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October 25, 2024

Gen AI Snagging Major Budget Attention

By Jay Bemis | Advertising Systems Inc.
Generative AI continues to gain much attention from chief marketing officers, who say in recent polling that content creation, social media engagement, ad copywriting and insight generation will be among their top budget priorities in the months ahead.

In a study this summer by the Boston Consulting Group and the Association of National Advertisers, 36% of 200-plus chief marketing officers polled said content generation using Gen AI was a top budget priority for their businesses.

Content generation was followed closely by social media engagement as a top budget item among the CMOs polled (32%), with ad copywriting (31%) and generation of insights (30%) also expected to gain top budget attention.

Another key finding in the BCG/ANA report: About 80% of the respondents said that AI in general has boosted productivity in their workplaces.

As far as content generation as a budget priority is concerned, “Parts of our creative teams have been using (Gen AI) for ideation and iteration,” said Alex Schultz, CMO and vice president of analytics for Meta, in the wake of the BCG/ANA report.

“It helps them trial ideas … to see how they look without having to do photo shoots or time-consuming artwork themselves … on the way to a campaign idea or creative execution.”

What Is Generative AI?

Generative AI is a type of artificial intelligence that uses machine learning to generate new data that is similar to existing data on which it already has been trained — it can create new images, videos, music, text and even software code.

Used in such fields as art, design, gaming and medicine, some examples of Gen AI use are:

ChatGPT, which is a chatbot developed by OpenAI that can answer questions and generate human-like responses from text prompts; DALL-E, another AI model from OpenAI that can create images and artwork from text prompts; Google Bard, which is Google’s generative AI chatbot and rival to ChatGPT 2 (“Bard-vs-Bing,” as we called this battle nearly two years ago); and, Firefly, which is a generative AI tool developed by Adobe that can create unique designs for graphic designers.

Customer Service Also High on Gen AI Use Lists

Beyond content marketing and social marketing, other ways that marketers can put AI tools to good use — and ChatGPT, specifically — include the area of customer service.

As a type of natural language generation (NLG) technology, ChatGPT uses deep learning to produce coherent and fluent text based on a given input, such as a customer’s question. Thus, it can respond to user queries and messages in a conversational manner, creating a personalized and interactive experience for a company’s customers.

Marketers are using ChatGPT to create interactive chatbots or voice assistants that can answer customer service questions, provide product recommendations, collect feedback or offer support.

ChatGPT also can use its AI abilities to create personalized messages or offers based on customer behavior or preferences.

Besides content generation, social media engagement, ad copywriting and insight generation, customer experiences also were high on the CMO list of budget priorities for Gen AI. Twenty-one percent of those polled in the BCG/ANA report cited social listening and customer feedback as a budget priority, and 20% listed chatbot marketing as a budgeted expense.

New York-based analytics firm Verint, in polling of its own this summer, found that AI-powered bots for customer self-service was the top AI technology that will “significantly impact” how customer-experience pros interact with their clientele — with 60% of the respondents in that study citing the bots as a top use.

Also high on the customer-service pros list: Automated customer-interaction routing (53% of respondents) and “automated contextual knowledge for agents to streamline customer conversations” (47% of those polled).

The experts at eMarketer, meanwhile, note these other ways that AI is boosting customer experiences:

  • AI enhances decision-making by analyzing customer data, helping marketers understand behavior and preferences.

“You can find ideal prospects using AI, using the characteristics and attributes of your current customers,” notes Brad Mehl, a CMO for Boundless Markets. “ … There’s win-loss analysis … and using AI to understand what’s working and what’s not working in the sales process.”

  • AI can help marketing teams do more with less, eMarketer found. “For instance, AI can streamline back-end processes, such as data management and understanding customer sentiment, freeing up marketers for more strategic work.”

“AI is amazingly helpful with filling in the data gaps, cleaning data and uncovering trends with data,” Ken Yanhs, CMO of Zoovu, a customer-experience consulting firm, said.

“ … It would’ve taken us forever … to gather all the [customer] notes and then analyze them. (AI) does that for you … and my team can do more creative, interesting and impactful things.”

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