Generative artificial intelligence (AI) has recently grabbed the public’s imagination.
First, Dall-E came along to wow us with AI’s capability to produce astonishing artistic creations based on natural language descriptions, such as “a koala dunking a basketball.”
Then, ChatGPT burst onto the scene to instantaneously turn requests for the written word into everything from cover letters to press releases to short stories.
All of this might prompt you to ask, “What’s next in AI?” A more immediate and useful question for marketers might be, “What’s already here?”
Dall-E and ChatGPT are just the tip of the AI iceberg. Examples abound of marketers and marketing technology deploying AI. For example, a recent article in The Wall Street Journal described how Zipcar used generative AI to generate headlines for when potential customers might need a Zipcar. A living, breathing copywriter turned the AI-suggested headline “Zip if bamboo too big for bus” to “Zip if monster Monstera.”
- A martech product called Albert “evaluates ad campaigns across Google, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and Bing, then makes recommendations on improving performance.”
- AI-driven BlueConic is a customer data platform that brings together your “first-party data from all its disparate sources, then unifies it so you can use it across your marketing efforts.”
- Google Analytics, a tool familiar to all of us, relies on AI to enable marketers to “ask common questions of their data, then receive natural language responses.”
- Another well-known tool, Grammarly, relies on AI to offer “suggestions for how to make your messages more accurate, effective, and impactful across emails, documents, and social media.”
- Descript is a remarkable AI-powered tool for editing video that enables editors to make video rough cuts simply by cutting and pasting an automatically generated transcript.
These examples show that powerful marketing AI applications are already here, and that AI is transforming marketing communications right now — albeit with human help required. After all, AI can’t realize all of its capabilities without skilled, creative, and knowledgeable human beings to get the most out of the technology.
AI is definitely in the process of changing marketing. More importantly, through the eyes of our biotech clients, we, at HDMZ, are getting a glimpse of the breathtaking possibilities of AI to transform healthcare and society.
Here’s just one example: A client of ours, Genesis Therapeutics, a biotech startup based in San Francisco, uses generative AI and predictive AI in its drug discovery process. Formed to create new therapies for the most severe diseases, Genesis uses generative AI to develop novel molecular structures that may be useful in battling previously untreatable disorders.
Genesis then deploys predictive AI to run simulations that assess the structures’ viability as a treatment. All the while, humans are at the wheel of this process, interpreting the data and analyzing the potential of these AI-created molecular structures.
Ultimately, AI is likely to transform healthcare and marketing and every other human endeavor – business or otherwise. No matter what, we humans will have a crucial role to play. AI is like any tool: Its effectiveness depends on who’s using it. In the end, I subscribe to the notion that AI is not going to make you obsolete — but someone who’s using AI just might.
