that can help us work better and more effectively. This seems to have made us early adopters. We wanted to share this experience and the tools that we use.

Our experience has been mostly positive. As Simon puts it, “AI has been the single most brilliant thing that’s changed life and increased my productivity tenfold.” And this is the beauty of AI – it’s ability to support you and your day-to-day work. Like Simon, I have a passion for technology and over the past 25 years I’ve never seen a piece of technology develop and move quite as quickly as this.

Style over substance

One thing we both agree on is that the hype surrounding AI is making it difficult for marketers to find what they need. Just when you think that you’ve found the perfect tool and it’s going to change your world, you discover it isn’t and it doesn’t. And you’ve wasted time trying to make it work.

But the potential is there and as a result we’ll see some amazing developments – things that we never dreamed possible. I saw a piece on the news recently about how AI is being trained to track eye movements so it can be used to replicate a radiologist looking for breast cancer tumours. This could speed up diagnosis times, shorten waiting times and hopefully get people to treatment quicker. ?

What about B2B? The consumer benefits are evident but how can we use it in B2B marketing? I believe that it sits a little more behind the scenes as the support for human work, interaction and communication. ?

Let me show you five ways that AI makes us better marketers:

1.????Research: It’s a virtual colleague to bounce ideas off. It can deliver simple explanations to complex topics; it can gather and analyse data; give behavioural, trend and demographic insights.

2.???Inspiration: When you’re working remotely it’s really useful for getting inspiration. When you’re in the office you often bounce ideas off each other. In an age of remote working, it can help to get the conversation, project or task out of the starting blocks. As Simon says, Chat GPT is an invaluable resource for jumpstarting strategies in the B2B space.

3.???Content creation: At this point, I’m often asked if AI can write? In short yes of course it can, but this is not where its strength lies and you need to be choosy. It’s suited to some content creation tasks better than others. But actually it’s strength is in simplifying complex content, proof reading copy, and testing your messaging and even tone of voice.

4.???Monitoring: This is a key area for B2B marketing. We spend our lives justifying budgets and here’s a tech that can finally help. It’s already built into a lot of stuff we already use – from coverage monitoring to social media listening.

5.???Efficiencies – This is where most people tend to focus. Yes, it can create quickly but fast isn’t always better.

Tools of the trade

So what tools are good? There are 1000s and more are being created daily, which makes me a little nervous listing any here, so here are just a few that Simon and I noted:

• Otter.ai – for transcribing meetings and interviews – and creating action lists from them
• Flare – good for generating email sequences and product copy
• Superhuman AI – great for creating marketing content including an ability to adapt its tone and generate persuasive, informative content
• Hoppy Copy - Trained to write marketing copy, with the choice of six preprogrammed tone of voices or upload your own
• Jasper – another content creation tool
• Emplifi – social media management?
• Personalize – while I’ve not yet used this one, it looks interesting. It lets you see what your contacts in your database are most interested in, in real time, live. Using their IP addresses you can connect to your audience at the right time, with the right message?
• Remini – AI photo enhancer – currently one of the most popular apps on the App Store. It enhances selfies or mobile phone images for public use??
• Image creation – if it’s images you’re after then check out fellow Skout Rebecca Brown’s blog here that looks at the good the bad and the ugly of image generative AI

?At the end of the Live we were asked whether AI will put agencies out of a job as in-house marketers start to use these apps in every day scenarios. My feeling is that rather than replacing us, it will make us better – enhancing agency capabilities. Just as the internet revolutionised industries without rendering professionals obsolete, AI is likely to elevate the role of agencies by enabling them to focus more on strategic thinking.