There are two echo chambers concerning artificial intelligence. The first reverberates with claims that AI is driving us into a dystopian future where The Terminator will one day be a reality. The second resounds with claims that AI can transform your business, and if you’re not already using it, you’re behind. The reality, as always, lies somewhere between these two assumptions.
AI can help you be more efficient but the intention should be to supercharge what you’re already doing, rather than drastically change or replace it. What’s more is that most companies are only at the very early stage of implementation. It’s very difficult to find case studies of AI in B2B at any great scale.
AI expert Katie King, author of Using Artificial Intelligence in Marketing: How to Harness AI and Maintain the Competitive Edge, says she only delved into the complexities of AI three years ago. If you feel guilty about not knowing or doing enough about AI, don’t. Most are still at a learning stage – and will be for some time yet.
Katie describes the current AI landscape as a repeat of the emergence of web design 15 years ago. “Everyone felt like they needed to be an expert. Because of the hype we all think we need to know how things work,” Katie says when speaking on the B2B Marketing webinar: ‘Be afraid. Be very afraid. (and a bit excited.) How AI is transforming B2B marketing’.
The hype has been proliferated by the growing number of AI start-ups receiving venture capital, good and bad press coverage, and the formidable echo chambers mentioned previously. Beneath this, marketers are searching for opportunities where AI might enhance their marketing. When viewers of the webinar were polled, the majority said they were excited for the opportunity of AI and wanted to know more.
What is AI for in marketing?
At this stage of development, AI is really designed to take on the three ‘Ds’; dirty, dangerous and dreary tasks. This allows marketers to focus on the more complex aspects of their role. For example implementing a chatbot could filter customer enquiries. Those that are easy to resolve will be dealt with without any human interaction. This leaves employees to deal with the more difficult issues.
However, there’s a reason why Maureen Blandford, VP of marketing at Community Brands, got a standing ovation when she denounced vendors for misselling promises and making marketers feel like they’re failing, at Get Stacked 2019. Aiming for the transformative vision that vendors tend to portray in their own marketing isn’t practical for most marketers. In fact, many have told us that rather than doing anything productive with their AI, they’ve spent the day fiddling around trying to integrate two incompliant MA platforms, therefore making it counterproductive.
Instead Marcus Lambert, CTO at Omobono, suggests building AI upon your existing efforts rather than obliterating and overhauling them. “Dabbed in the right places, it can supercharge everything you have,” he says.
What’s the difference between AI and machine learning?AI is a term that has been loosely flung around by mainstream media. This has led to confusion over what AI actually is and how it differs from terms like machine learning. AI (artificial intelligence) is the broad term for everything to do with making machines. Machine learning is one of the sub-categories of AI. Robotics is another example of a sub-category.
The current use cases of AI in B2B marketing
There are extraordinary examples of AI use cases that sit on the horizon of marketing. Some of these are fairly familiar because they’ve had coverage due to their progressive uniqueness. Currently, B2B organisations are using AI for basic enhancement of their marketing. “I think marketing is one of the early usages of AI – not just chatbots but also AI-embedded software. We’re genuinely just at the tip of the iceberg,” says Katie.
Customer insight: Tom Salvat, co-founder and CEO at Concured, says running customer insight analysis is something his AI content platform business is commonly asked to do by agencies. By using AI, marketers can collect a larger amount of data in a shorter amount of time. The benefit of having more data means it gives you a bigger view of the market and in turn a more accurate picture. Most AI data platforms will also do the analysis for you. “In order to gain truly meaningful insight you need volume. What marketers spend weeks doing they can now do in a number of days or even seconds,” Tom adds
Personalisation: AI is being used to harness the power of personalisation. This usually means using an automated platform to understand a customer’s individual interests and stage of the customer journey, and show the most relevant content on your website for example. This is called CMS – control message segment. However, its success will depend on how clean your data is.
When collecting case studies for her book, Katie says she saw the term ‘relevance transformation’ crop up a number of times. This simply means filtering relevant content for specific individuals. She says this is something we should expect to see more of in content.
How to avoid the disillusionment of AI
If you’re trapped in one of the AI echo chambers you could feel pressured into making decisions that aren’t the best option for you. Vendors can also muddy the water further by ‘AI-washing’ their products. A tech company may add an AI badge to their product but they might not really have the kind of AI capabilities you’d expect to see. Tom says the best way to counter this is to really research and interrogate a number of vendors.
Alongside this you should be asking yourself whether you’re doing this to improve what you’re already doing or if you’re just too excited by the hype. Tom says when deciding to add an AI product to your stack you should ask yourself three questions:
- Does AI make the product quicker?
- Will AI make the product cheaper?
- What’s the use case for this?
Katie agrees it’s best to weigh up if this is really going to improve your product. She’s seen examples of companies who have implemented AI and then rescinded it because it made their product worst. One of these was a Swedish Bank who took up a chatbot, but it found that customers felt the bot gimmicky, and staff felt uncomfortable about the service they were now delivering.
“It’s a huge opportunity if you have the right mindset and are prepared for a continuous journey of learning.”
Resources for learning more about AICB insights: The AI 100Using Artificial Intelligence in Marketing: How to Harness AI and Maintain the Competitive Edge by Katie KingInterrogate AI-powered businesses and vendorsReport: AI in B2B: Going beyond the hype Report: The benefits of AI for B2B agenciesReport: Adapt or die? Leadership in the era of the martech transformationEvents: Ignite and Get Stacked
This article was inspired by B2B Marketing’s webinar ‘Be afraid. Be very afraid. (And a bit excited.) How AI is transforming B2B marketing’. You can listen to the whole conversation with Katie, Marcus and Tom on-demand now.
