How should B2B brands consider using AI for marketing versus internal business processes?
It’s definitely a both/and [decision], because marketing is just one of the functions. If you looked across the business and said, ‘How is finance using this’ or ‘How is the supply chain using this,’ or sales or marketing, it just becomes yet another one of the pillars that runs the company. And that’s why a human-centric approach becomes really important. You can’t offload all these decisions, because every situation will have a level of nuance, and in the B2B world, that nuance impacts the infrastructure of a company often before it ever touches the end consumer.
Should B2B brands allocate employees that are solely focused on exploring AI use cases?
From my perspective, I need people to use AI in everything that they’re doing, but we also need somebody to go fan out and figure it out. Do you use ChatGPT or Bard—what are all the different tools out there? So there’s got to be somebody that helps call through.
It’s like with a martech stack, there’s so many things that you could spend your money and time on. But the technical leader, the evaluator, the expert has to say, ‘Here’s the functionality of these different tools,” and “Here’s when and where and why you should use them—now go incorporate that into your job.”
How might a B2B company consider using generative AI, as opposed to types of AI technology that have been available for a while?
The lowest hanging fruit for B2B companies is to use AI and machine learning to improve basic processes or be more efficient in that respect. So that’s really a back-office use case. I think that generative AI gives you a more front-office use case, because it helps marketing and sales and it’s creative.
It’s about what’s the right use case, and then how do you find a use case that’s repeatable? And then what do you build on top of that, so that the value that you create today, once you add some sort of AI, whether it’s generative or not, that value equation moves up.
