As a technology marketer, I’ve witnessed the Gen AI revolution from its inception. In early 2023, I crafted an enterprise narrative for Google Cloud, helping our global salesforce inspire customers to adopt this technology. I’ve seen AI evolve significantly: from chatbots writing silly poems to answering medical questions and guiding students in physics. Today, AI can understand, reason, and create across various inputs like text, images, audio, and video. I’m excited about AI’s potential to accelerate marketing innovation.
Now, as the VP of Marketing at Synadia, the startup on a mission to connect the world, I’ve observed even more. At a recent webinar for 50+ portfolio companies at Forgepoint Capital, I shared these insights, which I’m highlighting in this week’s newsletter. Thank you Tanya Loh for the opportunity!
As a technology marketer, I’ve witnessed the Gen AI revolution from its inception. In early 2023, I crafted an enterprise narrative for Google Cloud, helping our global salesforce inspire customers to adopt this technology. I’ve seen AI evolve significantly: from chatbots writing silly poems to answering medical questions and guiding students in physics. Today, AI can understand, reason, and create across various inputs like text, images, audio, and video. I’m excited about AI’s potential to accelerate marketing innovation.
18 months ago, I visualized gen AI as my alter ego, a game changer amplifying our strengths and overcoming our weaknesses. I hoped that for creative and curious people who tend to procrastinate and get bored easily, Gen AI would make life easier by handling the repetitive and mundane tasks we dislike.
Today, I can say that my prediction turned out to be true. I see three main buckets where Gen AI helps us in marketing:
✅ Expand your expertise
✅ Jump-start your creativity
✅ Offload your marketing tasks
I’ll illustrate how I’ve used Gen AI in marketing through stories with Google and Synadia.
Gen AI quickly expands our expertise and teaches us new skills
First, let me tell you how Gen AI helped me hit the ground running from Day 1 at Synadia and how it continues to my invaluable sidekick. I created a custom GPT to teach me about Synadia’s product portfolio. I trained it using public documentation. I knew the learning curve on the product built by the world’s brightest distributed systems engineers would be steep. Asking my personal GPT questions promptly got me up to speed.
Here’s another example. Imagine hearing a new acronym during a meeting with your engineers. Instead of interrupting the flow and making everyone wait while someone explains it, my Synadia bot, trained on github.com/synadia-io, immediately clarifies it for me. This way, we can stay focused on discussing our vision for building the ultimate platform for distributed applications without sidetracking the meeting.
My other story happened at Google. You may have seen ‘The Tale of a Model Gardener’ video, a humorous cartoon about Gen AI’s ability to help enterprises achieve their business goals. Gen AI accelerated the creative process for this video we launched ahead of #GoogleCloudNEXT in August 2023. Here’s how.
The idea hit me when cycling between San Francisco’s Marina District and Financial District to Google’s office. I wondered: “How do I explain concepts in AI, such as augmentation and prompt engineering, in fun, approachable ways?” The idea of a cartoon video surfaced but how to start, having never written a video script nor cartoon?
With just 30 minutes until my next meeting, I instructed Bard (now #GoogleGemini). “Hey, Gemini, write me a movie script about X.” I added three sentences with my idea. In minutes, I got a fully developed movie script, beautifully formatted by scenes. I perfected things with small additional prompts. Google #Vertex AI, an end-to-end ML platform, helped me generate images. I stitched together a script draft with some images and sent it to my creative colleagues–all within 30 minutes–and they really liked the idea of a cartoon. Though they had different ideas about what the cartoon ought to explain and how it ought to look; the concept landed from my Gemini experiment.
This triumph really shows what Gen AI brings us as marketers. I got a solid movie script within minutes, with no prior experience in building such things. I didn’t waste the idea, which became an important, valuable deliverable for the company.
Gen AI sparks our creativity
I want to expand on how I use Gen AI to jumpstart my creativity, especially when short on time. As you can imagine, only a few weeks into the Synadia role, I’m working on our positioning and messaging. I brainstorm with my small but mighty marketing team, my product and engineering team, and my founder and CEO. I also brainstorm with Gen AI, especially when everyone’s busy. (My bot is always available.)
As the proud granddaughter of a professor of physics and a prolific dressmaker who whipped up gorgeous fashion from his patterns, I’ve long loved prototyping and testing my ideas. My mind works best when reacting to prototypes vs thinking about them. Prior to Gen AI, we had to write or sketch out our prototypes. Gen AI requires a simple prompt for a full document which can spark more ideas and creativity in ourselves and others. (We saw this with my design team at Google and ‘The Tale of a Modern Gardener’ AI-generated cartoon script.) For that same reason product demos are worth 1000 slides. Show, don’t tell.
Gen AI offloads small tasks
Gen AI also can offload small, repetitive, mundane tasks to free us up for more strategic thinking and exciting tasks. At Synadia and Google, Gen AI has helped me:
- Jump-start projects. A custom prompt to generate case studies from our many great customer stories captured in blog posts and videos scaled our small team’s output.
- Generate images. The early images for my first cartoon script for ‘The Tale of a Model Gardener’, weren’t perfect, but brought the narrative to life.
- Edit content and minor things/ideas. While preparing my creative idea for the design team, I lacked the time for editing parallel construction in my lists or capturing typos. My bot took care of that so I could focus on creativity. Writing uses the creative part of our brain; editing uses the analytical. Mixing the two puts the breaks on the creative process so I like to offload the latter to my bot.
Gen AI helps us feel more experimental
Gen AI never lets an idea go to waste. When you’re pressed for time, quickly producing a first prototype helps your colleagues provide feedback faster. While you might discard that initial version, it speeds up the journey to the final product.
If a picture is worth a 1000 words, a prototype is worth a 1000 thoughts
Sometimes, a colleague may take your prototype in a completely new direction. I find this process empowering and encouraging. Each strong reaction, even a negative one, means I’m one step closer to the ideal solution.
Innovation thrives on collaboration and diversity, not egos. Gen AI helps create an environment where ideas evolve and improve through teamwork, making our solutions stronger and more innovative.
The drawbacks and obstacles with Gen AI
Gen AI has some drawbacks. A few I’ve encountered include:
- Ubiquitous language. The bar for quality content has never been higher and savvy readers detect and tune out AI-generated if repetitive, generic, and vague. We’ve seen content overload for close to two years now. Cutting through that noise requires high-quality content.
- Flawed responses. Use AI responsibly and not verbatim. AI bots are not deterministic. Our bot’s responses may be quick, but sometimes contain significant errors in reasoning. I wrote about this problem in my post on how I turned a daunting 150+ page-long voter pamphlet into a handy cheat sheet for the San Francisco elections. I prompted: “Summarize all the propositions on the March 5th 2024 SF election ballot with their top arguments for and against in a 3-column table using the voter pamphlet as the data source.” The bot’s quick response impressed me. But I found reasoning errors and one argument was entirely made up by the bot. Always check your results.
- No slide fixes! Gen AI will not do what we dream of (yet): unify our fonts and texts in our slide decks 😂.
Change in Gen AI is unprecedented. I’ve seen nothing like this growth in my 15+ years in tech. The new features from OpenAI, Google or Anthropic are just the tip of AI innovation. Many startups work towards perfecting Gen AI as well. In the meantime, discovering gen AI feels amazing and I wonder how we lived without it.
Looking ahead
Despite all that Gen AI brings us as marketers, it cannot compete with human storytellers. Gen AI does not substitute well-written, well-narrated customer stories. Even OpenAl looks for interesting use cases of their products exploring new features in unexpected ways. So let’s provide them. A recent LinkedIn post on me using ChatGPT and a Peloton app to rediscover German became one OpenAI reposted, which sparked a wonderful conversation on learning new languages with Gen AI, all from a lighthearted, personal story connecting with technology, efficiency, and learning.
This moment reminds me: All Tech brands, even the Silicon Valley hottest companies like OpenAI, seek interesting stories on how we use their products in exciting, unexpected ways to start a community conversation.
For now, Gen AI cannot do that nor can it replace a great writer or story. That’s our opportunity and another way we can best partner with Gen AI as marketers and as storytellers.
➡ How do YOU use Gen AI in Marketing? Share your thoughts in the comments! ✍👇
➡ Need a hand getting started? Shoot me a message! ✍ ✉
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