Get Ready To Get Ready For AI – January Webinar

Generative AI in Content Strategy is All the buzz – but how do you integrate it into your workflow and your team’s overall process.

We’ve been working with a number of companies lately that want to get their teams to “get good” at using Generative AI to create more efficient, effective content. But what does that mean? What kind of technology should we purchase? How do we get to good use cases?

Cathy and I walk through a tried and true three step process, that can help your team get ready to be ready for actually integrating AI into your overall content strategy.

Full Transcript of the Webinar

Robert Rose: All right, let’s go ahead and get this party started. Shall we? Thank you all so very, very much for coming to our first webinar of the year, we’re starting 2024 off with a webinar series. We’re gonna do one of these per month and hopefully helping you really navigate the waters that are AI Content strategy technology process, governance

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Robert Rose: storytelling all of those kinds of things we’ve got. Kathy and I worked over the holidays to really put together an entire program for the year on what we wanted to do on an education program. And do this. If you’re not familiar with us. We are the Content Advisory. Robert Rose and Kathy Mcknight. We’ve been working together for the last decade, working with organizations all over the planet

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Robert Rose: do a lot less all over the planet these days than we do sort of on this wonderful format. But we are starting to get back into submit person stuff. So this is this is really encouraging to us, because we absolutely believe that working in person is is is truly wonderful and and great we’ve we had the distinct pleasure of working with organizations large and small.

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as you can see. If you wanna learn more about us there, that little QR code will will take you to the wonderful little website that we have, Kathy. It’s great to see you. It’s it’s gonna be so much fun to do today to talk about getting ready to get ready for AI.

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Cathy McKnight: Absolutely, Robert, I’m looking forward to this. So why don’t we get going.

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Robert Rose: Okay, let’s do it. Let’s do it. So we need to jump back here. And we need to talk a little bit about where we are, because what we wanna do today is really begin to provide

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Robert Rose: a bit more pragmatism and like what’s really going on with AI and business, and especially as it pertains to generative AI and content in marketing and communications, and so to do that, to set the stage. For where we are in 2024.

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Robert Rose: What we’re gonna talk about is jumping back in the Time Machine to go all the way back to sort of the early part of the century, as it were, right around 2,001, 2,002. And there was this new disruptive technology called web content management. And it was gonna revolutionize the way that we did digital content, manage our websites, manage all of the content that we had in a digital format. And it was

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Robert Rose: the promises were huge, right. It was all about managing these large amounts of unstructured material and multiple media also known these days as digital assets.

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Robert Rose: It was about getting consistent with sort of well defined ideas of roles, responsibilities, charters for our marketing and communications team to work so well together and produce all this amazing content through a very structured workflow process to enable the composing and publishing of different information to different formats, different audiences. We had the promise of personalization.

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We had this idea isolating, editing, and creating content and having version control over all the things that we were going to do, and enabling all of our websites to have search and the retrieval of filtered content. So we got exactly the right message to the right person at the right time.

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Robert Rose: and it kinda didn’t work out that way. And what happened right? What happened with that? Well.

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Robert Rose: in many ways, those promises. What happened was, we saw companies of all sizes say, okay, let’s try this. Let’s play with this. Let’s have the individual marketers. Let’s have the individual people create content in there and publish content to the point where it became so democratized that, as one client recently said to us, really anybody with a pub a budget could publish to the website.00:06:37.110 –> 00:06:55.219
Robert Rose: So it got crazy quickly. And it became this really focus on, how can we get our arms around this? How can we harness this technology in order to create great content, manage great content, and then ultimately publish and measure it. Now, here’s the thing.

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Robert Rose: There was one fundamental flaw that really created the biggest challenge all the way around. Kathy. You can go to the next slide. It basically is this mistake that we mistook creation for a workflow state. It is not create is not a workflow state.

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Robert Rose: When we would set up these sort of initial workflows or these initial processes for the business. What we would look at is we would say, Okay, there’s a marketing team. And there are people who need to do stuff create content for the website to create landing pages to create all these things that need to be consumed by customers, and that are being requested by salespeople. They’re being requested by our C suite. They’re being requested by the demand teams. And we said, Okay, there’s create and create. Just kind of happens.

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Robert Rose: But it was interesting, because create. Just kind of happens was when you walk in and you would say, and we’ve done this many times when the business will say, How do you actually create content? And

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Robert Rose: the answer is kind of a shrug. Soldier like I don’t know. It just sort of happens. We, you know, the real state that we really start with is intake right? For the most kinds of of of things that we look at. The first step is intake, like we intake ideas. But of course, create is a process in and of itself creation is the process, and the companies and the organizations that really get it right.

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Robert Rose: that understand their content strategy and can get organized and consistent and cohesive and meet all of those promises that we were supposed to meet when web, content, management and content became a digital thing, are the organizations that understand the creation process.

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Robert Rose: So, in other words, how are ideas formulated? How do we take these wonderful big ideas and then prioritize them against what it is we’re trying to do from a marketing objective perspective, from a content or customer service perspective from a messaging brand, all of the different business objectives that we have as communicators.

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Robert Rose: And so when we sort of put all that together, we start then doing research, and we start writing. And then, when we put all those things, those expressions together. Now we’re ready to start managing that content. The expressions, all the different containers, whether it’s going to be web pages plus email plus all those different things. That’s what gets us into the manage process.

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Robert Rose: So if that was the challenge, then where are we today? Right? Where? Where do we look at where we’re now. We’re in 2024. You can go to the next slide, Kathy, which is when we look at this. Here’s generative. AI.

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Robert Rose: It’s here. II don’t know if you guys have noticed. But there’s been a little bit of a buzz about this whole generative AI thing. And what are we noticing? What are we seeing companies do? Well.

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Robert Rose: we’re seeing companies do exactly what happened in the early days of web content management. In other words, organizations are saying, well, let’s play with it. Let’s see what happens. Let’s let practitioners do the little things with it and figure out how it’s gonna make us more efficient or more effective, or where it’s going to apply, you know, in in all those individual jobs.

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Robert Rose: you’ve got sort of the extreme of that where you’ve got companies going, hey? Can we get rid of all of our writers, or can we reduce our writing expenses because this new Gen. AI thing is there. And the interesting thing is is that there are all these new tools that are promising to do all E of the things that we heard about right, they’re gonna make teams more creative. They’re gonna make teams more productive. But what does that even mean?

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Robert Rose: I mean, what does that mean? I mean, I’m hearing so much and see so much on social media. And here’s so much from the technology vendors like, we’re gonna help your team be more creative. Really, what what does that mean? Like? We’re gonna help you be more productive. We’re gonna help you scale. We’re gonna help you do more things like, what what does that mean? I mean, I understand what it means for me. As a content practitioner, I can use an AI tool to generate derivative content where I can do all these things. But what does that mean to the team? What does the business?

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Robert Rose: What does it mean to our creation process? What is getting good at AI really mean what is. In other words, when we say we need our teams to get good at AI, what does that mean?

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Robert Rose: And so it’s not certainly about better prompting. Better prompting is not the answer right? It’s not gonna be some specialized thing to help us code up the interesting ways that we’re gonna get value out of our out of our content. If for no other reason than because we don’t, we shouldn’t have to become AI whispers in order to be get good quality value out of the AI tools that we’re doing.

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Robert Rose: So we realize that we’ve got these individual use cases and maybe your company has been doing this. Maybe your company has been

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Robert Rose: letting people sort of play around with Chat Gpt, or do this, and maybe there’s some. It restrictions. And maybe you’re doing it on your phone because you quite honestly are routing around it. Maybe there’s some legal restrictions. Maybe you’re sort of playing with it to see what will it be able to provide? And all those kinds of things?

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Robert Rose: But which of these used cases are most important? It’s like, it’s literally, and I know this is a dated reference. Forgive me, my Gen. X. Is showing here. But I mean, this is literally Kramer and Seinfeld going. Why don’t you just tell me the name of the movie that you’d like to see?

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Robert Rose: And that’s where generative AI is today.

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Robert Rose: What we can see is, how do we get good at it? Now? We’ve done research, like just about every other organization out there has done research. But we took a little bit of a different swing at the research. We did right, which is, we wanted to know of the businesses that are out there. How many of them are actually integrating generative AI into their content workflow process. And specifically, the creation process.

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Robert Rose: Because this integration is really important. As we get into the management of content, we need to understand. How do we first affect

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Robert Rose: and make more efficient or more effective the creation part of content in our business? Because if we don’t get that right? Then anything we do in management is simply just gonna be, you know, water under the bridge. Or you know, whatever metaphor you like, it’s just not gonna matter that much.

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Robert Rose: But here’s the challenge. When we start thinking about creative, the actual creation of content. Well, there’s what we’ve been sort of noticing is a dunning Kruger effect. Now, if you don’t know, the dunning Kruger effect is basically the idea that in order to recognize high quality, you have to have the ability to know what high quality is. In other words, in order to be, to recognize if it’s good writing, you actually kind of have to be a good writer.

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Robert Rose: And so the challenge is that if we start leaning into the cre.

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Robert Rose: we won’t know if what we’re doing is good or not if we don’t already recognize good. So the thing that we have to remember is, and as we’ve learned, 80% of the companies that we’ve talked to, anyway, have said they have not integrated this into their workflow processes. And basically, the experimentation is all around sort of thinking about how we are going to integrate it.

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Robert Rose: We have to understand

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Robert Rose: that as practitioners, as managers in our business, as leaders in our business, we have to. You think of generative AI, not as a way to generate ideas or to create those ideas. It is a way to express. It is web content management.

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Robert Rose: It is ultimately content. Strategy, it is the expression of that content of our ideas that come after. We actually create that ideation and help us understand where we can get better efficiencies or more effectiveness. That’s the key of getting good at AI, understanding where and how it will integrate across all the functions

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Robert Rose: that we have to manage as part of the content life cycle and go to the next slide. So

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Robert Rose: yes, we have fear, uncertainty, and doubt. The fud factor right now is very real in many organizations. This has been what we’ve seen. So if you’re feeling behind right now, you’re not.

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Robert Rose: Many of the businesses that we’re seeing are still in that sort of experimental or getting ready right? These sort of well, what do we need to do to actually get ready to start to create that value, that integration in the business. And again, it’s being treated very much today, like the early days of the content management idea, which is, we’re trying to understand ultimately, where

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Robert Rose: teams will benefit, where the integration and cross functionality will benefit. But what we’re doing is we’re letting the individuals only play within their own little their own little sandbox. So what that does is that it ends up getting to. And we’ve talked to so many companies about. This is where the practitioners, the writers, the creators, the measurement people, the campaign managers, all of them playing through their lens with their small element of generative AI,

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Robert Rose: are only starting to really discover what the tech can’t do. In other words.

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Robert Rose: the writers are slowly discovering. And you’re starting to see this across social media as well like it’s really not that good or II can still see how it would create derivative content for me. But I’m not. It’s not really helping me do my job, or they’re saying

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Robert Rose: it’s not really helping me do my job here. And Kim, it’s not really helping me do my job yet here. And so there’s all this sort of individual perception that it’s not quite working. And the reason, of course, is because, just like web content management.

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Robert Rose: it needs to work

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across all those different areas. It will only help if it helps the team.

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Robert Rose: So it’s really hard to get an accurate sense of readiness when all we’re doing is actually looking at it from those individual lessons.

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Robert Rose: So how do we fix that? How do we actually fix that idea? How do we get ready to get ready for AI. That’s the real key and go to the next slide.

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Robert Rose: So the AI opportunity is big. We know this right? There’s so many different areas where we can start to apply creating content. As we’ve said many times, is probably the least interesting thing that generative AI does. But there are tons of things that we could or should be doing and recognize it as such, such as competitive research, like we can do what’s not being covered by a competitors. Or we can look at competitive research with Gen. AI and

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Robert Rose: chat with it. Or we can create automated SEO tagging. We can do things like semantic analysis of the content we’re creating. So that’s a scalable element. We can main consistent consistency of voice tools out there helping us.

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Use AI to say, here’s you know how to use our jargon, or here how to use our vocabulary or our tone, or maintain brand guidelines and content guidelines. There’s, of course, scalability with multiple versions of all of these things. There’s original content, of course, that can be created from original blog post to social post, to all sorts of things.

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Robert Rose: There’s increased efficiency in all of these kinds of things, right? By automatically creating derivative pieces of content. There’s a ton of of real sort of opportunity here. But how do we start to apply it? Because in in many ways it’s very much like the sort of ideas around web content management. So

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Robert Rose: what we’ve discovered, and you can go to the next slide. Now.

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Robert Rose: basically, we can get ready to be ready for AI.

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Robert Rose: In other words, there is an AI readiness that there needs to happen, and what we’ve seen is that there is a process that we can go to a process that can help your team

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Robert Rose: go from a a team that’s gonna work together to figure this out to an actual maturity model. And then requirements for whatever the technology is going to be. So I’m gonna turn it over to Kathy now and let her take over and sort of walk through this process. And we can walk through the this idea together to sort of see how you might map your own readiness. For generative AI.

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Cathy McKnight: Thanks, Robert, so I can tell you, the starting point is not with which AI tool I should buy

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Cathy McKnight: after 15 years as an industry analyst, I’m still a little surprised that this is where companies want to jump to. It is always about

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Cathy McKnight: throwing random technology at a problem before they’ve even really figured out what the problem is.

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Cathy McKnight: So the other challenge with generative AI is that there’s so many companies who think they’re ready. But the reality is is they’re probably not. We’ve seen this particularly over the last 8 months, 18 months, as as Robert alluded to not only our interactions with clients, but the research that we did

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Cathy McKnight: is that companies are asking us to help them choose a generative AI tool.

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Cathy McKnight: But more tragically, they’re implementing a geniiiiiiii tool or help them actually rather implement with a tool that they’ve already acquired. And the challenge is is they don’t know what problem they’re solving for.

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Cathy McKnight: because they’ve got all of this pressure. And you know they think. Oh, my gosh, we need to buy something. They gotta keep up with the hype right? That Fomo, that fear of missing out

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Cathy McKnight: when the latest, greatest tech comes in. Genai has just amplified that we’ve never seen a technology take the world by storm like this one has, and it’s really difficult to resist, particularly when there’s questions and pressures from others to get on it, and to start moving. And what are we doing about it? And how are we using it.

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Cathy McKnight: So Robert and I looked at our Tca technology, selection, adoption, methodology considered it specifically in the context of generative generative AI and what it had to offer, and we came up with this readiness framework.

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Cathy McKnight: So first step.

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Cathy McKnight: really, it has nothing to do with AI. It is all about getting your hands and minds and then documenting the end-to-end process of how content ideation actually happens in your org. Where are these? Where are ideas formulated? How are they harnessed?

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Cathy McKnight: How are they transformed from? You know, something itchy and scratchy in your head that you you etch out to really raw content. And then ultimately, how does that get designed into the assets that are going to provide those customer and content experiences that you’re looking to deliver.

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Cathy McKnight: And once you you, you look at that then you’ve got to start looking at what the process should be.

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Cathy McKnight: not what you wrote down 4 years ago, but actually what it should be. What is the best way to go about this.

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Cathy McKnight: and then you can’t forget. Forget as you’re thinking of those processes, and how to really document and capture them is, what is your your content? Strategy? What are your longer term growth goals?

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Cathy McKnight: And it’s not just about the content and marketing goals, as we are often the ones that are are neck deep or over our heads in in terms of the technology and AI, and trying to figure out how to use it. But how are we working to support the organizational’s goals? Because if marketing and content goals are not aligned to those, then what are we doing it for? Right. We’re clever, we’re smart. We can come up with great stuff. But it’s if it isn’t meeting the end needs of the organization. Then we’re really not doing our jobs.

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Cathy McKnight: and then the last step is really looking and assessing the benefits of integrating geniii capabilities and then mapping them to where you want to go starting point where where you are today, and then moving forward. What’s the vision? So let’s look at each of these steps in a little bit more detail.

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Cathy McKnight: So the backstory here is that this scenario is based on an A technology company that we worked with last year.

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Cathy McKnight: So they were looking to integrate generative AI into a content marketing process. The team, like so many of them, were seeking counsel on, okay, where do we start? Right? We’ve done all the reading we’ve been attending Webinar. We’ve gone to conferences, all of these things, and we’re still just stuck.

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Cathy McKnight: So what we came up was an action plan

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Cathy McKnight: based on the readiness program that we had we had developed based on our experience with other technologies.

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Cathy McKnight: So the first thing is, is, do an audit. Look at what work is getting done and how it’s actually getting done.

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Cathy McKnight: Not like, I said earlier, the documented process that you did 2, 3, 4 years ago. But actually, how is the work getting done? What are all the steps? Who is involved?

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Cathy McKnight: How is information being exchanged? How is it being tracked? What are the metrics, all of those things.

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Cathy McKnight: And then also, what are the standards to support that? What are the roles and responsibilities, including that you need the big picture of how work gets done.

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Cathy McKnight: So, for example, one of the biggest challenges with this organization was thought leadership and how it was scheduled. So intakes, forms existed. Things were coming in from email all of these things. They thought they had a process, but they really didn’t.

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Cathy McKnight: So what they had to do was, go back and look at it and start with an original starting point. So somebody coming to them for a thought leadership piece and say, How does this work? How do we get from whatever that intake is recognizing that intake can come in many different forms to that final product?

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Cathy McKnight: And so, rather than right. So they captured, they captured what they did. But then what you’ve got to go is look and think about

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Cathy McKnight: What are the what does the business need. How is this being applied against other elements of content? Because surely there’s not a separate process for each and every kind of content that you’re going to create.

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Cathy McKnight: And again, what are you looking to achieve? You’ve got to understand that when you’re thinking about a process today and mapping it out to be optimized. You’ve got to think about what you’re going to start, stop and keep.

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Cathy McKnight: because you can’t keep doing all of the things and then add to those things because you’re never gonna get anything done. It just takes up too much time. So really stepping back and thinking about what are the priority use cases. So what is it that you do? 80% of the time? What is your role? What are the things that are repeated over and over and over again and start there. There’s no point starting in something that you only do once a month, or once every quarter, because you’re not gonna gain and see the efficiencies and the effectiveness and impact that the technology can have.

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Cathy McKnight: And then also think about how that priority use case, then leans into some of the other use cases where there’s slight variations, so that you’re aware of those

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Cathy McKnight: moving on to step 2 is about designing and prioritizing right?

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Cathy McKnight: So I can guarantee you that successfully implementing and adopting and scaling generative, I within the organization is going to create challenges. It’s going to create friction.

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Cathy McKnight: and it requires helpful planning resources and training.

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Cathy McKnight: A great place to start with. The assessment. Is your readiness, to integrate AI into your business with a process audit. So again, digging deeper into the existing or current behaviors, how are things actually going to get done?

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Cathy McKnight: And what’s at least one party use case, as I mentioned earlier.

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Cathy McKnight: Also, a stage here is thinking about your Matty level, and this is where you really have to take a hard look at the mirror and not look at. Say, Hey, this is where I really want us to be, but actually, where you are today, and we’re going to get into a little bit about a little bit more about the maturity model in the next slide.

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Cathy McKnight: but really understanding where you’re starting from, is going to enable you to set a path forward and grow, and get to those next stages of maturity.

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Cathy McKnight: When you think about a maturity model.

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Cathy McKnight: And this is something where we see organizations again, often

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Cathy McKnight: thinking they’re either further ahead than they are. But also keep in mind. When we think about a maturity model, we’re often thinking about them in a linear fashion, and we really shouldn’t. This is not something that you have to step through stage by stage, by stage. It’s not like the board game of life where you have to actually click through each of the blocks. Right? This is something where you can go in this case from experimentation to fluency.

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Cathy McKnight: because through your experimentation you got it. It clicked, it works, you figured it out. You do not have to go through each and every stage for each and every feature and functionality within generative AI or any other technology.

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Cathy McKnight: The other thing to consider, too, is understanding where you are as an individual.

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Cathy McKnight: then, where you are as a team collective

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Cathy McKnight: is going to be different to where the rest of the organization is. So as you start rolling out these features and functionalities as you start considering the implication and application of them.

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Cathy McKnight: how that happens. Because, again, what we’re finding with generative AI is that is falling on the shoulders of marketers and communications and content teams is they are being the ones to ask, to quote unquote, figure it out and do it quickly. But oh, by the way, make sure that the eyes are dotted and the t’s are crossed, and there isn’t anything illegal about what you’re doing, and that our brand is protected, that copyrights are being infringed upon, etc. Etc. Etc. There’s a lot of pressure here.

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Cathy McKnight: So as you start taking this out to the rest of the organization. Make sure that it’s being rolled out to where they are on the maturity level, not where you are or where you started, but where they actually are.

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Cathy McKnight: Some are going to just take it and use very little features and functionality about it. That’s that’s fine. There’s going to be other parts of the organization that really want to lean in.

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Cathy McKnight: So by you starting again with stage One, identifying how it can be used and how it can be integrated to improve a process not just be thrown at something willy-nilly, because that’s what everybody else is doing, and all the cool, cool kids are using it. But actually, where you can leverage to help the organization, you’re gonna need to go through that again as you, if you’re responsible for it, roll it out to the rest of the organization, following those steps as well.

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Cathy McKnight: And then, finally, once you’ve done all this, you get to the third step.

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Cathy McKnight: and in this particular case. There is no perfect time to when you buy technology to when it works. Some of you are gonna want to start right after you’ve identified the use cases and figured out where it can fit.

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Cathy McKnight: documented all of the the actual processes and come up with. You know how it actually works. You’ve gone through the workshop to test it. Please don’t do this in a vacuum. It really takes a team to make sure that you get the processes correctly or processes depending

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Cathy McKnight: it. Really, you want to test this out before you get to this stage, you want to make sure that the optimized process that you’ve come up with that, whether it’s you, whether it’s 2 people, whether it’s a team

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Cathy McKnight: actually works, have it tested with others. Put some outside pressure on it. That’s the way you’re going to get it right.

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Cathy McKnight: So again, whether you start the selection process right after you’ve done that, whether you wait until you’ve got you’ve been running with it for a while, and you’ve really worked out some of the bugs, and you’ve really seen where it brings value, where it’s adding efficiencies, or where you’ve been able to identify where the technology

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Cathy McKnight: plus some new skill sets are going to make a difference, or perhaps where? You know, you’re able. It’s a brand new process. And the existing team can leverage it right? There’s different ways in which you can see the benefits that are gonna come out of generative AI.

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Cathy McKnight: But whether you do it immediately after, because you know your procurement team and it’s going to take you 18 months to get there. or whether you wait a year in order to really figure it out

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Cathy McKnight: doing, selecting a technology, whether it’s generative AI or anything else in your martic stack. Really, there’s a process to be done. Robert and I have been doing this for many years.

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Cathy McKnight: And we’ve come up with a really tried and true process on how this works. QR code on this page here will take you to the guide. It gives you the step by step. Of course we are happy. If you have any questions to engage and and help you out, and and give you some direction in terms of how to make an inefficient selection process.

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Cathy McKnight: But make sure that you know and have this background. You’ve done this step 1, 2 identified not only where you are on the maturity level, but also where you want to get to on the maturity level before you move into the selection. Because if you don’t know what you’re buying for, and what the best fit’s going to be for you chances of

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Cathy McKnight: finding the right tool, let alone the best fit tool for you is going to be a challenge and getting the wrong tool implementing it means adoption is going to be like the steepest curve you’ve ever had, and I say that having been on all sides of the trifecta when it comes to technology implementations.

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Cathy McKnight: you want to make sure that the technology that and the investment that you’re making in the technology is the right one, and that you’ve done all of the background work

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Cathy McKnight: in order to make and choose the right and best fit technology, whether it’s generative, AI or otherwise.

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Cathy McKnight: So recap. Because I want to make sure that we get get some time for questions, these 3 steps are really going to set you up for long-term success.

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Cathy McKnight: These are not one and done activities, but rather a new way to approach process team technology and really maturation and evolution of your team, and how it leverages technology, whether existing or or what’s coming around the pipe next time

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Cathy McKnight: these steps are gonna help you implement generative AI or other technology

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Cathy McKnight: and in and otherwise as well, it’s going to contribute to and include benefits for processes and support. And it’s going to enable things rather than bog them down by understanding where the technology fits into what you need to do rather than the other way around.

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Cathy McKnight: You’re going to be able to actually make the most of the technology and use the features and functionalities and get their roi, that your your CTO and your Cfo are looking for you to do, cause you’ll actually have the metrics to show how you’re doing things better, faster, stronger.

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Cathy McKnight: And the bonus thing here is these 3 steps. Not only will they let you pivot into technology and where to apply it and where to leverage it, but they’re also gonna help you pivot out of technology and adapt processes to remove technology, either that you’re not using anymore. That maybe is no longer needed, because again, you’ve got it in 2 or 3 different parts of your Martic stack. One of the things we’re seeing. Maybe this is a topic for another. Webinar is, you know.

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Cathy McKnight: right now, our Martext stacks are all bloated because we’ve bought so much to get specific functionality. And as a lot of that functionality consolidates into more and more groupings of so Cms’s imagine, you know, to Robert’s Point, where they were 20 years ago to where they are today. This is not the same Cms. They do the same things, but they do so much more. So this methodology is actually going to let you clean up your Martext.

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Cathy McKnight: It’s going to let you streamline and create efficiencies with the technology that you use.

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Cathy McKnight: And again, with, you know our clients, we always start from a position of how. whether it’s generative. AI or other technology is going to add to the need for resources rather than replace teams or team members which we know and we hear is a huge concern.

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Cathy McKnight: you know. Ultimately, Jenny, I it can positively impact the effectiveness of the team and what it offers to the organization. So we shouldn’t feel worried about that. We’re gonna lose our jobs. If we actually get a geniiiii tool, it’s actually gonna let us do our jobs better. And as marketers and creatives get us back to doing the things that we love and and

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Cathy McKnight: are fun rather than the minutia that we can actually leverage the AI tool to be so. I don’t know what you think, Robert. I don’t know if generativei is the best and biggest promise of the future of marketing.

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Cathy McKnight: or is it gonna turn out like web content management, where we’re still, you know, scratching our heads and pulling our hair.

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Robert Rose: Yeah, I mean, well, I and I. And I think you said it well, and I and I’ll and I’ll sort of summarize in in in, you know, in in my own words, which is.

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you know, these are. These are fancy words, right? So you know, a current processes and optimal processes and use cases. And you know all of those things. It really just comes down to a 3 step process, which is.

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Robert Rose: you know, where are we now? Where do we want to go? And what’s in our way of getting there. And that’s really what we’re getting to when we when we talk about this, the biggest challenge that we see is that we don’t understand the very first one, which is, where are we now? So it’s really hard to map where we wanna go or what’s in our way of getting there when we don’t know where we are at the current moment. And so that setting up that audit of those occurrent processes, the actual what’s really going on here, not at an individual level, but a team level. What we’re finding just to Kathy’s point

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Robert Rose: in doing this with the clients that we have, we’re finding that actually, when we get to the other side of that, in most cases, in most cases, it’s not about cutting heads or actually getting more efficient or doing content faster, or certainly doing more content. It is ultimately about

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Robert Rose: things that we’re not doing, that we could be doing if we were to put in the gaps. What I’m talking about things we could be doing were we to put in a technology that helps us. And the key there is that helps us understand? Okay?

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Robert Rose: To Kathy’s Point web Cms systems, digital experience systems. All of these martic stack. They’re integrating AI as well.

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Robert Rose: Is that the right answer is just utilizing the AI that’s generating within those applications to better integrate that into our team. Is it better that we have an enterprise separate tool for AI that’s going to help us do. We can’t understand the decisions that we wanna make about which AI and how integrated across the teams it can be until we understand where we are.

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Robert Rose: and that helps us understand where we want to go. And we can understand then all of the obstacles, or what’s in our way of getting there. And that helps us. Rec, you know, put in the right requisite for the right technology to apply. And that’s and and that’s really, ultimately, it’s it’s just that simple. And it’s just that pragmatic. Now it’s harder to do, I understand, because you’re in a team, and and you’ve got other things to do. And this is your. This is not your day job, and all those kinds of things, but this is the work

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Robert Rose: to get ready to be ready for when somebody says, What is it gonna take for us to get AI good at AI. It is. It is this process.

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Cathy McKnight: and I think, something to add to is

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Cathy McKnight: process and documentation are 2 things that most people, most teams.

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Cathy McKnight: you know, it’s like, Yeah, we’ll get to it. And it’s the thing that’s always the eleventh on the 10 item to do list right?

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Cathy McKnight: So in actually taking the time to audit the processes involved in the marketing and the content, creation, and and all of the related activities that go along with supporting those 2 functions for the business.

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Cathy McKnight: Whether you get to the genai tech selection or not, you will gain, you know, so much more knowledge, and be so much more effective just by understanding how things work or dysfunctionally work, and making slight modifications. You may end up deciding that you know what no, how we do things is right fantastic. You know. What?

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Cathy McKnight: How do you leverage technology to facilitate that, to make room for the creative, the writing, the things that often marketers don’t have time to do because they’re so belayed by the technology load that it takes to actually get from ideation through the archive.

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Robert Rose: That’s a it’s a great point, which is. And to sum that up, it’s basically there are early wins at the end of each of these steps right? Which will, you know, at the very worst, you’ll actually understand if your air traffic control right? And you’re the content team or the marketing team end of Step One. You at least know all the planes in the air. You know where everything is, you know, where everything needs to head the end of step 2. You’ll understand. Okay, what are all the things that we

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can and should control in a prioritized way, and should be on our plate, and at the end of Step 3. If you decide to go there to to Kathy’s Point is now you’ll have the making the right choice about the right technology.

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Cathy McKnight: Alright. Well, we had a whole bunch of questions. Fantastic. Yeah. Well, J, not during nothing so much during that. We’ve got a couple from in real time. But there was a whole slew of them beforehand. But yes, thank you for those. Yes, yes. So before we jump into the questions and get will give people a chance now to throw their questions into the QA. Window.

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Cathy McKnight: Of the zoom tool so that we can build those up as well. We wanna make sure we address anybody who’s actually online. We have a great group of attendees right now. And get those questions answered. But you know

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Cathy McKnight: Robert and I, as I mentioned earlier and and as did he, we’ve been working together for more than 10 years now.

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Cathy McKnight: and one of the things as a a project manager. Pmp, and my brain works very much like that is, we are constantly looking at how we do things and how we can make them better, much to Robert chagrin. Sometimes, because I’m all about the process. I’m all about the documenting and making sure we have a way of doing things that are repeatable. So.

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Cathy McKnight: Jenny, I actually gave us a really good push to think about. Okay, how do we do things? What is needed in the organizations that we’re working with? And we’ve have the literally the privilege of working with, with amazing brands and organizations around the world

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Cathy McKnight: and seeing the inner workings. And some of you would be, we’ll we’ll take some solace in the fact that a lot of organizations that we’ve worked with, you know, you think. Oh, my gosh, they’ve got it all together. They do not. There is room for improvement. There’s help. That’s why we get called in.

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Cathy McKnight: But what we, what we did is we we took the process that we had been following for several years, and really died, dissected it similar to to this process.

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Cathy McKnight: and came up with a more succinct. More, I would say, Robert, you know, client focused and client-centric way of making sure that when we leave the room at the end of our engagement that there

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Cathy McKnight: more powerful, they’re more enabled by the work that we’ve done together. It’s not that they’ve got this this great roadmap or strategy now, but they also know how to execute against it. And that’s what we’ve captured here as well in our in our process, so I won’t go into it. You guys can take a look at that

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Cathy McKnight: but just wanted to point that out that you know

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Cathy McKnight: one of the things that we we’re eating our own dog food in here, and in that we want to make sure that what we share with you guys is is what we’ve tried and tested on ourselves as well.

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Robert Rose: I think he’s drinking our own champagne. I think that’s oh, I like that. Yes, I like that. Yeah, yes, yeah, fantastic, alright. Yes, indeed, we. And and basically it is to say that we’re not only help here to help you, roadmap, but we can help you build, implement, measure, manage, etc. We’re we’re just, you know we have. We have. We have one talent. We have one thing that we can do really well, and so we like to do it.

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Robert Rose: Let we do have some wonderful questions that came in, and I’ll I’ll just get to a couple of here before as we wrap up here in the next 5 min. Keeping respectful of your time of a 45 min, Webinar, and giving you 15 min to get to your next your next meeting, because you’re, I’m sure, back to back. Like most of us, are

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Robert Rose: the one of the questions that came in from the registers was, Are there AI models that can consolidate internal content and become a Chatbot, providing solutions based on customer inquiries. And, in fact, it’s a great one, and I’ll Kathy, I’ll let you take on this one. But my, take on, this is that

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this is honestly where we’re seeing some of the earliest opportunities. Right? So what we’re seeing a lot of the in 2024 are brands leaning in, doubling down on what might be called customer enablement content.

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Robert Rose: Whether that’s delivered through events or sort of online education or how tos, or it goes sometimes beyond just simple training on the product, but actually enabling the customer to do more with our products and services.

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And one of the earliest applications that we’ve really seen with generative AI is to take that corpus of content that cuts all that that stuff that you have that training material and either create an interactivity, a literal chat bot, which is fantastically valuable

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Robert Rose: or honestly derivative content that can be delivered in a much more segmented way. In other words, if we’ve got these big manuals or big how to guys or big presentations, that sort of enable a lot of things. How do you break that down automatically and find the patterns that can answer very specific questions in a very specific way. So

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Robert Rose: whether that’s a Chatbot interface or whether that’s basically understanding how to create derivative pieces of content using the existing corpus of content is again coming back to a process question. But it’s one of the earliest opportunities that we’re really seeing. Drive a lot of value that. And I would mention translation and localization as well in terms of in terms of in terms of value. Kathy, I don’t know you had anything to add to that.

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Cathy McKnight: No, I think I think you covered that well, it it is one of the

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Cathy McKnight: the most proven use cases out there right now, as far as how Jen AI can help and and facilitate. I mean, the chat bots have been around for a really long time. We don’t necessarily think about that, but they have been. Whether we saw them clearly or not, people have to acknowledge it.

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Cathy McKnight: but it is. I think it’s again like you said it is about there are a lot of options. The one caveat I will throw into that is that this, again, is another case in point about getting your hands around what you have.

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Cathy McKnight: So we talked about how getting your hands around as a step in the process, getting your hands around the processes.

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Cathy McKnight: It also requires for Jenny I. To really work well from a content generation perspective whether that’s dynamic on the fly, whether it’s

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Cathy McKnight: variant testing those kind of things, it needs to be able to look at your content, so you need to know where it is, where it’s and and have it consolidated. Now, I’m not saying it all has to be in one place. But having a centralized digital asset management system having a centralized content management system or data lake, Cdp, a place where you can point the bot in order to get the right amount

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Cathy McKnight: and the correct information. What you don’t want it is to generate solutions based on outdated information. And if you’re just giving it widespread access to all your data sources and all your content sources. I can guarantee you that there is stuff in there from like when we were children

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Cathy McKnight: and for me, that was a while ago. And it’s gonna pull that up because it doesn’t know any different. There are limitations. And you know what thinking now, there’s all hindsight is always good. We should have put that slide in as well, is. There’s a lot of things that Jen AI is good at. But there’s a lot of things. It’s not quite ready to do that, and validating currency and tone and protecting your brand based on just

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Cathy McKnight: what it it’s based on what it’s given. So if you give it old information, it’s going to think it’s right, and it’s going to share it.

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Robert Rose: Yeah, absolutely. Maybe one more quick one before we before we wrap up here. By the way, we will answer all of the questions. A, as we as we go forward in terms of the on-demand version of this and and and sort of the follow-up materials that we’ll provide the the question is, is there a way to get AI to cite their sources, to cut down on time to verify accuracy? Did Kathy, you got a quick take on that

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Cathy McKnight: so that all depends right? So from if you’re creating your own database from which it’s pulling.

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Cathy McKnight: then yes, absolutely but as far as just using an uneducated genii tool, then, no, you don’t necessarily know where it’s coming. This is actually where that prompt engineer role that everybody was like all freaking out about last year. That’s where knowing how to write a prompt while, we sort of tongue in cheek, said, you know. Oh, it’s not about the prompt

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Cathy McKnight: getting generative. AI to work well and work for you is really

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Cathy McKnight: getting the prompt right is absolutely part of that. And so putting in parameters that brings up that kind of information or providing it. The data, the specific data block that you want it. To to garner the information from are 2 of the ways that you can validate the accuracy. And and where it’s citing from. Yeah, ultimately, it’s about custom learning models, right, building your own building your own learning model there.

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Robert Rose: and and getting to it, and and by better prompting. What we’re really getting at is asking better questions, just asking learning Cap, and ask better questions to what we really want rather than what what we may think we want. Yeah. And there are there are tools that do include citing resources. Yeah, indeed. And with that.

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Robert Rose: thank you very much. Thank you very much for hanging out. Basically wanted to tee up next month, as I mentioned, at the very top of the show. We’ve got a great a year’s worth of of programming already in the books, and next month will be no different. We’re gonna talk about content orchestration, maybe a term that you’ve started to hear a lot more of these days. We’re gonna be joined by a special guest, Leona Cave.

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Robert Rose: who we’ve been working with at Hilton for a a number of years in a number of capacities, and Leon is gonna share what the Hilton journey has been on content, a. A operations and content orchestrations and sort of evolving their entire content strategy to a content orchestration, and

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Cathy McKnight: we’ll all learn how to sort of optimize our content strategy together. So thank you very much. I hope you’ll register for that, and we’ll see you next month, and thank you very, very much once again, and remember everybody. It is your story to tell tell it. Well, we’ll see you next month on the next webinar.