Over the past ten years, we’ve built our agency on helping B2B businesses adopt marketing automation technology, and we can’t be more excited now that ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot are hitting the market. Based on our experimentation so far, we think that large parts of the marketing function can be either automated or augmented with artificial intelligence, allowing small B2B teams to have outsized market footprints without sacrificing content quality.
Whereas our AI Guide focuses on how to bolt AI onto your content marketing workflows, we’ve been getting questions from CXOs who are curious about the broader implications of generative AI for their business. These are three of the biggest considerations from our vantage point.
AI Insights for CXOs:
#1 – AI is a Must-Have
Many CXOs we speak to have put off digital adoption projects in the past for some reason, which creates problems for them later. The companies that didn’t jump on permission marketing after Seth Godin popularized it got left behind in the 2000s. The people that left social media too late had to catch up in the 2010s. Leaders who hadn’t tackled remote work policies and ecommerce were left scrambling when the pandemic hit.
One of our biggest takeaways after working with ChatGPT and other tools is that AI is going to change business practice about as much as the internet did. Whereas the hyperlink and the search function allowed us to create grassroots networks of information and scale our peer-to-peer interactions, AI makes the entire internet “smart” in an automated way. This is not something CXOs can afford to waste time on, and either they need to become the internal champion or find an employee who’s looking for a stretch project.
Even the early versions of ChatGPT, for example, are allowing us to simplify our research workflows and gain high-level views of topics quickly by asking the AI questions. This is even faster than Googling and can shave fifteen minutes of reading time from a content workflow. Although this is great from an individual perspective, it won’t be long until AI will become the glue that holds many companies together, providing intelligent feedback based on data trends it sees within the company.
#2 – Data is like Electricity Now
If the lights aren’t on in your business, neither are your computers. Similarly, if your data isn’t organized and centralized, even the best AI tools will not be able to browse through it and create the kinds of efficiencies that experts are promising. This means having your customer information in a CRM and ready for AI integration, having your email lists sorted and tagged appropriately, as well as having your company’s internal documents digitized and on a cloud solution like SharePoint.
All of these things are necessary stepping stones to higher levels of automation, where you’ll be able to reallocate administrative hours to strategy and client care, allow an artificial intelligence to fully personalize your email workflows and all of the futuristic things that are coming true faster than many people predicted. The companies that have their data in order will be the first ones to take advantage of all the automation potential that’s coming, and if you’re not one of them, you’ll be left behind quickly.
#3 – Custom Solutions are Worth the Investment
Although the interface offered by ChatGPT allows for a lot of freedom, the API offered by OpenAI allows you to bake AI into custom programs. This means that you can take almost any process in your business and build a custom program for it with a little bit of Python code, creating endless opportunities for efficiencies and automations that fit your business perfectly.
We’ve been experimenting with these tools through ventures like WhatsMyValueProp.com, a website that allows users to get a readout of what kind of messaging a certain website has. This, we think, is the first step in augmenting competitive research processes to allow a single human to access more information and develop wider perspectives. From the perspective of a marketing agency, we look forward to spending more time on insights, strategy, and execution, and less time on things that we could handle with custom AI tools.
As we’ve documented in our AI Guide, bolting AI onto processes in this way is a lot like giving your human workers a second brain to collaborate with. Although ChatGPT isn’t as universally “intelligent” as a human being, it can do some tasks very well, which means that finding opportunities to leverage the technology in custom ways could transform how you do business.
Incredibly, all you need to get started is someone in your business who can code Python. If no such person exists, we’d recommend this six-hour YouTube course that covers all of the basics, and some of the applications for machine learning. If you are really serious about digital transformation, one of the cheapest things you could do is work with your IT team to create a learning day for your organization that will teach everyone in your company a bunch of new tricks. This is the kind of “fertile topsoil” that fuels organic innovation within organizations, and aside from boosting morale and giving everyone a breather, you’ll be setting yourself up for a flood of new ideas and grassroots fixes.
Getting Started with Digital Transformation
One of our specialties is helping businesses adopt technology that scales their marketing effort and grows their revenue systematically. If your team is just starting to think about digital transformation and automation, one of the best places to start is with your marketing stack. Not only will you develop the processes and experience you need to tackle comprehensive transformation projects, but in the meantime you’ll develop a healthy pipeline of leads that can take your business to the next level.
To learn more about what next steps would look like, download our AI Guide for a primer on how to think about AI and deploy it in your workflows. Don’t delay!
About Marketing CoPilot
Marketing CoPilot Inc. builds digital sales engines that help companies find customers and keep customers. Our proven methodology improves demand generation, resulting in qualified leads for your sales team. Companies that implement our program have reduced their cost of lead acquisition, improved the quality of their leads, and increased revenue.
We have worked with over 200 companies in the B2B technology and manufacturing sector to turn digital lead generation around. Our proven methodology to map your buyers’ journey to make an educated buying decision, has helped countless sales and marketing teams win. In today’s cluttered and confusing online environment, we can de-clutter your content strategy and get you on track to better sales results. Your website and web presence should be helping, not hurting your lead generation efforts.
