How agile marketing teams can work with AI

I remember when the web was brand new, unknown and scary to many people. The company I worked for was extremely traditional and vowed never to have a website or allow employees to use email. Well, that was in 1996, and as you can imagine, a few years later, they could no longer fight it because the world had changed.

It seems like AI is causing that next paradigm shift. And instead of being a fresh college graduate, I’m now one of those old people who’s a bit skeptical of what’s happening. But I know there’s no way to stop progress, so we must be agile and adapt the way we’ve always worked.

This year, it will be important to broaden people’s job skills so that they can work with AI — not be replaced by it. There will be a significant movement toward improving people’s problem-solving skills as they learn to use automation with their human brains.

Because AI is unexplored territory and, in the wrong hands, can damage a company’s brand, people will need to know how to maintain ethical boundaries. AI can accelerate team performance, prompting a shift in dynamics as individuals strive to balance artificial and human intelligence effectively.

Broaden job skills on an agile marketing team

Many marketing teams still operate with specialists who perform a very limited job function. I’ve witnessed teams where someone only works on TikTok or only writes emails. While these super-specialized roles have never been ideal for agile marketing, they will be even more problematic with the onset of AI.

You’ll want to broaden people’s job skills because AI can, and will, replace people that work like computers. If all your marketers do is spit out the same thing repeatedly, they’re not adding much human value. You need to hire or train people to do complex tasks that require thinking, so as leaders, this will require you to invest in cross-training team members and permitting them to try new things, even if they aren’t the experts.

I was recently at a restaurant where a robot brought out my food. While this seemed shocking at first, it shouldn’t be surprising. This is a pretty mundane task that doesn’t require a person. However, I was happy to see that a human took our order. People dine out for human interaction, so seeing the server and robot share duties was fascinating.

As agile marketing teams progress into the future, I predict that team members will become more strategic and well-rounded and utilize AI as additional “team members” to perform more mundane tasks, such as ideating on content or drafting an email. However, people will still need to think through the content, add the human touch, and edit marketing materials for accuracy.

Dig deeper: Broaden your marketing skills to succeed as an agile marketer

Focus on your team’s creative problem-solving capabilities

AI cannot creatively solve problems but rather collect and respond to data. It takes people to do the critical thinking, so enabling team members to do so will be imperative. 

A team member may want to know an answer to how consumers feel about something, so they’ll ask ChatGPT. However, it will be up to the person to critically analyze AI’s results, determine what is true, and validate those assumptions by talking to real customers.

Here’s a hypothetical example:

The marketing team for an athletic footwear company wants to better target millennials in an upcoming campaign for a new style of running shoes. They’ve previously targeted Gen X but want to reach a younger audience. Part of the marketing strategy is to launch co-branded ads with retailers. 

Since the team doesn’t know much about millennials, they utilize ChatGPT to answer some questions about where this demographic shops for shoes.

I asked ChatGPT where millennials like to shop for shoes, and the top answers were Amazon, Zappos, Nordstrom and Nordstrom Rack (online). 

While that’s a great start in ideation, the marketing team would need to do additional consumer research (which takes problem-solving skills) to understand how to use that information so that it’s meaningful.

Since we’re talking about agile marketing here, our goal has always been to do some upfront research. We don’t want to spend all of the team’s time in that area but to test and experiment with small, quick tactics to learn what resonates with customers. With AI, marketers can speed up research, allowing for faster experimentation.

Dig deeper: How to make the time to solve marketing problems

Utilize AI for hyper-personalization

At the center of agile marketing is being customer-focused and serving a customer’s needs, rather than the old days of companies simply selling at all costs. By incorporating data from AI into our agile marketing teams, we can take customer-centricity to places it’s never been before.

Understanding customer preferences was once a manual process where we lumped people into personas. In recent years, we’ve been able to better understand customer needs through data analytics and machine learning, leading to marketing personalization.

But with AI, we’re taking it even further with the ability to be hyper-personalized in our marketing efforts.

According to Forbes:

“At its core, AI-driven personalization leverages AI to tailor marketing efforts to individual consumers. It goes beyond traditional data analytics by using machine learning algorithms to predict and adapt to user behaviors in real time.

AI’s ability to predict and understand customer preferences in real time ensures that consumers receive content and offers that resonate deeply with their individual needs and desires.”

Dig deeper: 4 AI categories impacting marketing: Personalized customer journeys

Conclusion

It’s time to embrace and leverage AI on our agile marketing teams. While the unknown can be intimidating, change is already here.

To deal with AI’s uncertainty, leaders need to focus on upskilling people to be creative problem solvers and widen their core capabilities to add human value that technology can’t replicate. In addition, agile marketing teams can take advantage of the speed and customer-centricity that AI brings to the table through hyper-personalization.

Dig deeper: How AI-powered features are revolutionizing marketing automation platforms