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Leaders, It’s Time To Cut Through The AI Clutter

Forbes Agency Council

Gilbert Corrales is CEO of Leaf, an end-to-end performance marketing solutions company based in Newcastle upon Tyne, UK.

Regardless of the sector you work in, artificial intelligence is currently impossible to ignore. Whether you’re reading the news, attending conferences or browsing LinkedIn, any number of commentators are on hand to tell you that AI is here to change everything.

With ChatGPT reaching 100 million monthly active users worldwide, I was recently asked by a journalist whether this means that robots are “taking over.”

The truth is, it’s complicated. With so much noise surrounding AI, it’s vital for anyone looking at the role that AI can play in their business to cut through the clutter.

The Machines Were Already Among Us

With the latest surge in interest in AI, it’s easy to forget that AI is already so ingrained in our everyday lives that we don’t even think about it. For years, AI has been quietly underpinning Google Search and Google Translate, automating bidding in ad auctions, serving up product recommendations on Amazon and program recommendations on Netflix, powering voice assistants such as Siri and Alexa, and curating our social media feeds.

What has really supercharged interest in AI is a step forward in generative AI. In a nutshell, that’s AI that creates new content, whether that’s text, audio, code, images, music or videos.

Historically, chatbots have existed to simply mimic human conversation—you’ve no doubt encountered them on the front lines of customer service for banks and utility companies, among others. The latest generation, however, is far more versatile. ChatGPT and similar chatbots can write music and poetry, debug code and pass academic tests. The most recent version of ChatGPT, GPT-4, can recognize images and offer up recipes based on a photograph of ingredients.

Cue multiple articles on how AI is set to transform everything. The challenge is that not only is it easy to be overwhelmed by the sheer volume of commentary on AI, but also much of the coverage is a little vague on what exactly AI will transform, and only a very limited number of articles offer actionable insights.

My company provides data science for e-commerce brands, so it’s not hard to see how AI is set to change almost every aspect of what we do. We’re currently working on multiple proprietary AI tools and can see a near future where large language models and voice recognition collide to completely revolutionize workflows in the agency world.

Don’t Panic

Now that the dust has started to settle and the AI bandwagon has started moving at a less frenetic pace, a more nuanced picture of the impact of AI has started to emerge.

I’m a software engineer at heart. And when it comes to AI, we’re doing what software engineers and data scientists always do: put technology at the core of the solution. AI helps us conceptualize creative campaigns and generate iterations of copy and imagery, while also helping us analyze and visualize huge amounts of data. The learnings not only work on a campaign basis, but they also can be fed back into an organization’s wider marketing and customer engagement strategy.

The result is more effective decision making as well as time saving. AI helps us make much smarter decisions, significantly reducing media spend wastage. Of course, these tasks can be completed by humans, but they would take many monotonous hours. In paid advertising, decision speed is a huge factor in performance.

We’re currently hyper-focused on using AI for predictive modeling. Understanding how to most effectively allocate budgets for campaigns, both across and within channels, helps us to understand what “levers” to pull at what times and the optimal time to offer certain promotions, discounts, price changes and budget calibrations. We see this as the ultimate answer to the post-cookie world we’re heading toward.

While these capabilities have undoubtedly led to speculation about AI replacing human expertise in the advertising and technology sectors, the reality is more complex. AI remains in comparative infancy, and while it may replace some roles over time, it will also probably create new roles both directly and indirectly. We’ll also likely see large numbers of roles where AI becomes very much a co-worker. Fundamentally, AI can help us do things that humans can’t do at all, so it could actually help to create jobs if applied in the right way.

Unlocking The Value Of AI

How ChatGPT and other AI fit into your wider strategy will vary from business to business, but the principles remain the same. When it comes to adopting AI, take a helicopter view. Rather than simply deciding that AI is the solution, take a step back and look at your current processes. Where can AI deliver ROI by making your business more efficient and effective? In the short to medium term, for many businesses, this will be the repetitive and time-consuming tasks I mentioned earlier.

You may be lucky to already have a wide range of technical talent on your team. If that’s not the case, you need the right people around you to help you understand the various types of AI technology. Don’t forget that data is the fuel that feeds AI and helps it learn and improve. Do you have the right data strategy in place to maximize your AI investment, and the right expertise on your team to implement?

Next, it’s time to test and learn. No matter how smart a new employee is, you wouldn’t let them make business-critical decisions without proper onboarding and evaluation of their performance, right? AI should be no different. Once you are in a place where you are confident about integrating AI into your processes, engaging your team and creating a culture of testing and learning to continually improve performance is critical.

Don’t forget, however, that the key to really unlocking the value of AI is curiosity and the desire to dive in and try something. AI, especially generative AI, really benefits the curious and the brave.


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