Data is essential: Building an effective generative AI marketing strategy

Generative AI is powering a brand new world of artistic, personalized communications, permitting advertising and marketing groups to ship better personalization at scale and meet in the present day’s excessive buyer expectations. The potential of this highly effective new instrument spans the complete end-to-end advertising and marketing course of, from inner communications and productiveness to customer-facing channels and product help. In a Could 2023 survey carried out by IBM and Momentive.ai, 67% of CMOs reported that they plan on implementing generative AI within the subsequent 12 months and 86% plan to take action inside 24 months.

AI for enterprise has lengthy been in a position to obtain a number of advertising and marketing features: seamless connection throughout any platform or system, instant response when experiencing points and customization primarily based on present location and buy historical past. However generative AI options can present new capabilities for customer-facing groups in advertising and marketing to offer even better personalization at scale and enhance worker abilities and efficiency.

Enterprise advertising and marketing groups stand to learn enormously from generative AI, but introduction of this functionality would require new abilities and processes. Based on the IBM survey, when CMOs had been requested what they thought the first challenges had been in adopting generative AI, they listed three high considerations: managing the complexity of implementation, constructing the info set and model and mental property (IP) threat.

With the suitable generative AI technique, entrepreneurs can mitigate these considerations. The journey begins with sound information.

Generative AI wants the suitable information

As with all AI implementations, generative AI requires consideration to sourcing and sustaining the underlying information. The acquainted IT adage, “rubbish in, rubbish out,” nonetheless applies; high-quality information is important to yield a high-quality end result. If the coaching information is biased or incomplete, the fashions might generate inaccurate content material.

For advertising and marketing particularly, generative AI can assist with content material growth and viewers concentrating on. Information curation is vital, together with setting guardrails and supervision to deal with bias and guarantee consistency of brand name voice and accuracy of product and repair info.

For instance, a retail clothes firm may use generative AI to customise electronic mail or on-line experiences tailor-made for various buyer personas. The superior capabilities of generative AI for textual content, visuals and video have the potential to create a extra customized and fascinating expertise. This may embody a digital mannequin carrying outfits that match the shopper’s physique kind, vogue selections and actions of curiosity. The generative AI instrument may incorporate exterior elements like climate, upcoming occasions or the patron’s location.

However what if the generative AI instrument recommends the shopper purchase a showering swimsuit in the midst of winter or a snow parka in the summertime? As a result of numerous generative AI options are educated on giant swaths of knowledge, they’ve the aptitude to drag and interpret current information incorrectly. Thus, the instrument has the potential to offer surprising outcomes.

When an AI basis mannequin generates off-topic or incorrect content material, that conduct is known as a hallucination. To mitigate this situation, groups should guarantee they customise their fashions with proprietary datasets, moderately than relying solely on open-source web information.

Create a data-driven generative AI advertising and marketing technique

Earlier than your advertising and marketing group can introduce efficient generative AI options, you want a technique to implement AI basis fashions. Given the huge panorama of accessible information (each exterior and inner), it’s important to outline your use instances prematurely of sourcing and coaching your fashions. Understanding the profit and threat of every use case will assist to create a step-by-step path that prioritizes the mannequin coaching course of.

Entrepreneurs additionally must work carefully with IT to align on the info structure wanted to securely construct and deploy basis fashions whereas following obligatory protections for mental property and confidential information. The suitable utilization guardrails will assist monitor and safeguard your IP and the integrity of your model.

Generative AI wants human advertising and marketing groups

As soon as deployed, your generative AI information journey isn’t over. Basis fashions are regularly being refined as they work together with clients, accumulating growing quantities of knowledge, which in flip improves their capabilities. Human supervision (corresponding to supervised fine-tuning with human annotations and reinforcement studying from human suggestions) is required to align the output of generative AI apps operating on basis fashions with human intentions, guaranteeing they’re useful, moral and dependable.

Though generative AI can produce customer-facing work that appears humanlike, it nonetheless requires a human information with experience in navigating moral and authorized considerations relating to information use. Human reviewers may determine and proper any cases of bias or hallucination that might have seeped into the content material.

Add generative AI to your advertising and marketing toolkit

Within the IBM survey, CMOs cited content material creation and modifying, search engine marketing and social media advertising and marketing as the highest B2B use instances for generative AI capabilities.¹ In regard to B2B advertising and marketing operate, these leaders referred to as out lead era and gross sales nurturing as the highest use instances.¹

When requested about their greatest considerations relating to generative AI, leaders had been centered on information accuracy, privateness administration and having the expert assets to construct this answer.¹ To that finish, adopting generative AI know-how requires a sensible strategy to construct, take a look at and study its capabilities. This may make sure that proprietary information is protected, buyer experiences are related and rewarding, and the advertising and marketing course of is streamlined and price efficient.

For many years, IBM has been on the forefront of AI for enterprise. We offer options and companies that assist entrepreneurs implement generative AI responsibly and successfully. Watsonx, IBM’s enterprise-ready AI and information platform, is designed to assist advertising and marketing and different enterprise leaders confidently transfer into the generative AI area. The platform contains three highly effective elements:

1. watsonx.ai: an enterprise studio for AI builders to coach, validate, tune and deploy generative AI
2. watsonx.information: an open hybrid information retailer constructed on an open lakehouse structure, designed to assist scale generative AI workloads
3. watsonx.governance: a toolkit that accelerates AI workflows which are constructed with duty, transparency and explainability

IBM Consulting™ and its numerous, world crew of greater than 20,000 AI consultants assist advertising and marketing organizations shortly and confidently design and scale AI and automation throughout their enterprise. We work in live performance with IBM watsonx know-how and an open ecosystem of companions to ship any AI mannequin, on any cloud, guided by ethics and belief.