Editorial
The Gist
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Grounding is key. Improve AI accuracy by grounding it in reliable data sources like internal documents and trusted industry content.
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Understand AI laws. Stay compliant with AI regulations like the EU's AI Act and Brazil's Bill No. 2338 to avoid penalties and ethical missteps.
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Policy-first approach. Implement responsible AI policies that balance innovation with ethical use, and make sure tools are vetted for security and compliance.
As a chief marketing officer, I’ve witnessed the potential power of AI firsthand. AI will have a significant impact in the way we do marketing, from automating mundane tasks to generating content and predicting customer behavior.
However, while AI in marketing offers opportunities, it also presents potential risks, such as privacy concerns and hallucinations. Understanding both the benefits and the potential pitfalls is essential for effectively implementing AI tools and establishing ethical practices.
Table of Contents
- AI’s Impact on Marketing
- Unexpected Results from AI in Marketing
- Step-by-Step Guide to Adopting AI for Marketing Success
- Building Trust: A Smarter Approach to AI in Marketing
AI’s Impact on Marketing
AI has already made a significant impact on my team's marketing efforts. For example, Gemini, a chatbot, accelerates content creation by helping overcome writer's block and providing a solid foundation for new content. Marketers can quickly generate initial drafts of various materials, including blog posts, social media posts and outbound sales emails. This saves time and helps spark creativity, allowing our team to focus on refining and enhancing content. We definitely have to fact check the output and add detail and depth, but having that first draft is very helpful.
Healthy Dose of AI Marketing Technology
Like most marketing organizations, we also leverage martech tools that incorporate AI in their capabilities. For example, 6sense, an AI-powered sales and marketing platform, provides our team with insights into buyer behavior and intent, which then inform the ads and content we tailor to specific audience segments through our marketing campaigns.
In addition to 6sense, my team leverages Hootsuite and Google Analytics to manage social media accounts and analyze website traffic. Hootsuite automates tasks like scheduling posts and tracking engagement, saving us time and effort. The tool recently added new AI-based features, such as OwlyWriter AI, which generates captions for social media posts, and their AI chatbot, which automatically responds to social DMs on a vendor’s behalf.
Google Analytics, a longstanding mainstay of the marketing technology toolkit, provides valuable insights into visitor behavior, helping us understand how people interact with our website. More recently, Google Analytics has employed AI to further enhance the value it provides marketers, including by enabling business technologists to build, train and deploy predictive models with SQL. These models, in turn, can help identify new audiences based on a vendor’s existing customer profile.
We're also exploring the potential of AI-powered chatbots to improve customer service and lead generation. By deploying these intelligent virtual assistants on our website, we can provide immediate first responses to visitors and answer common questions. This ensures that visitors are engaged regardless of the time of day, and keeps them warm until our SDRs can continue the conversation.
Unexpected Results from AI in Marketing
There are certainly many limitations with AI. For example, if I search my name (“Who is Bryan Cheung”), the AI gets certain details right, like where I work and that I am one of the founders, but it also incorrectly states that I graduated from UCLA. This highlights the risk of hallucinations and the necessity of grounding.
As Mike Szczesny, vice president at EDCO Awards & Specialties, has written in CMSWire, the use of AI in marketing can also lead to a homogenization of content. When everyone uses the same generative AI tools to write their blog posts, those posts quickly start to all sound the same, and marketers lose the differentiation necessary to stand out to prospects.
Mike also says that there’s a line when personalization becomes creepy. Everyone likes a personalized customer experience, but brands lose trust when customers feel they’re being targeted based on personal information they didn’t intend to share.
None of this is to say you shouldn’t use AI in marketing. You’ll be hard pressed to put that genie back in the bottle, and you’ll quickly find yourself outpaced by competitors in doing so. But it does mean you should have a plan in place to manage it. This starts with grounding the tools you’re using in good data, understanding the regulatory environment in which your business operates, and having policies in place that clearly convey which tools your team is allowed to use and why.
Related Article: Lost in Translation: AI Hallucinations Wreak Havoc on Big Tech
Step-by-Step Guide to Adopting AI for Marketing Success
Step 1: Understand Grounding
A simple definition of grounding is giving an AI service relevant data to use as a source for its output.
Part of the reason publicly accessible chatbots sometimes provide inaccurate results is because the source data they use is the public internet. By contrast, when you ground your AI service against your internal documents, product information, marketing content and documentation, you increase the likelihood of having accurate and relevant output. You could also choose trusted external sources such as Wikipedia, industry publications, academic journals and high-quality marketing content from reputable companies.
By grounding your AI, you can mitigate the problem of generating poor outputs due to incomplete or incorrect training data and deliver more accurate results. This is especially crucial for resource hubs and product-led growth strategies, where credibility is essential. As AI continues to evolve, grounding will remain a critical factor in maximizing its potential and minimizing its limitations.
Step 2: Understand the Legislation
As a global company doing business in the Americas, Europe and Asia Pacific, we’ve been intentional about watching the development of legislation around the use of AI. So far, the most significant piece of legislation related to AI is the European Union’s AI Act, which went into effect on August 1, 2024. It includes many provisions gradually slated to go into effect six to 36 months after passage.
The AI Act categorizes applications of AI into four distinct risk levels:
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Unacceptable risk: Applications that are banned.
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High risk: Legal but subject to stringent regulation regarding usage.
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Generative AI (limited risk): Subject only to transparency requirements.
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Minimal risk: Applications that are not regulated.
Unacceptable risk applications include facial recognition and social credit scores. High risk applications include the use of AI in law enforcement or employee management. Fortunately, most of the ways in which marketers would use AI, such as leveraging generative AI for content creation, fall into the limited risk category. This requires only disclosure that content was generated using AI.
The AI Act imposes fines of up to 35 million Euros or 7% of a company’s global annual turnover, whichever is greater, to companies that fail to comply. So there’s meaningful incentive to follow the rules.
While the EU leads the way in regulating AI, it isn’t the only government entity taking steps to do so. First introduced in 2023, Brazil’s Bill No. 2338 was endorsed by the country’s AI commission and proposes classifications of AI usage similar to the EU’s AI Act. Like the EU regulation that inspired it, Bill No. 2338 doesn’t impose heavy restrictions on marketers. It does, however, stipulate that AI must not use subliminal techniques to induce people to behave in a manner detrimental to their health and safety or exploit the vulnerabilities of specific groups, such as people living with a disability.
Step 3: Have an AI Policy
Recognizing that using AI in marketing comes with serious responsibility, my organization has defined a policy for the use of AI. While my team is encouraged to explore AI tools, they must do so in line with our responsible AI policy.
This policy has four elements:
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Making sure our plan for compliance with global regulations is achievable with our existing available resources.
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Focusing on areas with the greatest potential for misuse of AI systems, where oversight can have the greatest impact.
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Developing and implementing a common standard that can be rolled out globally.
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Applying a federated model where local teams are able to make some adjustments to reflect their regional needs while maintaining adherence to the global standard.
In order to ensure compliance with this policy, all tools must be evaluated by our AI Council, a group of people representing a mix of compliance functions (i.e., legal and internal AI experts) before the marketing team is allowed to use them. The AI Council reviews each tool’s terms of service, with particular attention paid to their data handling practices, security measures, protections for intellectual property and general impact on the environment and society.
In some cases, this unfortunately means a tool is prohibited. Many free AI tools have failed the internal test regarding their data handling practices, typically because they don’t honor intellectual copyrights or train their algorithms on user data. In other cases, a tool is approved but certain limitations are stipulated. For example, the paid Gemini Advanced has been approved for writing first drafts of quarterly reviews, but managers are expected to review the generated content and maintain ultimate responsibility for the reviews they share with their teams.
These policies sometimes lead to disappointment among my team, particularly when desired tools are prohibited. But they’re important to make sure we operate ethically and strike a balance between empowering our teams and doing right by our customers and the jurisdictions in which we operate.
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Related Article: 6 Considerations for an AI Governance Strategy
Building Trust: A Smarter Approach to AI in Marketing
As you consider how to employ AI-based marketing tools in your own organization, it’s important to understand what AI is good for and what it isn’t. It’s also vital to consider the relevant legislation in your region, particularly the EU’s AI Act and Brazil’s Bill No. 2338. Put clear policies in place to govern what tools can and can’t be used. This doesn’t mean you’ll please everyone on your team, but it does mean they’ll understand why one tool is approved and another isn’t.
As AI continues to evolve, it’s essential for marketers to balance its potential with ethical considerations. With a thoughtful approach, AI can be a valuable asset in shaping the future of marketing.
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