AI Transformation Starts With Marketers

Over the last couple years, marketers and businesses have been enthusiastically finding good use cases for AI technology. Right now, the focus has turned to envisioning the ways individual professionals and entire businesses can transform the way they get work done through innovative use of AI. AI is fostering cross-team collaboration and rewriting marketers’ roles and career paths. But to unlock AI’s full transformational potential, the business needs feedback and vision from all functions and levels of the organization. Forward-looking marketers can seize this opportunity, rooted in their own experiences with using AI at work, to become leaders of change in the business. 

You Need a Strong Foundation Before Building an AI Framework 

Marketers need to build a foundation of trust and transparency to run AI-related initiatives, while concurrently balancing the time constraints all marketers face. That foundation is responsible AI use.  

A recent McKinsey report revealed that only 18% of businesses have formal AI councils – for codifying and guiding responsible AI usage – in place within their org. With AI integrated into core processes at an ever-larger share of businesses, this is concerning. But it also shouldn’t hold business leaders back from adopting useful, transformative AI tools.  

Even without an AI council, business leaders can take a step back, consider their values and the types of compliant data they have available, and establish guiding principles that everyone across the business can reference and follow.  

Understanding Responsible Use Means Understanding and Mitigating Risk 

A responsible use policy provides a framework for the ethical and safe use of AI, including data privacy, transparency, and the responsibility of building trust internally and externally. 

The human professional needs to stay focused on breakthrough moments for the business – connecting different tools at different points in the process, and collaborating with people who work outside of your own skillset. Responsible use makes cross-function collaboration possible.  

The first step is to assess the risk level of AI, which is a factor if you’re using any AI tools in the business. Start by locating points of potential risk. One really good way to do this is by conducting an anonymous, company-wide survey to find which AI apps people are using and gaining value from – and to find out why they’re using these apps. From that informed starting point, move on to thinking about these important types of risks: 

• The likelihood that the business already uses the AI, and the specific use cases, end users, and environments.  
• When it’s necessary to approve an AI app, overall or within a specific use case. Ask yourself and the people using the app: If our org uses and scales this tool, what’s the worst possible outcome? From there, begin ideating what amount and types of controls you need in place to best protect your business, employees, and customers. 
• The measurable value the AI generates for the team and the business.  Consider the metrics that are most important for your business – efficiency, productivity, business growth impact, revenue impact, and any other key metrics. 
• ROI – whether the efficiencies and cost savings of the tool are worth the cost of the tool itself. 

An AI council matters because it empowers the business to continue gaining value from the tools without slowing momentum. The AI council also manages the value process – maximizing the value of tech solutions, and making sure useful tools aren’t siloed away. The AI council is dedicated to exploring all use cases that can deliver value for the business, and to making sure the costs of the tools makes sense for the business.  

When cross-functional collaboration happens, we can really start to see scalable value in the AI tools. The upfront investment of time and strategy pays off in dividends as scale increases.  

AI Strategy and Vision Leads to AI Value 

Marketers should step back, reflect on their professional experiences, and think about their day-to-day and big-picture challenges – not only for themselves internally, but for the customers they serve. Take these steps as you begin imagining AI strategy: 

• Start with listening to internal staff. Understand their priorities and what it means to maximize their strengths in their roles. Ask open-ended questions about people’s personal vision: If you could do anything in this role or company to make a significant impact, what would you love to do? What have you always wanted to do, but haven’t had time, capacity, or resources to do yet? 
• Take fundamental courses on AI in Marketing and Business to unlock your thinking of future potential for the business, employees, and customers you serve. 
• Take a prompting course together  to unlock your creativity and the potential of the tools.  
• Experiment with approved, responsible AI tools within your responsible use guidelines to find other roads for your marketing to explore, and don’t get hung up on any perceived imperfections of these tool (like, ”This is the dumbest they will ever be”). 
• Have conversations with partners and customers to find out what they’re finding value in with AI, and what they expect of products and services like yours to incorporate or what value they expect to be unlocked by AI and new technology.  
• Work with leadership to understand these insights across these items and clearly define what growth and opportunity you are aiming to unlock with AI.  Use the AI council in collaboration to help then define how to get there and what use cases from your insight gathering to start with. 

The more we test and use AI tools for functions such as data science, coding, and content and asset creation, the more marketers will be free to explore their own creativity and evolve in their careers. Along the way, we learn how to view business objectives from the angle of other functions throughout the business. 

Rest assured, when marketers automate as much work as they can – and they should – they won’t lose budget. Instead, their value to the business increases greatly.