Let AI do its thing, so we can do ours
Over the past 12 months, we've been working hard to understand how AI can help the business and where the opportunities lie to enable the team and improve our service to clients.
We've made some great progress; AI is proving incredibly helpful across the business, including coding, content creation, and research. Keeping up with AI in our sector is challenging to say the least. Even today, we noticed that one of the new features of WordPress 7 is AI integration. Direct connections to AI APIs like Google and OpenAI allow users to generate text, write meta descriptions and create featured images. Something new to investigate.
But we're also beginning to understand AI's limitations. Our adoption of AI has been considered and driven by the desire to help the team, who always provide oversight of any AI input. This is very important. AI has incredible power, but it can be spectacularly dumb on occasion.
Put simply, we are trying to use AI to do what AI does best and ensure people do what people do best. This may sound obvious, but it's not always easy to distinguish. In the marketing sector, there’s a proliferation of new AI tools trying to mimic or replace the work of real people. They don’t work very well.
The fact is that AI has real limitations when it comes to being human. AI can’t understand human emotions, nuance, shared experiences and tends to deliver bland and sometimes tone deaf, inappropriate responses. It is by nature generic and often repetitive, wordy and rather dull. We've all read AI content; it can be a real struggle to get through.
Take designing something like a website or an advertising campaign. Putting the intellectual property concerns to one side for the moment, AI will have a good stab at delivering these things. But if you want something really good that differentiates you and properly engages with people, then you need genuine creativity, you need humans - specifically, a great marketing team.
In many ways, I find this a real source of optimism. AI can do the things that AI is good at, leaving me free to do the fun stuff, like interacting with other actual humans.
No AI was used in the creation of this post. I did use voice typing, very handy.
