For most the question of “Are you ready to get ready for Generative AI?” is a resounding, “We’re not sure.” Which is not surprising.
One of the most common questions we get when working with clients, regardless of whether it’s a content strategy, operational roadmap, or executive coaching, is “Where should we start?”. An understandable question for sure. No one wants to start something, no matter how big the endeavor, only to figure out that it was not the optimum kick-off line. But our perspective is that it\’s not so important where you start, but rather that you DO start. Decision paralysis is very real, and it is rampant across industries and companies of all sizes when it comes to whether, or how, to introduce and subsequently implement Generative AI into the organization.
TCA conducted a survey mid-this year and heard from more than 200 marketers and marketing leaders about where they and their organizations stood on the epidemic-level quandary that is Generative AI.
The bottom line finding: most are unsure of what they and their teams need to do to be able to successfully adopt Gen AI into their marketing practices and so are choosing not to make any decision.
We’ve analyzed the results and developed a pragmatic guide to the current state of Generative AI in marketing and content operations, and how to assess your organization’s readiness to successfully adopt and use it.
In this report, we address Gen AI’s tremendous potential to assist content and marketing teams in use cases such as:
- Putting competitive research at your fingertips
- Automating SEO or other content opportunity research
- Support for maintaining a consistent tone of voice across multiple writers/sources
- Enabling scalability – multiple versions of headlines, or other content
- Crating variables of content creation at scale
- Increasing efficiency by automatically creating derivative content such as meeting notes, sales emails, and webinar transcriptions
Teams typically want to jump into technology and then figure out how to best use it. But assessing AI readiness is not a technology question, it’s a content strategy challenge. What our research found was:
- 73% are either experimenting with AI tools themselves or know of others in the company who are.
- For 82% of those experimenters, the tool isn’t integrated into their workflow.
- 75% said their companies would likely integrate Generative AI into their processes, but less than one-quarter of those said it is being done through a defined process. The rest simply believe that “eventually” their company will get there.
- 2% said they believed the primary use cases for Generative AI would be summarizing original research and creating derivative content. Yet Generative AI can do much more.
OK, so you believe us about the overall lack of readiness to successfully adopt Gen AI into a marketing process.
Now, do you want to know how you successfully implement Generative AI?
Well, before you do anything else, be sure your marketing or content team has a buttoned-down content strategy: standards, consistency, and organized processes for content research, ideation, and creation. And remember, Generative AI does not replace human creativity and intuition. It can assist in generating new ideas and content, but human input and oversight are still crucial to ensure accuracy and quality and maintain brand integrity.
Generative AI has the potential to revolutionize how organizations engage with their customers, create impactful marketing campaigns, and drive business growth. But that potential can only be reached through strategic, purposeful planning.
We can’t say it enough: your first step to getting ready for Generative AI is to develop a clear content strategy.
Learn more about how to get ready to get ready with our Guide: Getting Ready to Get Ready for Generative AI.
