Regardless of where you stand on AI’s continued crossover into our day-to-day, the fact remains that AI has been the reality for a few years now. The AI technology market is forecasted to grow 10x in 7 years to an astounding $90 billion industry. As we write this, the GPT-4 demo is now out there for all. The marketing community is incredibly close to streamlining research, ideation, delivery, analysis, and iteration across all creative formats (text, audio, image, and video).

Despite AI’s deep rooted presence in the digital marketing industry for years now, the upsurge in the number and variety of tools available to the average performance marketer, has been fairly recent. Some may say, with the arrival of OpenAI’s ChatGPT last November, we’re at an exciting junction in the evolution of AI marketing. With its natural language processing capabilities and ability to analyze large amounts of data, AI is now mainstream. 

As we continue to explore different ways we integrate these new tools in our day-to-day, we want to take a moment to remind ourselves that the application of AI is not limited to machine learning algorithm improvements and writing ad copy.

One of the earliest use cases for AI tools was for content creation. In fact, improvements in integrated media planning and execution is the second most powerful impact by advertising leaders worldwide. Financial Services marketers lead all other industries in AI application adoption, with 37% currently using them today while 25% of travel and hospitality companies around the world implemented AI powered chatbot technology to improve overall user experience.

Predictions and what you should prepare for:

AI writing tools will accelerate creation of all types of content. Here are some of the most noteworthy tools available today: 

• Wellsaidlabs.com - A really solid tool that creates life-like synthetic voices (voiceover), from the voices of real people. It is especially useful for product developers, podcasters, educators, and those in the business world.
• Midjourney - This is an AI image generator tool that the designers at Bamboo are testing and have found the results to be great! It generates images with text prompts and one can add a link to an image it should use in its art as well.
• Frase IO - a tool that helps research, write, and optimize high-quality SEO content. One can also use this tool to generate ideas, and the product also extends to provide content analysis that is used to improve topics and content. 
• Syntheses.io - A great tool to produce a professional AI voiceover and to create videos with a virtual avatar to deliver anything - from a product walkthrough, training video, and even translations. 

While Large language models (LLMs) are excellent at giving results to specific prompts, they can’t discern what good content looks like. As breathing, thinking, and bodies composed of 75% water, humans will continue to develop and curate this content into something that is considered good and helpful content.

Keyword planning will become smarter with AI keyword tools that provide deeper insights into keyword volume, competition, performance, and intent.

• ChatGPT - An important thing to note is that ChatGPT does not have access to search volume and other metrics the way keyword tools like Google Keyword Planner, Ahrefs and SEMRush do. However, ChatGPT is useful for several research functions such as, competitor research, influencer marketing, topics/themes, etc. The best use case would be to use multiple prompts to obtain the information and then request ChatGPT to summarize the research with actionable insights - including adding size modifiers to the shortlisted keywords, ad copy development, and discovering additional sub topics.
• Parallel Dots - This tool performs Sentiment Analysis within a wide range of other solutions. The tool analyzes social media streams, but is usually restricted to just basic sentiment analysis and count based metrics. It provides insight into: key aspects of a brand’s product/service that customers care about while also highlighting the users’ underlying intent and reactions.

Integration with third party tools will also be a huge unlock for customers to receive customized messaging.

• Zapier x ChatGPT integration - Zapier offers a ChatGPT integration that enables other apps to automate workflows and ensures tailored and relevant messaging for customers via email and SMS. AI can be used to reduce the risk of customer “churn” – customers can be automatically targeted with personalized promotions or incentives to hopefully restore their loyalty. Additionally, this feature can then extend onto providing summarized records, and high level analysis to the stakeholders. 
• Inflact - This is yet another tool used to identify micro influencers. This aspect is a free feature provided in addition to the Instagram Automation solution including scheduled posting, audience targeting and hashtag generator.

With 3rd-party tracking cookies on the way out, deep learning is the key to solve for cookieless reporting and attribution. While the first step here is to unify all first party data in a single place before augmenting this data with data sourced across multiple platforms. Multiple large tools offer these services and it is only fair that you decide based on your needs and scale. 

A special mention to OpenAI's new version, GPT-4, a large multimodal model which accepts image and text inputs and emits text outputs. The model is sophisticated, as clearly shown when it passed a simulated bar exam with a score around the top 10% of test takers; in contrast, GPT-3.5’s score was around the bottom 10%.

Remember that as things currently stand, AI is only going to evolve and learn. It isn’t capable of doing something new that nobody has done before. It is merely, yet another (incredibly powerful) tool that marketers will leverage across the board to generate value for their business. If you’re worried about its reliability, take your time leaning into it, testing and understanding how it works for you. You still make the decision on how you want to use it… at least, for now.