Einstein GPT and What Marketers Should Be Prioritizing Now
Yesterday Salesforce announced that they'd be baking the capabilities of OpenAI into their product called "Einstein GPT." While "significant" new features from tech behemoths are often more impressive in idea than practice, let's take these capabilities at face value. After all, it's just v1 of a new way of using their platform.
You can read Salesforce's press release on the launch here if you would like. Two features (copied/pasted from the release) stood out to me as a digital marketing leader at a large enterprise organization:
Einstein GPT for Sales: Auto-generate sales tasks like composing emails, scheduling meetings, and preparing for the next interaction.
Einstein GPT for Marketing: Dynamically generate personalized content to engage customers and prospects across email, mobile, web, and advertising.
These two features, on the surface, appear they could put some marketing roles out of a job. That may very well be true for some people. However, the good news about a clunky v1 of a product is that it gives you the space to plan and adapt for the inevitable future when these technologies get more sophisticated, more accurate, and more of a game changer to your job.
Two critical things jumped out at me from reading this release and imagining a future where AI is doing a lot of the marketing work as we know it today.
Rediscover Marketing Fundamentals and Creativity
One thing about marketing technology is that someone could use a tech stack to hide behind their knowledge gap in fundamentals. Marketing technologists like myself get frustrated when other marketing or sales professionals are slower to adopt new tools, tech, or processes than we'd like.
The inverse could also be true - marketers slow at tech adoption could get frustrated at technologists who need help understanding the customer, messaging, or buying behaviors.
On the marketing front, AI will automate quite a bit of what marketers do now. It's going to be able to auto-create content based on customer data. Shoot - it may be able to use a company database to answer customer questions on demand in their own time. I expect future integrations with OpenAI to allow customers to define their buying journey more than they can today.
Marketers who get to know their customers and find creative and unique ways of communicating their value prop will continue to thrive. Savvy marketers will use AI to help reduce some burdens, make space for creative ways to reach people, and leave random touch points to the robots.
This brings me to my next point.
Data Hygiene Will Be A Premium
Automation is truly only as good as the data behind it. The only thing worse than not personalizing a buying experience to a customer is trying to personalize it but with the wrong information.
AI is excellent, but these early iterations of CRM integration will only be as effective as the data in the CRM. Conversations at conferences and with other vendors show that data quality is a massive challenge for most organizations. A salesperson automating an outreach using Einstein GPT but with insufficient data could quickly turn a potential customer off. It doesn't make you look like a serious person.
Data hygiene isn't a sexy topic. It's honestly not one of the "fun" things to most of us marketers. But man, is it essential. It's what's going to pay the bills.
I've had the good fortune of learning a lot about data hygiene from the Business Intelligence team here at Womble Bond Dickinson. I am proud that the crew helps us have some of the best data quality of anyone in our space (which third-party vendors have acknowledged). We sometimes know about client updates before our attorneys do!
Big law isn't known for its rapid adoption of new technology. However, the attention paid to the small but essential details of customer data at WBD has positioned us well to adapt to new AI technology.
There is much opportunity for AI. As a marketer, AI can help you improve your job by improving efficiencies and creating more head space for creative problem-solving that has been spent on the mundane. I've written about how I've started using ChatGPT in that capacity over the last couple of months.
The atmosphere around AI and marketing feels eerily similar to social media's impact on marketing when I started my career. The people who were resistant to the changes struggled after a while. Despite the discomfort, others who found a way to grow alongside the new tech and embrace change appeared to thrive.
What about you? Any thoughts about OpenAI integrating with CRMs? How will it affect sales and marketing pros in the next few years?