Generative AI has quickly become one of the most exciting — and transformational — technologies in a while. Early applications give users of every skill level the ability to type in a few prompts and generate fantastic images or sophisticated text. Marketers are already harnessing this technology to generate SEO content, social copy and images, as well as a range of other marketing collateral.
However, the full potential for how this powerful technology can redefine the way customer experiences are created and delivered is just now starting to emerge. For marketers and others charged with meeting customers wherever they are with experiences that differentiate, generative AI can act as a highly capable co-pilot — reshaping every aspect of customer experience design and delivery and helping teams work smarter, faster and with more creativity. When deployed responsibly and well, this emerging technology will help brands deliver ever more relevant experiences to their customers — and generate experience-led growth for their companies.
Generative AI as a co-pilot for customer experiences
While there’s little doubt that generative AI will transform how digital marketers engage customers, four specific areas stand out as top candidates for delivering near-term value:
Marketing copy generation: Brands will be able to use generative AI to instantly create message variations for consumer touchpoints such as webpage, email and mobile messaging, all tailored to the brand’s style and language.
Conversational experiences: Generative AI will improve chatbot offerings, providing B2B brands with superior tools to engage visitors to their digital properties, and creating summaries of their interactions for when account leads re-engage. For consumers, chat technology will evolve into a more effective and empathetic tool, helping marketers know when and where to deploy conversations across the customer journey. Generative AI will also provide conversational interfaces between marketers and critical technologies such as analytics and insights, democratizing intelligence and empowering them to take the right actions faster.
Audience and journey creation: Identifying, segmenting and comparing audiences for targeted campaigns is time-consuming and not always informed by the best data; similarly, connecting the dots of customers’ experiences can be challenging. Generative AI will be able to automatically create rich audience segments that provide incredible precision for personalization campaigns, delivered to millions of customers. It will also help brands simulate customer experiences as they happen across online and offline channels, obtain real-time insights on next-best offers and touchpoints for consumers and start delivering new customer experiences faster, using generative AI to customize templates based on prior best practices.
Real-time, actionable insights: Generative AI will power intelligent captioning, including instant text-based descriptions of visualizations such as cohort tables and fallout charts, enabling brands to get and offer answers with greater speed.
Generative AI best practices for enterprises
Like all transformational technologies, the ultimate measure of whether generative AI will be a positive or negative force for employees, customers and companies is not whether — but how — it is developed and deployed. The following are a few recommended best practices to help brands make better decisions for their customers and business:
Focus on utility: Most of the generative AI art and text tools released over the last six months have either been on web pages or inside dedicated apps. For these new capabilities to be truly helpful for marketers, they’ll need to be tailored to their specific use cases and deeply integrated into the tools and workflows they use every day. This will improve both the user experience and enhance what generative AI can deliver.
Enterprise-ready: As with any technology, integrating generative AI into enterprise systems must be done thoughtfully to drive the right business outcomes. Generative AI technologies must adhere to enterprise standards for security, privacy, data handling and compliance, governance, transparency and responsibility. It’s also important that generated content aligns with your brand style and guidelines and is designed to use in commercial settings.
Empower, not replace: While it may be tempting for brands to hand over as much work as possible to generative AI, the real power of the technology is its ability to augment the capabilities of human beings. Generative AI can expand a marketer’s value — and make work more engaging — by giving them the ability to do more quality work faster and shift their mental energy and time to tackle the strategic work that machines can’t duplicate. Think of generative AI as a co-pilot that can assist and augment marketers’ skills, but always keep a human in the mix for final reviews and edits to ensure customers get the right experience every time.
Governance framework: Groundbreaking technologies are almost always way ahead of legal and regulatory rules, and generative AI is no exception. Whether a brand is developing or just deploying generative AI, it’s just as important to consider how the models are made as how they are used. If your company doesn’t already have policies and frameworks in place to govern the creation and use of emerging technologies, now is the time. Establishing strong guidelines and internal guardrails for bias testing, avoiding IP contamination, and monitoring feedback will help brands make thoughtful decisions and provide leadership for broader regulations. This applies to both homegrown and partner solutions.
Generative AI won’t solve every marketing problem or turn struggling brands into category leaders overnight. Done right, however, generative AI has the potential to elevate human creativity and productivity, empowering digital customer experience management teams to achieve greater scale and agility through higher project velocity and higher-performing experiences. Marketers will be able to apply their expertise to guide and supervise generative outputs and review processes to ensure the experiences are on brand and resonate with customers. Just as content and data are foundational to digital marketing, AI — especially generative AI — will become a trusted co-pilot for the next generation of digital customer experience management, driving experience-led growth that will keep companies healthy and competitive in the years to come.
By Anil Kamath, Vice President of Technology, Adobe
