The theme for this year's International Women's Day is Get her involved: Investing in women to accelerate progress It sets an inspiring tone to drive real change, which perfectly reflects the dynamic landscape of today's data-driven environment, where change is the only constant: the last third-party cookie has finally fallen, privacy laws have tightened, and now Generative AI is ushering in a new era of rapid innovation and adaptation.
With a growing body of research demonstrating that gender diverse teams outperform other teams, we turned the conversation over to some outstanding female thought leaders who are at the forefront of shaping the narrative surrounding Gen AI and marketing.
Let's take a closer look at their insights and experiences.
Lisa Gately, Principal Analyst, Forrester
Gately has 20 years of experience in B2B technology content, communications, events, and services marketing. She helps Forrester clients build and optimize their B2B content engines and turn them into competitive differentiators. Lisa is an evangelist for audience-centric content strategy, content marketing, and content operations.
“Over the past year, Gen AI capabilities have emerged in the martech stack along with an increase in multimodal capabilities that allow AI models to understand, interpret, and generate content in multiple formats, including text, images, audio, and video. Understanding which systems perform what tasks and deciding which to adopt can be a daunting task, but it's important to make the time to learn about these capabilities. Gen AI brings additional power to content creation, audience engagement, and personalization. Not only are content use cases a practical entry point for expanding Gen AI adoption, they also represent a large portion of an organization's activity, with great potential to improve customer experience and accelerate time to market. The pace of change in Gen AI will only accelerate, so it's important to act now.”
Julie Shinock, managing director of travel, transportation and logistics (TTL) at Microsoft
Shainock is responsible for shaping Microsoft's perspective and future strategy for the global travel and transportation industry. He leads airlines, hospitality companies, cruise and cargo logistics, and railroad companies, focusing on driving innovation that enhances customer and employee journeys while driving productivity improvements and cost savings through Microsoft technology and the ecosystem of solution partners.
“Generative AI will revolutionize the travel, transportation and logistics industry by enabling unprecedented levels of personalization, efficiency and innovation. It's not just about automation; it's about creating intuitive, seamless customer experiences and enabling new levels of operational efficiency. For organizations to effectively unlock the full potential of generative AI, it's important to have a clean data foundation and a clear strategic vision for the desired outcomes.”
Adeela Aviram, Cookie-Less Marketing Transformation Practice Leader, Deloitte Digital
Aviram is an award-winning digital marketer and Senior Manager, Advertising, Marketing and E-Commerce, Deloitte Digital. Outside of his career, he is an avid fellow of the Black Wealth Club (BWC) and actively contributes to the group’s mission of wealth creation and community reinvestment.
“The only constant in marketing, like every other field, is change. When I think back to my first role as a search marketer, some similarities stand out. I had no formal training in search marketing and the idea of learning an entire system for advertising on search engines seemed strange. Now, much of that same field is supported by generative AI, and I'm excited about all the possibilities it brings to marketers. Generative AI can help us focus on areas of our work that are more strategic, less repetitive, and more energizing. But marketing will always need a human element. Customer experience is inherently human, and generative AI won't get in the way of that.”
Joyce Gordon, Head of Generative AI, Amperity
Gordon leads Amperity's generative AI product development and strategy and has also been involved in the product development of a number of investments across the ML and ML Ops space, including the launch of Amperity's predictive models and infrastructure that are used by many of the world's top brands.
“Gen AI is only as good as the data that powers it. Customer data is so complex that it requires a separate AI process to synthesize it into accurate, comprehensive profiles and feed them into generative AI tools to get the best results.”
Customer data tools use AI to power key processes behind the scenes, such as data integration, insights, and predictions, so you can answer the questions: “Who are my customers? What have they done? What should I do next?”
In a world where everyone has access to the same GenAI tools, the data you feed into your Gen AI systems will determine the quality of the output, and therefore will be a key competitive differentiator. This means that it is not enough to deploy AI tools in the last mile, it needs to be part of your approach from the very start.”
Teresa Sperti, Founder and Director of Arctic Fox
Sperti is an experienced and respected digital and e-commerce leader with over 20 years of experience working with leading brands such as Coles, Officeworks and World Vision. Since founding Arktic Fox four years ago, Teresa and her team have partnered with leading brands, large retailers and CPG | FMCG brands to drive e-commerce adoption and capability building, leverage data to improve experiences, deliver better omnichannel experiences and help brands leverage and invest in technology to support their strategy.
“In the digital age, there are seminal moments that fundamentally change the trajectory of an industry. The birth of social media or the launch of the iPhone are some of those moments. And we believe the launch of ChatGPT is another moment that really ignited the adoption of Gen AI.”
“The tech world is starting to aggressively adopt Gen AI within marketing platform interfaces to automate creative development and support and enable smarter decision-making. However, we believe it's still early days for Gen AI and we're only just scratching the surface. Be prepared for a whirlwind of change in this space over the next 12-24 months.”
The Future of Gen AI in Marketing
Women leaders in marketing spoke out and their insights demonstrate the importance of embracing Gen AI not only as a tool for innovation, but also as a foundational pillar for driving growth and building meaningful relationships in a rapidly changing marketing landscape. Let's make 2024 the year we unlock the full potential of Gen AI and create real, lasting change for the better.
(Editor's Note: This article was produced in partnership with Amperity)
