3 ways we're using GenerativeAI as a co-pilot for marketing

Artificial intelligence (AI) is not a new technology – people have been researching and developing it for decades, and if we look at fiction, it was in our imaginations long before that. But with the launch of ChatGPT earlier this year, generative AI has gone mainstream. Everyone from students to medical practitioners to home cooks have been experimenting with the technology. As my colleague Florin Rotar, Avanade’s Chief Technology Officer, has written, we’re witnessing the democratization of AI.

Many of these experiments are just for fun. Who hasn’t played around with asking ChatGPT to write a family holiday card or cover letter? But generative AI is more than a toy – it’s a powerful tool. At Avanade, we are already helping clients achieve significant impact in adopting these new technologies to help solve real business challenges.

In a matter of days, we launched a new service for a manufacturer that uses a simple and easy chat interface to generate new design ideas for their products— a big shift in their design process that will save them loads of time and effort. Another example is a logistics company, where we’ve helped improve the workflow of their call center agents using Azure’s OpenAI service to automatically classify up to 90% of emails for customer service agents.

As Avanade’s Chief Marketing Officer, it’s a real privilege for me to work alongside such technical brilliance. They’ve been at the cutting edge of generative AI for years, and hearing how they’re utilizing this technology for our clients has inspired me to think differently about some of the challenges we face in marketing. Given our close working relationship with Microsoft as one of our parents, I’ve been partnering with them in the last year to explore how AI and gen AI can help improve the marketing function.

The focus is on how the technology can be a “co-pilot” for our team. Gen AI is not meant to replace roles like copywriters, creatives, or campaign leads, but to significantly change – for the better – the work that each of us does to make us more efficient, creative, and collaborative. Here are three ways we’re using AI in our marketing:

1.     Creating insights from free-form text. We’ve recently started creating clusters of clients with similar business needs or challenges. Generative AI is able to analyse that information from various non-confidential text documents to gather insights and make connections. It has enabled us to be more targeted and relevant in our marketing to those clients, and ultimately increase share of wallet.

2.     Supporting the handshake between marketing and sales. As we generate and nurture new opportunities, the point in the process that has the most risk for dropping the ball is when we hand leads to our sellers. To enable a smooth transition, which includes following up in the most appropriate, timely and personalised way, we’re using Azure OpenAI to pull together information on the user journey to date, the client account relationship, the client themselves, and script either the email or phone call to make sure each lead gets carried forward.

3.     Sparking inspiration. Generative AI cannot replace copywriters – we need that human touch for tone, strategic positioning, and emotional intelligence. But how many of us have sat staring at the cursor blinking on a blank screen because we don’t know where to start? AI can give us that great starting position – a helpful first draft – before the expert steps in to make it uniquely targeted to our audience. And by working with Azure OpenAI, leading in the Microsoft ecosystem, we’re also helping to tune it to our brand and personality, so that it’s even more effective in the future. Right now, we’re leveraging generative AI to help do high volume copy writing for our new website, populating agreed copy blocks with content brought together from a range of different content repositories.

AI has the potential to reshape the work we do and the value we add as marketing experts, and we continue to evolve our thinking in this area. What would it look like if a generative AI co-pilot assisted every role in marketing? How would that change the work each of us does? If we can remove more repetitive manual tasks and empower people to be more efficient, that frees up time for more collaboration and critical thinking. I’m excited about the future of marketing as this technology creates more bandwidth for bigger thinking.

To learn more about how generative AI is revolutionizing marketing, I invite you to join me for the virtual event “Evolution of today’s marketer: Generative AI and its rapidly growing impact” on May 16.