We interviewed six experts at top marketing artificial intelligence companies to get their best advice for marketers getting started with AI.
Here’s what they shared.
Remember that AI isn't rocket science.
"AI is not rocket science, it is just a bunch of mathematical models that help to gain actionable insights from the large data accumulated by the modern world. There is no question of whether AI will be leading and dominating the marketing industry, but rather when it will become an essential component of every marketing routine. So do not be afraid, and try the AI tools to discover the best fit for your job and industry."
Aleks Farseev, CEO, SoMin (AI for social media ads)
Don't forget conversational use cases.
"Conversational marketing and autonomous reps are the future of the industry. Automating conversations will allows marketers to have conversations at scale with their leads, prospects, and customers."
Ilan Kasan, CEO, Exceed.ai (AI for lead qualification)
Don’t be fooled by big, expensive deployments.
“The biggest thought I'd share is a word of warning. Don't buy into huge deployments and expensive AI and machine learning projects. The correct use of these technologies should feel like a self-driving car—sign up, set goals, sit back and start benefiting from a better strategy and better results.
If someone is selling you something complicated or with a long lead time, tell them to build their product first.”
Brennan White, CEO, Cortex (AI for content marketing)
Make sure you have clean data.
"It’s not just about the algorithms, it’s about the availability and cleanliness of your data as well. Ten years ago when I worked at Google, Google Translate had the best accuracy for both Chinese and Arabic. The underlying reason was not that the algorithms were better tuned for these languages, but that thanks to the U.S. Department of Defense, researchers had the most translated text available for these two languages.”
Pawan Deshpande, CEO, Curata (AI for content distribution)
"Data quality is a key foundation for any predictive marketing technology to work. Take time and invest in data hygiene solutions (enrichment, deduping, lead to account matching etc).”
Raviv Turner, Founder, CaliberMind (AI for B2B marketing)
Ask vendors the right questions.
"Marketers should beware of 'AI-washing.' Ask vendors if the AI just provides recommendations and surfaces insights or does it autonomously take action on the marketer’s behalf?
When comparing answers, ask yourself if you want to do some or all of the execution manually. What level of automation is sufficient to solve your challenges? Helping with decisioning and actually doing decisioning are two very different use cases.
Or Shani, CEO, Albert (AI for ads)
Paul Roetzer
Paul Roetzer is founder and CEO of Marketing AI Institute. He is the author of Marketing Artificial Intelligence (Matt Holt Books, 2022) The Marketing Performance Blueprint (Wiley, 2014) and The Marketing Agency Blueprint (Wiley, 2012); and creator of the Marketing AI Conference (MAICON).