AI-powered martech is dazzling and versatile.
To make it succeed, put a premium on training your team members — both human and digital.
The current promise of AI is to do more, quickly. At last week’s Pros & Content summit, stories underlining that were everywhere. Marketers are turbo-charging ideation and fast-tracking complex, agent-driven performance analysis. At DDM Content Solutions, a humans-plus-AI approach gives us scale and speed that would have been unimaginable just five years ago.
But there’s something more around the corner. Generative AI brings a whole new approach to your marketing tech stack. Engaging with data just turned into talking with a friend. That has big implications for our work, touching our go-to-market strategies, deliverables and how we run our marketing teams.
Make way for the agents
One of the major coming trends is agentic AI — tools that can take on complex tasks by themselves, acting as “agents” for marketing teams. Knotch, the presenters of the Summit, rolled out their newest tool, Agent-C, which can string together their current agents into a kind of super-agent.
That kind of autonomy will take a big leap of trust — and its output may be a lot for human teams to oversee. But, it’s a must. Karthik Rau, Chief Executive Officer at Contentful, wonders if this calls for a new approach to our martech, one that’s less about setting dials and more about ongoing interaction. “I wonder if the way to think about [using AI] is not necessarily in terms of tools, but almost like instructing people,” he says.
Brian O’Kelly, Co-Founder and CEO of Scope3, agreed. “You need to ‘onboard’ your agents,” he said.“ They know where the databases are…. But they also need to know the philosophy and what your business does. You have to share your values your principles.” In other words, it’s like hiring an employee. You don’t just give them a task — you teach them your in-house way of doing things. “Any human or AI is going to need that to be effective.”
Bring your human team along
Not every flesh-and-blood marketer is equally prepared for the AI rollout — or new digital team members. This can present team leaders with unique challenges. When you’re onboarding tech that has all the hallmarks of a junior colleague, some feathers are bound to get ruffled.
“People immediately feel threatened and defensive, And that’s natural” says Jamie Roô, Head of Wealth Management Digital Content at Morgan Stanley. In the short term, she found that the answer was “a lot of sympathy and empathy.” But by including skeptical team members at the forefront of the conversation, “they became the subject matter experts” she says.
Of course confidence can go too far. Joe Lazer, former VP of Marketing at Contently says that some team members stretch the abilities of the tech. “Everyone thinks they’re a copywriter now. Everyone thinks they’re a creative director. And when that happens, you can start to lose certain things to the brand.”
Rau sees this as a more holistic challenge. “I think there are a lot of analogies with how we manage teams that we have to start bringing into this concept of managing agents,” he says. Patience, education and defining limits will add up to “a different way of working.”
When the audience is AI, too
Marketers are still working for the person on the other end of the screen — the customer with a need to fill. But it’s important to recognize that, in the very near future, some of those customers (or their proxies) will be AIs themselves.
Take the case of the new “answer engines” — platforms like ChatGPT, Claude or Perplexity. They’re eating away at traditional search, which means that to get in front of customers, you’ll need to convince them to include you. “If you’re not in their answer, you’re not in the conversation,” says Scott Gardner, Founder of New Media Advisors.
The science of placing on answer engine results is evolving quickly, with plenty of black hat tactics winning in the short term. But at heart, the mission for content creators remains the same. “The fundamental things you do from an SEO perspective haven’t changed,” says Cooper Nelson, Senior Director of Content Strategy at the University of Phoenix. Deliver solid, useful answers — and don’t be stingy about the contributions of your brand.
At the moment, the challenges of balancing SEO and “GEO” (generative engine optimization) are tricky — and so are reporting results. Nelson recommends that you “set realistic goals to show incremental results. SEO isn’t what it used to be, so it’s about getting leadership to understand what success looks like now,” he says.
All of those players — the AI agents you bring online, the human staff that works with them and the broader AI landscape — will present new ways to engage. Brace for new kinds of conversation, and a new definition of success. Core to that will be bringing in a fourth kind of player: outside expertise.
“There are these incredible technologies available to us that can really deliver in incredible ways,” said O’Kelly. “But we have to control them. We have to give them context, and we have to know how to instrument them and operationalize them.” That will require people, teams and products already at the far limits of this new frontier, to help brands understand the technology can bring their mission forward.
Author Bio
Jason leads the editorial team serving DDM Content Solutions’ health and wellness content — overseeing both B2C and B2B content development. His teams have won awards both within the content marketing sphere — including Best Editorial, Best White Paper and Best Content Program in Healthcare from the Content Marketing Institute — as well as mainstream awards from the Association of Health Care Journalists and the National Association of Science Writers. As a journalist, Jason was written for The Atlantic, WIRED, the Washington Post, Nautilus and many other publications. Jason also heads up AI partnerships and development at DDM Content Solutions.