Joyce Gordon, Head of Generative AI, Amperity, reports on how to set your brand up for success with Gen AI.
It’s a very exciting time for AI. Innovation is happening at breakneck speed. Each week brings new developments, whether it’s about the large language models (LLMs) themselves and how they’re becoming more performant and less expensive or an announcement on content creation across video images text.
Amperity’s Head of Gen AI Joyce Gordon recently joined forces with industry leaders, Rio Longacre, Managing Director at Slalom, and Jon Williams, Global Head of Agency Business Development at AWS. They dissected the transformative potential of Gen AI and its role in setting up your brand for success.
Gen AI: Making sense of the mania
During our conversation, Longacre describes a paradigm shift in the Gen AI landscape. Moving beyond experimentation, companies are now forging strategic pathways, identifying areas where it can genuinely make a transformative difference. “When ChatGPT launched, it quickly became the thing every client we worked with was suddenly dedicating significant resources to. They were building out Gen AI demos, investigating it. People were asking us to help them create a Gen AI strategy. And there was a lot of experimentation. There was a lot of wheel spinning too. It was like this Gen AI-mania – everyone just went all in,” he says.
“Within the last few months, there’s been a big shift, which is very positive. Instead of ‘let’s just try different things’, it’s now, ‘let’s have a Gen AI strategy’. They are looking to identify areas where Generative AI could make a big difference and move the needle. They want to invest in those, whether it’s eCommerce, operations or creative; they want to come up with ideas that could work and test them. If they work, great. They’ll look to start to commercialise them. If they don’t, that’s OK too, then they can pivot and try something else.”
3 Ways organisations are leveraging Gen AI for greater efficiencies and cost-savings, according to Longacre:
- eCommerce company: This company has written descriptions for 10,000 product SKUs using Gen AI in a couple of weeks, saving them months of time and about a million dollars.
- Paid media: As it relates to paid media tools, such as those designed for Amazon Marketing Cloud, there’s a background image generator specifically tailored for crafting lifestyle images. Findings indicate a remarkable 20 to 25% increase in conversion rates for products showcased with lifestyle images compared to those with a plain white background. Swiftly deploying these features, testing their efficacy, obtaining results and subsequently, optimising based on these insights is a gamechanger.
- Banks and finance: The bank’s creative briefs are now being generated by artificial intelligence, reducing the time spent on back-and-forth communication with agencies by approximately one week.
Even with segmented strategies, brands often face resource challenges. Accelerating the creation of creative briefs, creative imagery and product descriptions allows for a faster customisation of on-site experiences. This progression toward personalisation doesn’t require them to go in a ‘hands-off’ mode where Gen AI is really running the show. Instead, it’s truly like a genuine one-to-one chatbot interaction or conversational AI.
AI as a marketing assistant
Williams shares where Gen AI is shining as a marketing assistant, of sorts. “Amazon Q is a new type of generative AI-powered assistant that can be used specifically for work to be tailored to your business to have conversations, solve problems or generate content. It uses the data and expertise found in your company’s information repositories, such as codebases and enterprise systems.
“You could use Q, for example, to:
- Learn a brand style guide, then
- Use that information to turn a press release into a blog post that adheres to those standards, then
- Analyse how a brand has shown up on social media, then
- Create new posts around those releases that will make sense to followers, then
- Analyse the results of those posts, and finally
- Summarise them for review for teams
“It’s almost like this self-fulfilling circle of incremental productivity that’s happening as a result of leveraging some of the generative AI capabilities that come to use as a result of a bot but are plugged into the systems and data that your enterprise organisation owns. We’re only in the very early stages of that, which is pretty exciting.”
Key takeaways for brand success with Gen AI
In the journey of crafting a Generative AI strategy, Williams points out five key elements that play a pivotal role in ensuring success. They are:
- Tech stack: Your tech stack is vital. You should have the ability to explore models, test use cases and choose the right ones.
- A solid, mature first-party data foundation: Generative AI relies on the data to function properly, which means you must have robust data ingestion storage and management capabilities to make sure that the first-party data is accurate and as close to real time as possible to provide accuracy in the model outputs.
- Human oversight: You still need that human in the loop intervention to make sure that what you thought was going to happen is happening and there are no anomalies.
- AI-specific analysis skills: Leveraging AI requires the ability to interpret and accurately apply AI model outputs. You must ensure that your teams have the expertise to understand how the tools work and how best to put the data to work.
- Process redesign: Consider existing processes or workflows that need to be resigned to take advantage of General AI.
Start small with AI for big results
My advice to brands and organisations when rolling out AI: start small. I would start with a small use case that’s highly measurable and one that doesn’t require major change. One place where clients we work with have seen a lot of success is just with subject line optimisation or optimising the body of emails or paid media ads. Since you can have a human in the loop here, it’s a great opportunity to experiment with creating different segmentation strategies and different messages. And it’s also really easy to measure and determine if those approaches are working or not.
At Amperity, we recently announced two new generative AI capabilities, Explore and Assist, that join our existing AI-powered capabilities, Stitch and Predict, to create a comprehensive suite collectively known as AmpAi. We are committed to fixing the data quality and access challenges many brands face with traditional CDPs. With AmpAI, brands can be confident that they are making decisions based on a trusted data foundation to determine the best way to engage with customers and power downstream AI technologies.
As the cookie crumbles and the marketing landscape continues to change, we want to ensure our technical and business users can put every last crumb of their customer data to use, unlocking more value and creating incredible user experiences. While this is a big leap forward, I can tell, it’s only the beginning.
Watch the full webinar here.
About Joyce Gordon
Joyce Gordon is the Head of Generative AI at Amperity, leading product development and strategy. Previously, Joyce led product development for many of Amperity’s ML and ML Ops investments, including launching Amperity’s predictive models and infrastructure used by many of the world’s top brands. Joyce joined the company in 2019 following Amperity’s acquisition of Custora where she was a founding member of the product team. She earned a B.A. in Biological Mathematics from the University of Pennsylvania and is an inventor on several pending ML patents.
About Amperity
Amperity delivers the data confidence brands need to unlock growth by truly knowing their customers. With Amperity, brands can build a unified customer profile foundation powered by first-party data to fuel customer acquisition and retention, personalize experiences that build loyalty, and manage privacy compliance. Using patented AI and machine learning methods, Amperity stitches together all customer interactions to build a unified view that seamlessly connects to marketing and technology tools. More than 400 brands worldwide rely on Amperity to turn data into business value, including Alaska Airlines, Brooks Running, Endeavour Drinks, Planet Fitness, Seattle Sounders FC, Under Armour and Wyndham Hotels & Resorts. For more information, please visit www.amperity.com.