My late grandmother always encouraged us to get out and meet people, and I sure am glad I did. In the last couple of weeks at conferences, I took in a lecture on What it Means to Be Human in an Age of AI by neuroscientist Heather Berlin, PhD, MPH, at the Colorado Behavioral Healthcare Council’s annual session, and participated in a workshop with Silicon Valley CMO Liza Adams on Inspiring New Possibilities by Embracing AI Responsibly at the Women Presidents Organization’s fall retreat for the Denver chapters.

Here are three things I learned from these wickedly smart women and how I am applying my learnings in my work as a fractional CMO:

1. AI cannot replace consciousness.

It has no experience and is only a simulation of thought. That means regardless of how AI develops in the future, we will always need human connection: touch, relationships, community, spirituality, service.

In social media marketing, the data shows people follow other’s profiles with much more frequency and engagement than they follow business profiles. Meanwhile, in thought leadership/content marketing, readers can detect an AI voice versus an authentically human voice. In all marketing, I can think about you, my valued readers, current events in real time, my relevant experience at recent conferences meeting and talking with people from whom you might like to learn, and I can connect with you here on the page correlating all those vantage points into a cohesive, relatable blog.

Here’s another example. A client recently approached me to say his team developed a fundraising campaign he felt was falling flat. I reviewed it with him; the bones were there, but it read rather mechanically. I asked him about his vision for the campaign. In seven minutes, he shared with me his passion for researching behavioral health trends in veterans who have returned from war, and how those trends affected the lens through which they saw the whole world. He expressed his curiosity about how teens today might similarly view the world through a skewed lens after the collective trauma of the 2020 pandemic. After our talk, I wove his story into the campaign and ignited readers to get curious about how they might support teens in our community in improving their mental health. The client’s reaction to the new draft: “Wow. This really has shaped up nicely. Thank you all for your edits.” They were his edits, really, his story. I just made the connection.

Storytelling matters in marketing, and it happens through human connection.

2. AI is the next big SEO.

Internet visitors are electing to make search queries not on Google but on ChatGPT and comparable AI tools. That means we marketers need a keen eye on not only getting managed brands found through search engine optimization, but also via AI search. To dig deeper into how this might be done, I reached out to Andy Crestodina, Co-Founder and CMO at Orbit Media and specialist in SEO, analytics, AI, content strategy and website optimization. He responded:

It’s a fun and very interesting question, but there isn’t an answer yet. And there may never be good answers on how to reliably get AI to recommend a brand. It’s because even slight variations in prompts can lead to different recommendations. It’s not like Google.

Having said that, it’s definitely true that a brand that has more relevant content and more mentions around the web is going to appear in AI responses more often.

For this reason (and similar to SEO), I can confidently say that the brand with the biggest digital footprint has the best odds of winning AI recommendations. Build up a very active digital PR program and you’ll be fine! In search, in AI and in word-of-mouth conversations…

The ellipsis at the end of his message made me smile. More will be revealed!

3. What I put into AI is what I will get out of it.

I mean this threefold:

1. 1. When I am ethical and aligned with my high personal values when using AI, I teach it to be ethical and aligned with good human values. The more good humans use AI, the more good AI will do.
   2. When I begin by entering into AI human data that I have gathered (such as voice-of-the-customer data to inform brand, a strategy session recording in which I led a client team to align on a target persona and content titles for the year or programmatic survey data informing an eBook), it in turn can produce much more authentic brand messaging, blogs or eBooks. Still, at our firm, we have three sets of human eyes on every draft of every project after it comes from AI: an editor, a proofer, and a brand manager.
   3. The prompt is everything. Admittedly, most of us already knew that, but I learned I was at about 40% capacity in writing great prompts for AI. Here is a sample AI prompt that Adams shared in her workshop:

      You are an exceptional B2B SaaS marketer. You are skilled at deeply understanding the market and deriving key insights to guide content creation. You are hyper-focused on ensuring that your content resonates and empathizes with your target customers and that you use their natural language in communicating with them.

      The attached pdf includes reviews from 2023 to now of users in companies with 50-1000 employees. These users use Asana daily for 6 or more months.

      Based on these reviews only, please infer natural language top of funnel, mid funnel, and bottom of the funnel inquiries that project management SaaS prospects might ask. Include a mix of branded and non-branded inquiries that prospects might use in search.

      Please make sure that you use the actual words that the reviewers used in their reviews. Do not paraphrase or make up words. Also include the rationale for your suggestions at each stage. Please put this info in a table.

      Please think about this step by step. Take a deep breath. There is no need to rush. I have full confidence in you. Do you have any questions before we start?

I knew to start by sharing with the system what sort of expert it is, which will allow it to draw on more advanced sources across the web. I knew to share my human-gathered data. The last three paragraphs were the real light bulb moments for me. To date, I have been treating AI like a junior copywriter, when in fact I can query it for support with much more strategic thinking. I can give it clear parameters from the get-go rather than overcorrecting after the first prompt is answered. I can express my confidence and ask it if my prompt was clear. That is AI and the strategist in co-creation at its finest!

ChatGPT was first launched by OpenAI in November 2022. We are less than 24 months in with this! What did you learn this year about how best to use this powerful new tool in our marketing toolbox?

Since 2007, Big Buzz® has helped Stage II to Stage III organizations systemize marketing to achieve growth goals. Founder and CEO Wendy O’Donovan Phillips is the author of two books available on Amazon, Kaboom and Flourish, multiple data-driven eBooks, has been published in McKnight’s, in Forbes, and has been quoted in The Washington Post, ABC News, and Chicago Tribune. She has lectured for the American Dental Association, Argentum, several chapters of LeadingAge, and dozens of other organizations in front of audiences ranging in size from 25 to 3,000. She has been honored by the American Marketing Association for excellence in her field and has been named a Gold Key Award Winner by the Business Marketing Association. In her two-decades-long career, she has consulted with hundreds of organizations globally to support improved marketing clarity, strategies and outcomes. Get details: visit www.bigbuzzinc.com and follow Wendy.