If you're client facing, you need an opinion on AI

AI has simultaneously become one of the biggest threats and opportunities to various marketing ecosystems, and regardless if your job function is R&D, or developing account strategy - if you're client-facing, you need to have a base understanding, finger on the pulse, and opinion on the use of AI in marketing.

Nothing can destabilize a relationship quicker than not having an answer to a question posed by C-level or a VP, around a hot trending topic in the industry - regardless if you think it's worthwhile, meaningful, or will even be impactful to the client's business.

If you're not able to answer the question and keep them interested, there are plenty of others in the industry who will be willing to have the conversation with them.

Not only that, VPs and C-level are always looking for economies of scale, competitive advantages (across all aspects of marketing), and let's be honest, developing cutting edge AI strategies and implementing them with results sounds amazing in any board meeting.

This is why it's imperative you're:

• Up to speed and able to converse about AI. Even if you don't know *everything* going on, you can hold a conversation and have an opinion on the impact of AI on [insert relevant talking point here].
• You're researching and aware of how other companies are leveraging AI for competitive advantages. Read things like Campaign, Drum, Marketing Week, Forbes... The publications your VP and C-level contacts read.
• Ways AI can impact the client business, even if it's not directly related or tangential to your scope/channel/remit.

How to identify AI use cases

Identifying specific AI use cases for your company can be overwhelming. The best place to start is by understanding how AI is currently being used in your industry. Many of the applications of AI already exist and are available to you, but you may still need to customize or tailor them to fit your organization's needs.

You can also brainstorm use cases with your team, paying attention to areas in which you could be doing things better or faster. AI applications play a major role in customer relationship management, marketing automation, media planning and optimization, digital ad buying, analytics and sentiment analysis.

When identifying specific use cases, consider the following questions:

• What processes or tasks can be automated?
• How can we leverage customer data for more personalized experiences?
• How can we optimize media buying?
• How can we leverage predictive analytics to identify underlying trends and patterns?
• How can we ensure our customer service agents are well informed and up to date with the latest information?

What business outcomes AI can help you achieve

Once you've decided on an AI use case and identified an AI tech vendor, the next step is to gain a better understanding of the possible business outcomes you could achieve from using AI in your marketing operations. Depending on the use case, AI can help you to:

1. Automate mundane tasks and reduce operational costs: This can include everything from automating time-consuming tasks with bots, to transforming customer service processes or removing manual steps from your sales pipeline.
2. Discover new business insights: Efficiently process large amounts of data to uncover actionable insights that can help inform decision making. For example, using an AI-powered analytics platform, you can speed up discovery cycles and get answers to complex questions quickly and accurately.
3. Enhance customer experiences by personalizing content and offers: Leverage advanced analytics tools to quickly spot patterns in customer behaviors, then use those insights to better tailor their experience across channels and create more personalized interactions with customers.
4. Optimize marketing campaigns with accurate predictions: With AI-fueled prediction models, marketers can predict customer behaviors and outcomes in real time with higher accuracy than traditional methods. This enables marketers to respond faster and more efficiently to changes in the market or consumer preferences in order optimize their campaigns for maximum efficiency and ROI.

Understand your company's/agency's position on AI

Ask your team leaders what they think about AI, and figure out how to explain to customers how your group is using it.

This is a good opportunity to challenge the internal system to create a clear stance on AI and how the agency utilizes it. This makes things a lot clearer when communicating to clients, and reduces the anxiety caused by any potential ambiguity of not understanding if your AI proposals with your clients are inline with the agency view-point, or wholly deliverable.