Part I: The Advent of AI
AI is quickly changing many things, including the world of marketing.
As Google, Microsoft and others scramble to leverage the power of intelligent conversation chatbots, let’s look at some of the big impacts of this nascent technology.
Lists and Content Organization
It’s interesting that these chatbots are coming along at the same time that companies are using things like data catalogs to organize data assets. The data catalog, and data governance in general, have much to do with ordering information. So do the results provided by AI engines that mimic human cognition in conversation.
Basically, one of the things that chatbot technologies are good at is making lists and presenting linear information in a clear and compelling way.
So one of the significant use cases for programs like ChatGPT is a query that creates a list of items or ideas that marketing content will be based on.
We’ve all heard of the ‘listicle’ format for blog posts – a quick intro, and then several bullet points, each of which tells a narrative about a certain component of the overall idea. By generating these ‘skeletons’ quickly and efficiently, ChatGPT helps marketers to target what they want to say to an audience.
The Conversation
In fact, though, these technologies can go much further, and actually present the information in narrative form!
If you ask a question like “why is the sky blue?” The conversational chatbot will respond with an answer that looks and sounds sentient and conversational. However, since these technologies are new, the answers lack a certain human feel, so that marketers often use human talent to fine-tune ChatGPT results for an end-user audience.
Impact on SEO and Paid Ads
As for search engine optimization, AI will likely drive targeting of the kinds of results that fit Google algorithms, for the purposes of SEO. However, the end result might be a race to the bottom: A writer at Intent Farm writes about the possibility of ChatGPT and similar tools making SEO “all the same” and less unique to a brand.
On the other hand, some suggest that paid ads and paid search are complementary to what ChatGPT does, and that the list generating will be good for targeting paid ads.
Revolutionizing Search
These technologies will also change how we, as human users and consumers, search for information.
Since the chatbots themselves are able to answer broader questions with finer points, they’ll be responsible for a lot of the longtail searching that people are used to doing on Google or anywhere else.
Those are some ways that AI is going to really change our social landscape and the way the Internet gets built. In the next blog installment, we’ll talk about the arms race between companies and how programs like ChatGPT and Google Bard are stacking up against each other.
