What’s the big deal with AI?

The interest for AI really took off in the end of 2022 when ChatGPT was launched and reached 1 million users in 5 days and today have over 100 million users. Correct used it can be a real booster for your marketing work. Don’t miss our breakfast seminar on September 7 when Kevin Mullaney, MarTech Lead from Nordic Morning will give you all the insights to get going.

But is AI really something new? We have all benefitted from Google’s RankBrain, YouTube recommendations and spell checkers to email filters and probably use Siri and Alexa. These are all examples of AI applications that have been part of our daily lives for more than half a decade. Designed to rank information to provide better experiences, the first AI wave was all about handcrafted knowledge with limited to no self-learning capabilities.

Generative AI and Large Language Models (LLMs) are opening the door to “what’s next” engines, most famously ChatGPT and Bard. Generating unique human-like responses based on the data it’s trained on, these applications are, quite literally, transforming every aspect of the world as we know it.

One of Kevin’s recommendations of how to use AI is to see it as your new intern. It’s an enthusiastic intern who has unlimited time, access to an infinite library of information and can give a near instant response in almost any language. Now imagine the productivity benefits if everyone in your organization had an intern like that who sat next to them, eagerly waiting to help lighten the load.

On the other hand, much like a fresh-out-of-college student, it lacks real-word experience and is often only as good as its mentor, requiring hands-on coaching, very defined briefs and bite sized tasks. Also never forget that it believes everything it reads and was primarily trained on old information. So, a simple advice – treat it like you would any other intern:

Never provide it with sensitive information
Make sure you give it clear, step-by-step briefs
Check everything (and we do mean everything) and give clear feedback on how to improve
Discover what tasks it does best and use it for that
Set up robust Quality Assurance (QA) processes (known as Hallucination Mitigation Frameworks that scrutinize every AI output to confirm it hasn’t gone “rogue” by providing inaccurate, irrelevant or potentially damaging information) and ensure nothing leaves your desk without a healthy dose of human intervention

When it comes to implementing AI in your marketing workflow, the only way to learn is by doing. Start small, document your findings and scale up to larger projects over time. Here’s an example workflow for SEO optimization.

Starting small: Keyword structure. Review a website to find the overall keyword site structure and expand on the categories. Your prompts could look something like this:

Go to this logistics website and find the top SEO keyword categories
Expand on this list with SEO keyword subcategories
Put this list into a data table organized by category
Expand on sea freight keywords

Going bigger: SEO writing. After defining your strategy, use AI to write a first draft for a new SEO optimized page. Prompts could include:

Write 500 words of unique SEO copy from this top-ranking website
Write the post in this tone of this brand
Include the brand’s USPs
What are the key Q&As for this topic

And even bigger: A Nordic translation. After adapting and expanding on this first draft, translate the approved version into any Nordic language. Prompts to experiment with: