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The past month has seen a flurry of AI developments many of which are crucial for marketers to stay ahead of the curve. In this roundup, we summarise key insights from episode 24, episode 25 and episode 26 of the "Artificially Intelligent Marketing" podcast. Hosted by our CEO, Paul Avery, and his industry per, Martin Broadhurst, these episodes covered groundbreaking new releases like OpenAI's ChatGPT Enterprise, Google's conversational AI Gemini, and Adobe's enhanced Firefly.
From using AI to optimise content and predict trends, to baking it into collaboration tools, the opportunities are expanding rapidly. These episodes also highlighted important considerations around responsible AI adoption, data quality, and human involvement. With new models launching constantly, taking time to test and understand these technologies is key.
For those who would rather listen, episodes 24, 25 and 26 are available for streaming below or you can subscribe to the podcast on your platform of choice.
Summaries from episode 24:
ChatGPT Enterprise: A Game-Changer for Businesses
OpenAI has unveiled ChatGPT Enterprise, an enhanced version of ChatGPT designed for business use. Key features include enterprise-grade security and privacy, unlimited access to the latest GPT models, higher performance speeds, advanced data analysis capabilities, and easy admin controls for rollout. This overcomes major objections around using AI chatbots in business settings. The most powerful version of ChatGPT yet will give enterprises a major competitive edge.
HubSpot's AI Roadmap: INBOUND 2023
At INBOUND 2023, HubSpot is expected to showcase major AI capabilities across its marketing, sales, service, and CMS hubs. Their published AI roadmap focuses on increased efficiency, data-driven insights, and hyper-personalised engagement. Exciting updates could include AI website builders, automated lead scoring, predictive forecasts, and integrated image generation. As a leader in marketing automation, HubSpot's continuing AI integration will be a game-changer for leveraging data.
Google Duet: Your New AI Teammate
Google is rolling out Duet, a real-time AI assistant, to all Workspace users. Duet promises to simplify work tasks like creating presentations or taking notes in meetings. It also improves Google Meet with live translations and summaries. This puts advanced AI in the hands of Workspace's over 3 billion users. Duet is designed for privacy and security. The rollout poses a challenge for businesses to quickly determine effective uses during the free trial, before committing to the $30/month per user pricing.
Ideogram: The Future of AI-Generated Text in Images
Ideogram is a new AI startup focused on reliably generating text within images. Unlike other models, ideogram specialises in clean and legible typography and signage. This allows prompts like "Banksy graffiti saying..." While promising, the technology is still imperfect, with ambiguity and errors. Ideogram points toward a future of customisable, text-based AI image generation, which could be groundbreaking for marketing visuals.|
Interview with Jeff Coyle, Co-founder of MarketMuse
Jeff Coyle, Co-Founder of MarketMuse, discussed how AI is transforming SEO and content marketing strategy. He explained MarketMuse's data-driven approach to optimising content quality and expertise. Coyle emphasised expertise and quality as key metrics looking ahead. He predicts major SEO shakeups as weak "top-of-funnel" content loses effectiveness. AI can both empower and threaten brands, depending on strategy. Coyle foresees search engines potentially transitioning from mostly organic results to whatever meets the user need. Overall, he provided an insightful look at content marketing in an AI-driven future.
Summaries from episode 25:
Slack's AI Tool: A New Way to Recap Channels and Threads
Slack is introducing a new AI tool called Slack AI to help users navigate workspaces more efficiently. The tool, launching in beta this winter, will offer features like summarising threads, recapping channel highlights, and an advanced search function. Slack AI allows users to ask questions in natural language and receive a summary linking to relevant conversations. Slack is also launching Slack Lists for tracking projects and tasks, and a workflow builder to simplify third-party app integration. As Slack continues evolving with AI, these new features may aid efficient communication and project management for marketers using Slack.
Anthropic's Claude 2: A New Premium Player in AI Chat
Anthropic has introduced a paid subscription for its AI chatbot Claude 2, called Claude Pro. For $20 per month, Claude Pro offers 5x more usage than the free version, priority access during peak times, and early feature access. With Claude 2's large context window, complex reasoning abilities, and fast outputs, it has become an AI workflow tool for some power users. Claude Pro now directly competes with OpenAI's ChatGPT+ as the major paid chatbot options. As more chatbots like Google Duet emerge, Claude 2 could carve out market share given its more advanced capabilities. Pricing models are setting expectations, so marketers should explore contenders to find the best fit.
Microsoft's Assurance: Covering AI Legal Costs
Microsoft has stated it will cover legal costs if businesses face challenges using its AI offerings. This follows similar commitments from companies like Adobe, aiming to assuage enterprise concerns around legal risks of AI use. With major players in generative AI like OpenAI and GitHub Copilot facing lawsuits over training data, some companies became hesitant to adopt these tools. By absorbing potential legal fees, Microsoft hopes to accelerate AI adoption, especially among risk-averse large enterprises. If you work at a larger company and have wanted to test generative AI, Microsoft's offer may soon clear the way.
Zoom's AI Companion: Enhancing Virtual Collaboration
Zoom has launched its AI assistant Zoom IQ for subscribers at no extra cost. It provides quick meeting recaps, summarises key discussions, outlines action items, and can help craft chat responses. Zoom plans new features like email drafting, chat summaries, intent recognition, and digital whiteboard brainstorming. Unlike competitors charging extra for AI capabilities, Zoom is baking it into existing plans hoping to raise platform standards. For marketers relying on Zoom, this could replace transcription tools and streamline virtual collaboration. However, early demos reveal an evolution, not revolution in capability.
Sprig's AI Analysis: A New Approach to Survey Insights
Sprig has launched AI Analysis for Surveys, using generative AI to provide instant insights from survey data. It allows users to ask questions of their survey results conversationally, with AI analysing all responses including long-form text. Sprig's CEO highlighted users can pose custom questions and receive AI-generated answers from the full data set. As survey analysis is labor intensive, AI Analysis could produce insights and trends more efficiently. Sprig has also expanded its free plan, encompassing surveys, session replays, and text analysis. For survey-dependent marketers, exploring these new automatically generated insights could change research workflows.
Amazon One: The Power of Palm Scanning with AI
Amazon introduced Amazon One, allowing customers to pay, present loyalty cards, and verify their identity by scanning their palm. Using generative AI to produce millions of synthetic palm images, Amazon achieved near 100% accuracy. The privacy-focused system matches palm scans only to payment details, not individual identities. While potential issues exist, palm scanning could enable checkout without cards or devices. This provides a frictionless user experience, even if the technology sees limited adoption. For marketers, it reveals creative applications of synthetic data and AI matching beyond core business needs.
ChatGPT Integrates with Canva for Streamlined Design
ChatGPT Plus subscribers can now access a Canva plugin to easily create visuals by describing their design in ChatGPT prompts. It presents Canva template options to choose from before redirecting users to Canva for final edits and downloads. While potentially streamlining workflows, early tests reveal its strength lies in quickly searching Canva's extensive template library rather than enabling advanced direction of designs within ChatGPT. For marketers creating visual assets, it may provide a time-saving method to find and customie good Canva templates. But significant creative limitations remain despite the straightforward integration.
Gizmodo en Español: From Human Editors to AI Translations
Gizmodo's parent company, G/O Media, laid off the human editors of its Spanish-language site Gizmodo en Español. Instead, articles now carry a disclaimer that they have been AI-translated and may need adjustments. Previously, the site published original Spanish content and adapted English articles. The media union has raised concerns about this move, as AI was initially framed as complementing human writers. The change reveals risks for PR, as press releases and pitches may first be interpreted by AI before reaching human journalists. With publications testing AI content, PR strategy must adapt to increasing automation in media.
Summaries from episode 26:
Google's Gemini: The Conversational AI Poised to Rival OpenAI's GPT-4
Google is developing Gemini, a suite of conversational AI tools including chatbots, text summarisation, and text generation. Gemini aims to compete with OpenAI's GPT-4 and is expected to be released soon, integrated into Google's Cloud Vertex AI service. Gemini will offer capabilities like assisting software engineers and generating images. As a multimodal model, Gemini opens possibilities for enhanced customer engagement through chatbots and content generation. This positions Google to catch up in the AI market where OpenAI has taken the lead.
Stability.AI Unveils StableAudio: Audio Generation with a Twist
Stability.AI has launched StableAudio, a diffusion model that generates custom audio files based on text prompts. Users can specify genres, length, and more. The tool produces high-quality audio quickly. StableAudio has potential marketing applications like generating customised background music for videos, audio cues for events, jingles, and more. It offers free and paid subscription tiers, allowing commercial use for pro users.
Microsoft's AI Fiasco: When AI Goes Awry in Obituary Writing
Microsoft's MSN platform published an offensive, incoherent AI-generated article about deceased basketball player Brandon Hunter. This highlights risks of AI content creation without human oversight, especially for sensitive content. It follows previous questionable MSN articles. After laying off human journalists in 2020, MSN adopted an AI/human hybrid publishing system which appears to be backfiring based on errors, low engagement, and loss of credibility.
Amazon's Generative AI Simplifies Seller Experience
Amazon released AI tools to generate product titles, descriptions, bullet points and more for sellers, using brief prompts. This should make listing products easier and enhance the shopping experience through richer, more comprehensive product information generated by the AI. However, sellers should still verify automated content for accuracy. AI-generated product content raises questions around maintaining brand voice and differentiation.
GoCharlie Raises $2 Million Seed to Revolutionise AI-Driven Marketing
GoCharlie, an AI marketing tool, raised $2 million to become a trusted enterprise partner for AI marketing. They are developing a large language model tailored for marketers to generate consistent, personalised content across platforms. Investors see potential in GoCharlie's tech priorities and IP creation. GoCharlie plans further funding and potential M&A targets in 2023 after securing enterprise deals.
Adobe's Firefly: The Next Wave in Generative AI for Creatives and Marketers
Adobe launched Firefly, integrated across Creative Cloud and Experience Cloud, providing generative capabilities to all users. Features include Photoshop's image generation and Illustrator's vector recoloring. Firefly for Enterprise offers safe, licensed AI content generation for businesses using Adobe's trained models. Adobe supports responsible AI use with metadata credentials providing details on assets.
Coca-Cola Y3000: Sipping the Future with AI-Generated Flavour
Coca-Cola released Y3000, a limited-edition drink blending AI and human insights for the flavour. Coca-Cola tapped advanced technology to develop the product and used AI to create branding. This exemplifies AI's potential for enhanced product development and integrated marketing strategies. However, the actual flavour profile remains secret.
EY's $1.4 Billion Leap into AI
Consulting firm EY announced a $1.4 billion investment in AI services and technologies like EY.AI, AI-enhanced software. EY secured early OpenAI access through Microsoft Azure. This positions EY to compete in the AI consultancy space against others like Accenture. EY intends to integrate AI throughout operations, exemplifying a trend of AI focus from consultancies. EY may release an internal AI tool called EY.AIEQ.
Dive Deeper into AI marketing with the "Artificially Intelligent Marketing" Podcast
This article offers a glimpse into the profound insights shared by Paul and Martin in their captivating podcast sessions. For a comprehensive dive into the intriguing world of AI in marketing, we encourage you to tune into the full episodes, either below or on your preferred podcast service. Plus, the archive of previous episodes serves as a rich resource on AI's transformative impact on marketing.
AI Note
The creation of this blog post was enhanced by AI tools. The initial step was transcribing the podcast audio using AI, followed by Anthropic’s Claude and GPT-4 (ChatGPT) providing assistance in distilling the transcript into clear blog segments. Our BioStrata team subsequently reviewed and refined these sections for optimal coherence and readability. Additionally, the Clipdrop AI software played a key role in crafting the blog's featured image.
