Is anyone else sick of reading emails and blogs that are clearly written by ChatGPT yet? Gen AI is one of the most powerful tools to hit the world of marketing, but confining it to content creation is like using a state-of-the-art surgical robot to butter bread.
It’s time for marketing teams to think more creatively about how they can use Gen AI.
Join us in this special episode of The Undiscovered Metric as we delve into the transformative potential of Gen AI with Thomas Hirschmann, CEO at CoreCortex. Thomas is a trained behavioral scientist and leads a team of data scientists and AI experts delivering AI-powered innovation as a service.
From those who leverage Gen AI creatively to supercharge their value, to the pitfalls awaiting those who merely automate their daily workflows, we explore the dichotomy between innovation and mediocrity in AI adoption. Read on for the top 8 insights from the episode, or watch the whole thing below!
Much like the huge rush to create apps when the app store launched in 2008, many brands are putting the cart before the horse and acting without a coherent strategy for fear of falling behind.
“There’s a general principle that people over-expect the impact of new technology in the short term and under-expect in the long run, it's called Amara’s Law,” says Thomas.
Businesses need to take a step back and create a strategy if they’re going to get the best out of Gen AI. A couple of important questions to ask include:
One article from NFX explains that AI is like water. In a similar way to how the concept of digital tools and transformation took over discussions a few decades ago, only to become the industry standard, we can expect AI to do the same.
“I'm seeing that a lot, specifically with clients that are overwhelmed or uncertain about the technology,” says Thomas. “They think that the tool is the technology. So instead of rethinking the way they're doing business and understanding the full, transformative potential of Gen AI, they're looking for shortcuts.”
As Gen AI underpins more of our daily activities, it’s likely to backfire for people who focus entirely on using Gen AI tools to automate their existing workflows. “People will reduce their own work value by not thinking creatively enough about what they could be doing with Gen AI,” says Thomas.
“People will reduce their own work value by not thinking creatively enough about what they could be doing with Gen AI.”
Thomas Hirschmann, CEO, CoreCortex
For those who can look beyond automating their workflow and think more creatively about how to work with this powerful technology, there’s a huge opportunity to supercharge their value in every interaction.
On the other end of the spectrum, marketers looking for an easy ride whose Gen AI strategy ends at feeding ChatGPT their brand guidelines and setting up an automated posting function on social platforms will quickly find themselves obsolete. “If you get rid of that imagination, nothing stands out. You can't be a brand or do advertising — it’s all just the same,” says Thomas.
The mediocrity principle is something that we can expect to see mirrored in the analyst’s role too, with much of the manual workload becoming more easily automated, the role will call for more subject matter expertise. In fact, the lines between the marketer and analyst role are likely to blur as the value of the marketer role depends more on understanding data, and the analyst role calls for an ability to empathize and understand audiences
“There will be no differentiation between analysts and creatives. You have to do both,” says Thomas. “You have to start an enlightened way of thinking about creating value. It’s challenging but it will force you to evolve. It will force you to develop new skills where you switch quickly between these two ways of thinking and are able to plan and strategize on top of what you learned from the analytics.”
No technology comes into the world immediately ready to revolutionize our lives — there’s always a push and pull between the tech and the people using it — and this has never been more true than with Gen AI. In part, that’s because the task of teaching a machine to think like a human requires an incredibly high level of human touch. But it’s not a one-way street.
While we work to teach Gen AI how to operate on a more human level, Gen AI is also changing the way that we think about solving a problem, and how we can prompt AI in the most effective ways.
Strengthening this symbiotic relationship is a key area of focus for Thomas, who has built out a function called counter-prompt AI that supports exactly that. Thomas explains, “Counter-prompt AI allows you to reflect on the quality of your hypothesis in a Socratic manner, scrutinizing and questioning everything about your own knowledge. This is the way forward for us to do proper research and be actually innovative, instead of just producing more of the same looking, same sounding, generic outputs.”
One of the biggest problems for marketers according to research is manual data wrangling causing human errors. AI tools should solve that, but as we reduce the amount of human touch, the risk in this approach is overdependence — an assumption that the computer is always right, as our ability to question and query data trophies.
If you’ve ever tried to get ChatpGPT to perform simple numerical tasks you’ll understand how frustrating it can be, however, there could be more to these hallucinations if we zoom out a bit. Thomas explains, “In a way when we complain that ChatGPT hallucinates, I think we‘re overlooking the most amazing feature. It's not a glitch or a mistake or a bug in the system. It’s that feature of our own intelligence that makes us most powerful. To imagine a future that is different from our current existence. Imagining things that are still not possible and finding a technical way to get there.”
"In a way when we complain that ChatGPT hallucinates, I think we‘re overlooking the most amazing feature."
Thomas Hirschmann, CEO, CoreCortex
To take this one step further from a marketing point of view, if you get rid of that imagination, nothing stands out. So, hallucinations — or rather the possibility for LLMs to imagine things — could be a really fascinating and fruitful area to explore as the technology advances.
In the evolving landscape of marketing, AI is set to revolutionize not just how we analyze data, but also how we understand and measure cognitive changes in consumers. Thomas elucidates on this, highlighting the challenge of aligning the speed of AI with the inherently human decision-making process
“AI can help marketers respond and act faster. But there's one limiting factor. The audience that you're trying to address, we’re still human. And if you want a human to make a purchase decision, he needs to be moved or convinced.”
“AI can help marketers respond and act faster. But there's one limiting factor. The audience that you're trying to address, we’re still human."
Thomas Hirschmann, CEO, CoreCortex
While AI can provide instantaneous insights, human decision-making and cognitive changes don't occur at the same rapid pace. Marketers must recognize that ultimately, influencing a purchase decision requires more than just efficient data processing — it demands an empathy and understanding of the audience's motivations, needs, and desires that can prompt those cognitive changes that lead to action.
The evolution of data strategies has gone from written reports to spreadsheets, to automatically fetching data directly from the platform into visualization tools and dashboards. Gen AI will be a major catalyst in the next step of this evolution.
Thomas explains, “I see something happening that I was able to have the first glimpse of ten years ago. I had a client that talked about creating a completely interactive analytics dashboard that you can ask questions and it will give you a natural language formatted response.”
Being able to accurately predict hypotheses based on historical data would be a huge step forward for marketers in making decisions like which campaigns to run, which creatives to use, or where budget should be allocated.
“The role of the analyst is changing, and I think the value won’t just be in seeing what's better and worse, but learning from it and creating strategies and new hypotheses on the fly,” says Thomas.
Regulation is an elephant in the room for nascent tech like Gen AI. Currently, the landscape of AI in marketing is in a very experimental phase that feels a bit like the Wild West.
The technology is moving fast, and we don’t yet know what impact it will have. While it’s likely that at some point businesses will turn to a global regulatory body like the IAB to step in and regulate how AI is being used, this is a critical phase for the tech, and overregulation could be fatal.
“We need regulation, but we don't need the over-regulation to kill the technology before it even had a chance to emerge,” says Thomas, adding, “We need to strike a balance between venturing into the unknown and being reasonable enough to impose security systems where they are warranted without squashing innovation in its tracks.”
Marketers are right to be optimistic about the future of Gen AI, it’s an exciting transformation that we’re all just at the beginning of. Gen AI is only going to get more intelligent from here, and while historically there’s always some apprehension around big changes like this, Thomas urges marketers not to be afraid, “Normally there is a good correlation between things getting better with people making more intelligent decisions.”
In his parting advice, Thomas warns marketers not to expect the Gen AI revolution to happen without people pushing it forward. “Don't assume that this is an automatic conveyor belt into a golden future where you don't have to do anything. The process involves personal effort and the use of your own brain. Innovation always requires people to get involved.”