A CMO’s Blueprint for AI Deployment

AI is the most significant technological innovation ever created.

Almost nine months ago, ChatGPT put the power of Generative AI into the hands of 100 million users almost overnight, making it so effortless to use that it became difficult to understand its true impact because we all think of ChatGPT as the benchmark for AI.

It’s magical. It can answer questions, write, create, digest text, and learn.

Does it replace humans? Is it powerful enough to take my job? Is it going to destroy creative industries? No. It won't – but it will make your existing team exponentially more effective, and I’m going to show you why.

Advertising Jobs to be Done

Advertising is diverse, so it’s useful to put some context around the types of advertising and marketing tasks. Based on Kai-Fu Lee’s Blueprint for AI + Humanity coexistence, we are able to separate tasks into four main buckets and separate the division of work that leans into performance Vs creative.

Even today, you can see this play out in your digital life; as you Google search, AI and ML is serving you Ads¹ based on crunching your browsing behavior against 100s of millions of other users. In your email, you will see promotional emails from brands with some kind of personalization content²; while you are on Instagram you will see highly creative brand activiations³, and you will share a brand or product that resonated with you through that journey with friends⁴.

If we think about the skill sets required for those digital touchpoints, over time, there will be a migration from the bottom left to the top right; human skills will become less involved in the execution of each individual campaign.

That doesn't mean that humans or AI takes over; it simply means that AI plays a supporting role to the humans for that type of work, while in Quadrant One, humans support the AI by writing its code but letting it get on with the work.

This shift in skillsets, which has already started, is important to understand so that you can leverage your resources, both human and technology based in the right way.

The quadrant with the most longevity for human skillsets is Quadrant Four; the deep emotional demands that can only be created by our brains, not machines. However, for this work to truly shine, it requires more than just a human touch. As AI’s rollout continues, understanding consumer behavior will become even more difficult, and the pace of change will increase, as will the requirement for more creative work.

For C-suite, understanding what to Build Vs Buy is a challenge. It’s easy to see that the development of generative AI adverts and content should be bought from tech platforms (Google, Meta, Adobe) due to the wealth of data and engineering talent.

When it comes to a build perspective, brands have an opportunity to leverage the emotional depth of the fourth quadrant with the precision and efficiency of AI. This requires dedicated, bespoke work. Brands can build systems tailored to their distinct needs and rigorously train AI on datasets that reflect their essence.

There's no cookie-cutter solution here; every brand's integration with AI will be a unique journey.

AI upskills humans

If you were to do a detailed cost analysis of cost attrition, you would see that it’s highest at the start of the process.

Your highest-paid talent is working hard to ideate something new, or unique. Naturally, there will be many dead ends, restarts, and resets, which results in a waste of financial resources - but those dead ends and restarts are invaluable in the creative process, as they are all building blocks required to arrive at the final idea.

Allowing AI to support this process creates a framework backed by data to allow teams to quickly go down multiple dead ends in seconds, providing inspiration to the teams on consumer behavior, and automatically testing ideas against your target audiences.

This generates momentum in the creative process, finding the right data point to create the insight to produce the concept that will break through.

It’s also hard for AI to do out of the box, because generative AI is not trained on your brand, your behaviors, your thinking, or your ways of working.

Only by training best-in-class public models with your private data will you develop AI assistants that add value beyond a generic ChatGPT response. This is because the available LLMs are trained on broad Internet content, not the unique data of your brand.

AI agents, your new creative partner

Leveraging AI to partner with your teams is a win-win situation. With a profound emphasis on real-time data and insights, AI tools shed light where there was once ambiguity. By granting teams the ability to understand their audience as they evolve, every nuance and every shift in sentiment becomes visible.

This deeper, more immediate insight is not just information; it's power. Power to create pitches and ideas that resonate in real time. It eliminates guesswork, providing teams with the affinity of ideas generation, quickly. Meaning every creative effort is not just a shot in the dark, it’s using an informed strategy that hits the mark more effectively and efficiently.

By providing AI to your teams, you’ve created a competitive advantage; not only will the work be better, but you will attract better talent who want to leverage the tools in their day-to-day. On top of that, the closed-loop system between the AI and the humans will improve the AI dramatically over time.

Build vs Buy

As we go from quadrants 1, 2, 3, and into 4 the argument firmly changes from buy to build.

To build a moat against your competitors, you must build workflows and systems that reflect your brand's DNA. Which is deeply ingrained in your data, your processes, and the talent you nurture. Understanding how to capture and leverage this intrinsic identity is something off-the-shelf solutions can never truly replicate because your team and process are truly unique.

Building ensures that your AI tools are perfectly tailored to tackle the specific challenges and needs of your brand and that your strategies resonate with your target audience.

It's also important to ensure that your foundational AI models are ethical, unbiased, and representative. You want technology that reflects and respects the diversity and complexity of the real world and doesn't skew your team's thinking or ideation.

The roadmap is clear: Embrace AI, but let it be shaped by the human essence that defines your brand. The future isn't about AI versus humans; it's about AI and humans coexisting and co-creating.

Tim Rodgers, Rehab AI

Join the conversation

If you are curious about how to integrate AI into your creative process, we’re helping clients unlock their most valuable AI use case with our half-day Discovery workshop; industry-proven to be the fastest route from theory to prototype.

Contact our team to discover more about Rehab’s market-leading AI consultancy.

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