Is Your Organization Ready for the New Era of Generative AI Adoption?

Nearly a year on from the public launch of ChatGPT, Generative AI is entering a new era.

Playtime is over. AI is no longer an emerging technology for early adopters. Mainstream integration of generative AI into products from Microsoft, Google, and Adobe means AI will soon be everyone’s assistant. From drafting a simple email to creating sales pitches, everyday tasks will become easier, faster and more efficient.

The pace of development shows no signs of slowing. There are regular breakthrough announcements that have major implications for how we operate our businesses across every function. 

While the potential for unprecedented productivity gains are exciting, a balanced view is required. Generative AI also poses risks, including diluting what makes your business interesting and relevant to your customers. 

With AI technology commoditised and at every worker’s fingertips, how can companies harness the potential while also safeguarding their reputations, providing unique value, and maintaining differentiated brand experiences?

To answer these questions and more, businesses poised at the brink of this technological revolution will need a strategic approach to strike the right balance in human-machine collaboration and harness its potential.

Enterprise Software Levels Up

Software giants like Microsoft, Google, and Adobe are spearheading the mainstream integration of generative AI capabilities into popular enterprise tools with a huge user base.

Collectively, these integrations mark a seismic shift in how enterprise software supports knowledge workers. Day to day tasks now have intelligent assistance and automation. In theory, this enables staff to offload repetitious work and focus their efforts on strategy, innovation and customer experiences unique to the organisation.

Microsoft

Microsoft is at the forefront of this shift through the launch of its OpenAI-powered Copilot. This AI assistant is embedded across popular Office 365 apps like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Teams. It also enhances the use of OneNote, Loop, and OneDrive.

Copilot aims to help solve complex problems at work by accessing a user's entire data universe, including emails, meetings, chats, documents, and web content.

It can enhance the creation process in Word and PowerPoint, improve and deepen analysis in Excel, boost productivity within Outlook, and enhance collaboration across Teams. Its capabilities allow for easier formatting, writing, summarisation, data organisation and more.

Google

Google has been slower with the deployment of its Generative AI tools. However, it is expanding its offerings with Duet.

Like Copilot, Google Duet is a suite of AI-powered tools designed to improve users productivity and creativity across Google Workspace and Cloud. It is currently available in beta for Gmail, Sheets, Slides, and Docs.

Google’s Bard can also boost users’ capabilities. It can produce written content, programme code based on natural prompts, and help users to understand the contents of a YouTube video. It can summarise the main points of the video, identify the key concepts and arguments presented, provide context by discussing related topics and events, and answer questions.

Bard is set to become more integrated with Google’s suite of services, including Docs, Drive, Gmail, and Maps, aiming to make interactions with Bard more visual and intuitive, enhancing the user experience.

Adobe

Adobe's generative AI offer, centered around Adobe Firefly, is a collection of tools and services that use artificial intelligence to empower creatives to generate new content, enhance existing content, and streamline their creative workflows.

While still in the early stages of development, Firefly has already demonstrated significant potential in text-based image generation. As the technology continues to mature, it is expected to play an increasingly prominent role in the creative industry.

For instance, tools like Generative Fill in Photoshop, Recolor in Illustrator, and voice transcription clean-up in Premiere Pro use machine learning to accelerate content creation or ideation around design visuals. Integrations allow new images, color palettes, and other artifacts to be produced with simple text prompts.

The Promise

The verdict is clear – this is a paradigm shift that the senior team at all enterprises must address. As Gartner says, “Generative AI will be everywhere, so strategise now.” And according to Forrester, “Businesses need to understand the impact, assess organisational readiness, and prioritise use cases for adoption.”

Hesitate and you risk ceding first-mover advantage to savvier competitors racing ahead with AI adoption. With things moving so rapidly, waiting too long could penalise an organisation for years as they lose out on accrued efficiencies. 

And for enterprises still debating, remember that generative AI abilities will only continue advancing at an astonishing clip. The clock is ticking.

The productivity potential unlocked by intelligent assistance and automation is too sizable to ignore. Companies should invest resources now to integrate generative AI capabilities into their technology stacks and workflows.

As it is integrated into our work software, generative AI will become ubiquitous. Anyone will be able to use these tools without needing to learn new software. You won’t need to be a skilled graphic designer proficient with Photoshop to create brand specific images. You’ll just type a few words describing what you want to see and AI will create it for you, inside the document you’re working on.

Instead of hours spent writing repetitive status reports, AI authoring tools like Copilot will eliminate the grind. In addition, generative AI will amplify productivity gains by enabling greater individualisation of the customer experience.

The promise is that embracing this future frees up organisations to lean into what makes their business model and customer experience truly unique. Staff equipped with the power of AI will be able to devote more time to critical thinking, strategising and creativity.

What could your team achieve with AI in their toolkit?

The Pitfalls 

The potential for generative AI is undoubtedly exciting. But there are questions that need to be answered beyond how enterprises put this technology to work. Even the creators of AI are split between those who are optimistic and pessimistic about its impacts. Companies can’t go in blind.

The challenge is both strategic and creative. There are policy questions and ethical issues to address. There are questions regarding quality assurance, fact-checking, and brand reputation. Issues around company culture, operations, upskilling staff, and how Generative AI affects output value as well as volumes.

While generative AI stands to deliver game-changing productivity, companies must be careful. Organisations can’t afford to reject this technological advance, but equally they must spearhead adoption by addressing the risks head-on rather than reactively.

The judicious oversight, governance and customisation of AI will determine who sustains a competitive edge and ensures the technology’s promises aren’t undermined by unintended consequences.

For example, among Forrester’s Predictions for 2024 is this worrying thought: “Thinly customised generative AI content will degrade the purchase experience for 70% of B2B buyers.”

It is undeniable that by using generative AI tools, you can speed up content creation workflows. But if used ill-advisedly, that will only enable your team to unleash a deluge of bland, irrelevant content that irritates potential B2B customers more than it “wows” them.

Companies need to formulate strategies for harnessing AI's promise without outsourcing what makes them unique to it. Instead of ceding their strategic decision-making and unique points of difference, AI should be used thoughtfully. This ensures that while AI can take over routine tasks and data analysis, the core strategic decisions and creative directions continue to be driven by human intelligence and experience.

Best Practices for your Generative AI Strategy

As enterprises embark on making the best use of the AI tools embedded in their software, it’s crucial to adopt a strategic approach. The best practices outlined here will guide businesses in leveraging the benefits of Generative AI while mitigating potential risks.

Assess and Address the Impact on the Workforce

Your staff may not be following the developments in Generative AI as closely as you are. And when they consider what they hear about Generative AI, they may be more fearful of losing their jobs than excited to embrace the potential for productivity enhancements.

Generative AI can handle many tasks, but the human element of your value remains irreplaceable, especially in areas requiring emotional intelligence, moral judgment, and complex decision-making. 

Part of the transition to more effective use of AI in your operations will be understanding and mitigating the impact of AI on employees. This may include re-skilling programs, role redefinitions, and creating new positions to manage and maintain AI systems.

If you want your people to be enthused rather than fearful, maintain a balance where they can see that AI is there to support and enhance their capabilities, not replace them.

Establish Clear Use Guidelines

Define specific areas where Generative AI can add value to your products, services, and marketing strategy. These guidelines should outline the scope of AI’s role, focusing on tasks that benefit from automation and AI insights, while keeping strategic and creative decision-making in human hands.

You will need to develop a robust governance framework. Address the ethical concerns, privacy issues, and security risks associated with generative AI. This will involve setting up policies on data usage, ensuring compliance with regulations, and embedding ethical considerations into company-wide AI deployments.

Implement Staff Training and Support Programs

As generative AI becomes a staple in day to day company life, ensure employees are equipped to use the technology effectively. This means that businesses have to think about AI as an upskilling issue, but also support mechanisms to help employees use the tools well.

Businesses need to ensure their people understand what AI is capable of doing well and what it isn’t. Training programs should not only cover the technical aspects of using AI tools but also foster an understanding of their strategic application in business contexts.

Something businesses urgently need to do is provide swipefiles and templates for effective and brand specific prompting. Microsoft Co-pilot provides help on this issue but companies can’t rely on generic guidelines and expect their teams to receive tailored outputs.

To create high-quality content and experiences, you will also have to cover more than just effective prompt engineering. Training will need to cover policy and procedures, along with guidelines on using editorial discernment to maintain brand voice.

Finally, the rapid evolution of AI technology requires a workplace culture that embraces change and innovation. Encourage employees to experiment with AI tools and provide feedback. This approach promotes a more adaptable, resilient, and forward-thinking organisation.

Prioritise Customer-Centric AI Applications

Companies developing a B2B marketing strategy with the use of generative AI tools must be customer, rather than efficiency, obsessed. 

With your people up to speed on the role AI plays in your organisation and how to use it effectively, where can you harness generative AI to enhance customer experiences? How can it be used to improve marketing personalisation, on-demand customer service, or product innovation? The focus should always be on adding value for the customer.

Think about the future of search and how AI-powered search experiences are going to change how customers find and interact with your brand. In addition to sharpening the commercial intent of your content strategy, do you need to address gaps in your digital marketing mix?

Finally, when AI is at everyone’s fingertips, how do you ensure humans are apparent at all critical touchpoints and customer interactions? With AI assistance in everyone’s emails, for example, how do you safeguard against authenticity being sacrificed for efficiency in the emails going out to clients?

No amount of AI personalisation is able to replace the thoughtfulness your people bring to communications with a potential B2B buyer. Make sure AI doesn’t dilute their influence.

Leverage AI for Effective Data-Driven Marketing

Stay abreast of advances in AI models and continually refine your systems and workflows. This includes customising foundation models with brand specific training data, and revising strategies based on the evolving business environment and customer needs.

Investigate AI’s capability to enhance the analysis of large volumes of data. This can inform strategic decisions, identify market trends, and uncover insights that might be missed by human analysis alone.

Wherever possible, provide AI with detailed customer personas to work from, information about brand voice, and style guides. This is one way to effectively guide the personalisation efforts toward a high degree of relevancy for a B2B customer.

Navigating the Future of Generative AI in Enterprise

Generative AI can empower people and enterprises as long as C-level executives understand the bigger picture of the technology’s capabilities and think through its potential adverse implications and unintended consequences for their organisations.

According to McKinsey, many senior executives over the past decade felt they were behind in implementing automation and digitisation. It took a long time for them to embrace concepts of a neural network, artificial intelligence, and machine learning. Now, they do not want to be left behind again with the rapid integration of generative AI models and deployment of generative AI tools.

McKinsey suggests that by 2030, generative AI could enable automation of up to 70% of business activities. The result will be a significant impact all organisations and the global economy in the coming years.

Will generative AI replace the executives of enterprises? Probably not, even if one of OpenAI’s interim CEOs seemed to think otherwise. However, top executives who implement generative AI effectively will replace top executives of enterprises that do not.

Business leaders need to adapt and adopt now because innovations are moving so rapidly. As marketing has been at the forefront of experimenting with AI, CMOs can expect to be called on to take a leadership role in helping the organisation to understand the opportunities and challenges ahead. 

There is no perfect path for all businesses to follow as we are breaking new ground together. 

What needs to be crystal-clear is what generative AI means for your business, how you plan to use it to advance the organisation’s business goals and objectives, and how you can balance its strengths and weaknesses. Careful thought must be given to questions about business goals and objectives, on what AI means for growth strategy, market dynamics, the competitive landscape, customer behaviour, and brand.

As AI becomes increasingly integral to content and marketing, we can help to preserve your B2B brand voice and customer experience. Reach out to explore how 1827 Marketing’s approach can future-proof your organisation amidst AI proliferation.