One of the advantages of having been in a career for quite a long time is that you see things come (and go) and you can recognise patterns. For me, all the current hoo-ha about Artificial Intelligence in marketing ("It will replace us!") is very reminiscent of the arrival of social media on the marketing scene. Just as we learnt with social media, it won't replace marketing skills and knowledge, but AI will be yet another, fantastic tool that we can use to our advantage.
For example, I have been having some fun with simple AI automations recently. Take something as simple as signing up for something on a website; a basic automation can acknowledge the person signing up and add them to your future mailing list. Of course, it can do much more than that, too, but that could be a simple place to start. Platforms like Mailerlite or EmailOctopus (which this newsletter was created in) can all make this straight-forward and help you save time.
And what do you make of the images above? Left to right: an actual photo of me, 'Disney' me, Van Gogh me and Superhero me (my favourite!). These were all generated for free on an AI image platform called LightX (mostly because I was curious!). You can also get platforms that will create music for you (how about a rap to celebrate your birthday?!), and of course create written content, too. (I've used Chat GPT to get me started on text for a new webpage, then heavily edited it to suit the customers' specific details; it's always easier to start with something than a blank page!)
So embrace AI! It's not going to be a flash-in-the-pan and it will continue to evolve, so we might as well start understanding what it can do for us. It doesn't have to be complicated and it can be a time-saving tool.
