Artificial Intelligence in marketing (AI) is the main topic in most of the business and marketing newsletters I get now in early 2023. The tidal wave of words written on the subject since the launch of Open-AI’s Chat-GPT towards the end of 2022 has flooded into even the most secluded areas of marketing discussion. It’s not just in the business world. The benefits, dangers and potential to alter the course of history are being debated by philosophers, billionaires, governments, and anyone with an opinion to share. I published a post on the ethical debate on my personal blog.

What does this mean to small to medium enterprise owners (SME), entrepreneurs, and solo professionals? I am leaving out some in our audience – members of corporate marketing departments for this blog post – as the use of Artificial Intelligence in marketing in the corporate environment will likely be controlled, driven (or perhaps banned) by that great stifler of initiative, “company policy”.

Distilling the thousands of words I have read on the subject in the last few months, the thoughts of many expert guests on The Yakking Show, and the results of my experiments with AI, I have a few conclusions.

• The current versions of AI for text content generation apps are not yet equivalent to competent human writers.
• AI technology is evolving and will continue to improve.
• AI, at its current level, can be a useful tool for generating ideas and rough drafts of content.
• AI-generated content needs editing and personalizing.
• AI is unlikely to replace all creative jobs in marketing any time soon – but it may replace lower-level creators.
• AI is not going away, it will be impossible for governments to ban it, and difficult to slow down its development.

What Will be the Effect of Artificial Intelligence on Marketing for SMEs?

I started work in the corporate world in the era of electric golf ball typewriters, electro-mechanical accounting machines, switchboard operators and adding machines. Programmable electronic calculators were still a novelty. Over the 50-plus years of my working career, I have seen the Luddite-like resistance to new technology raise barriers to adoption on everything from fax machines and word processors to the use of drones to scout for pests in crops. The use of artificial intelligence in marketing will not escape the attention of its detractors. However, because of the influence of tech-savvy Gen X and millennials, I guess the adoption cycle will be shorter than, for example, that of the fax machine in the 1980s.

In the first quarter of 2023, there has been a proliferation of apps using AI to generate text and image content. Now there are apps for AI-generated audio and video content. Chat GPT has been upgraded, many other developers are investing heavily in the race to develop the “best” AI tools.

If anything is certain, AI is not going away.

We need to live with it, and use it to improve our productivity but accept that it can be used by our competitors, adversaries, detractors and organizations, both legitimately and unethically in ways that we can’t even imagine.

Over the next few weeks, we will have expert guests on the show to talk about artificial intelligence in marketing and other applications. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter which will alert you to guests for the current and following weeks. By subscribing, you will get access to our first episode of Success Secrets – normally only available to Premium members.

Two books I have read recently and which I can thoroughly recommend: Epic Content Marketing by Joe Pulizzi and Brian Piper – Belonging To The Brand by Mark Schaefer

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