Goldcast

In the marketing world, AI is everywhere you look. Generative AI (GenAI) promises to transform workflows, skyrocket efficiencies, and change the very meaning of creativity. ✨

But many marketers are stuck reading about the dazzling potential of AI without a clear idea of how to actually use it in their marketing teams. In this practical playbook, we’ll share expert tips and insights to help you harness the real day-to-day value of AI in your marketing workflows.

How marketers can harness the power of AI

• AI is here to stay, but many still aren’t ready
• AI in marketing workflows
• AI in your creative process
• AI in the enterprise
• Top GenAI tools
• Risks and ethical considerations

In this guide, we’ve distilled the very best information from our AI Summit sessions. But there’s no replacing the magic of an expert panel. If you’d rather watch than read, check out our sessions on demand:

Recently, it seems like everyone is an overnight AI prompt engineer. LinkedIn headlines are being updated en masse. It sometimes feels impossible to keep up.

But could AI be a passing fad? Are we hyping it up more than is warranted?

In a word: no.

Although AI has reached a pivotal moment in the hype cycle, the fact is this is one of the most radical technological developments the world has seen in half a century or more.

And with 92% of leading companies already invested in the technology and over half seeing increased efficiency, we’re witnessing the transition from high-level buzz to tangible benefits in real time.

GenAI tools are changing the game across marketing functions: events, content, demand gen, multimedia—even sales and customer experience are feeling the shift. As human-AI collaboration gets smoother, anyone still resisting its adoption will fall behind.

To unlock the value of AI, you need a clear understanding of the risks, practical tips for using it in your marketing and creative processes, and a clear plan for scaling adoption across the enterprise.

“If you’re not embracing AI right now, you’re not on the right path.” — Ajith Krishnankutty, VP of Experiential Marketing at Capital Group

In the discussion about the benefits of AI, it’s often touted as a tool that can automate repetitive tasks and take over boring, less fulfilling work.

But those efficiencies lie in different places for every organization. The best way to find out where generative AI can make an impact is to give your team access to secure, well-vetted tools. Then step back and let them experiment.

Jessica Hreha, Head of Global Integrated Campaigns & Content Strategy at VMware, encourages her team to ask, “Can I use GenAI for this?” with every new task.

“That’s the approach we took by giving everyone access to tools, then seeing the use cases and successes that popped up from there, and then scaling those use cases across the organization.”

In the next section, we’ll explore five real examples for using AI to elevate your marketing workflows.

We’ve collected some of our favorite AI use cases, so you can steal—ahem, adapt—them for your own organization.

During a large user conference, VMware conducted video interviews with leading CIOs. During each interview, the team captured an audio transcript in real time with Google.

That fed directly into Jasper, which drafted a summary of the interview and suggested new content ideas. By the time the event was over, the team already had the foundation of their event content flywheel in place.

Content efficiencies are a common starting point for companies using GenAI. At VMware, the team brings projects like video scripts and speeches in-house rather than outsourcing them to agencies.

This dramatically speeds up timelines since agency deliverability dates can be weeks out.

As a bonus, access to GenAI tools has also increased the content team’s job satisfaction. Folks are more excited about their work because they get to do more of what they enjoy. Writers can devote their time to getting over the finish line instead of drafting.

Here’s a tip for the non-designers out there using AI tools to generate images. To get amazing output, you have to get your prompts right. And who better to help refine your prompts than GenAI itself?

“I am not a creative designer, so sometimes I struggle to write prompts for images,” says Jessica. “I’ve been asking ChatGPT to write me a prompt for an image—and then I’ll take that prompt and use it somewhere else.”

Don’t be afraid to layer your prompts until you arrive at a result you feel good about.

Adobe’s new Fast Fill feature lets users instantly edit videos by adding, removing, or changing elements with text prompts. In one example, Adobe research engineer Gabriel Huang added a tie to a video’s subject by simply typing, “tie.”

If there are video edits you’re making almost every time—for example, adding branded elements—using GenAI is a no-brainer.

Anyone managing a martech stack knows that the technology available can be overwhelming. Selecting and implementing new marketing technology is a big resource commitment, so you want to get the decision right.

The marketing technology team at VMware uses GenAI to help. They’ve created a decision framework for vetting new tech—ensuring objective criteria are applied to quickly narrow down a group of contenders for further evaluation.

Creativity is all about finding new ways to solve old problems.

Despite fears of AI eliminating the need for human creativity, many experts believe it will actually enhance our creative potential.

“Once I got comfortable with the tools, I found myself feeling far more creative when using Midjourney and some of these other tools than I had in my entire career,” explains Founder of Designing with AI and CEO of Design Department Mia Blume.

With the right approach, GenAI can fill the role of creative co-pilot, helping you overcome blank page syndrome and generate exciting ideas you might not have discovered on your own. Let’s take a closer look at the role of AI in the creative process.

“That was a pivotal moment. That was a signal to me that there was something new, something different here.” — Mia Blume, Founder of Designing with AI and CEO of Design Department]

AI can be a powerful tool to spark your creativity, but as the adage goes: “Garbage in, garbage out.” Here are five tips to help you get it right.

GenAI can pull data from a vast expanse of sources, so providing the guardrails is key. Dr. Lisa Palmer, Founder & CEO of Dr. Lisa AI, suggests giving your GenAI tools clear frameworks to help you brainstorm.

For example, you can tell AI to use a SWOT analysis in its approach to generating an answer. If you’re not sure which frameworks are available, go ahead and ask the tool to give you some options.

There are thousands of AI tools already on the market. Try out a variety to see which ones work best for your industry and organization.

By diversifying your toolkit, you’ll be exposed to new sources of inspiration to elevate your creative process.

It’s essential to use an iterative approach with GenAI. Prompt, prompt, and prompt some more. Add context and ask AI for adjustments. Remember, you’re in the pilot’s chair.

“It’s really about helping you think,” explains Mia. Iteration helps you finesse your output until it’s something you can take pride in.

AI has some pretty embarrassing biases. Give your team clear tips and guidelines for what to look out for when experimenting with GenAI in the creative process.

Free AI tools are widely accessible, but upgrading to paid programs can give you faster, higher quality output—as well as better privacy and security.

You might end up with both free and paid AI tools in your tech stack. Either way, we highly recommend knowing what the paid version offers to evaluate the investment.

The adoption curve for AI is impressive—beating out even the smartphone. But while many enterprises are experimenting with AI, adoption is often a slow process.

Concerns about potential job loss, data privacy risks, and intrinsic bias are just a few of the key issues standing in the way of enterprise-wide adoption. The good news is, with a clear plan, each of these issues can be addressed head-on.

Let’s explore some of the key best practices when adopting AI at scale

“The reality is we're expected to do more with less, and produce better outcomes. So in my mind, GenAI is really our ticket. It can help us create efficiencies and productivity that we so desperately need.” — Lauren Boyman, Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) at KPMG US

The key to getting buy-in for GenAI is to make sure each and every member of the team understands that AI is here to enhance their role—not replace it. However, it will change your daily responsibilities, processes, and even goals.

“AI is going to give people a head start, and help them work more efficiently while still exercising creative control and expertise,” Ajith explains.

Here are three actionable steps you can take to make adoption easier.

Isolated use cases are a start, but they won’t help you scale adoption throughout your organization. Teams need to see enthusiasm for GenAI from leadership down.

Communicate the potential of AI and remind team members that AI has created more jobs than it’s taken. Then, share a roadmap for how you expect to implement your AI tools over the next 12 months. By first demystifying AI, then creating clear standards and milestones, you make the entire topic feel less daunting and increase your chances of securing organization-wide buy-in.

While strategy and buy-in start at the top, innovation often starts at the bottom. Set expectations for employees experimenting with GenAI. Make it clear that failure is okay as you learn how to use this new technology effectively.

Create a dedicated AI team or task force to review guidelines and monitor quality as adoption increases.

Innovation thrives in the right environment. Encourage knowledge sharing across teams as people discover new techniques and uses for GenAI.

KPMG US has established an AI Center of Excellence to guide this culture. “That group's responsible for integrating emerging technologies into existing services, incubating new solutions for clients, enabling new ways of working and, of course, doing so responsibly,” says Lauren.

When you’re ready to start experimenting with GenAI, where do you start? Here are some of the top tools driving real results for marketing teams.

Goldcast’s Content Lab lets you repurpose your digital event content into clips, social posts, and more in minutes. Pretty handy in today’s climate where decreasing production time is crucial.

“If I’m taking 14 days to go to market, the content would be stale when I actually go to market with the current world we’re living in,” explains Ajith.

You’ve already heard of this one. This natural language system chatbot can generate detailed text responses on a wide range of topics. You can use ChatGPT to generate content, develop processes and ideas, and answer the key question: “What am I missing?”

For content generation and copywriting, Jasper offers an enterprise-level solution. The company also offers business intelligence and analytics insights to improve your output.

Living up to its name, Writer is rooted in content generation. Use the tool for everything from product descriptions to employee training, powered by your own brand and internal knowledge base.

Salesforce’s suite of GenAI tools, called Einstein, offers native AI assistance for Salesforce users. It helps customers and employees answer questions and solve issues quickly using customer data.

Need quick audio, but hate being on screen? Deborah Ashley, Founder & AI Consultant at Level Up Executive Branding, uses ElevenLabs to automatically create audio recordings of her own voice from written scripts for pitches, presentations, and team trainings.

Marketers know repurposing content is key to driving ROI. Lumen5 is an AI-powered video maker that converts text scripts and media into video content by automatically generating visuals and voiceovers.

If you create a lot of video, Descript is a must. Its AI features include transcription, text-to-speech generation, and even automated editing—think seamlessly removing filler words and using your own voice to insert corrections into your audio.

Google’s free suite of AI tools, TextFX, helps stylize text in different ways, like expanding its length and changing it tone. It’s a super helpful tool if you have your key messages nailed down and want to come up with new ways to get them across.

For imagery, Midjourney is at the top of the game at the moment. It generates detailed images from your text prompts, allowing you to bring visual concepts to life with a few keystrokes.

When selecting AI tools, experts like Mia believe it’s all about finding resources that make it easy to pivot from one idea to the next. “The tools that I come back to on a regular basis are the ones that allow me to jump to new ideas or generate pivots from where I’m already at,” she explains.

Potential pitfalls and ethical considerations

GenAI is remarkable—but it’s far from perfect. The ethical implications are a growing concern in this quickly-evolving field.

Marketers face major risks around bias, copyright, legal, security, and accuracy as they integrate GenAI into their organizations. But with great challenges come great opportunities. Now is the time to face these issues head-on with full transparency.

As Jessica points out: “The more you recognize its limitations, the more you can harness its strengths.”

It takes well-structured workflows to make sure AI generates content and ideas that align with your ethical standards.

AI models use large amounts of human input to generate output. Biases around race, gender, and other demographics are baked in.

The first step toward mitigating bias is awareness—the second is process. Include steps in your GenAI processes like:

• Create a library of approved prompts and tokens. This helps control bias in your output and increases efficiency as employees don’t have to reinvent the wheel every time they build a prompt.
• Specify which language to avoid. For example, Mia teaches not to use prompts with proper nouns like artist and brand names. This will help prevent you from going straight to that source for your own content.
• Incorporate reviews to check for biases in AI-generated content. You can even build prompts to ask tools to check their own content, but always keep a human at the reins.

Legally speaking, it’s still unclear how copyrights, patents, and trademarks apply to AI-assisted creations. Who owns the content that AI creates for you or your customers? GenAI adopters must navigate these questions as best they can.

• Disclose when content is AI-generated to avoid misrepresenting it as human-generated.
• Add disclosures in vendor/client agreements regarding AI use and IP rights.
• Bar contracted parties from inputting each other’s confidential data into AI tools. (Train employees to avoid this, too!)
• Search for your IP in datasets to monitor for unauthorized use. You can even consider using a tool to protect your IP.

Many of the tools we already used have added an AI element. It’s crucial to vet every GenAI tool you use from a security perspective. Here are some tips:

• Understand the foundation of each tool. What data is it trained on? Is that data open source or public domain? How is your input collected and shared?
• Consider sticking to tools with isolated, private instances. This helps you avoid your own data being used to train public large language models and become available to the public.
• Loop in the appropriate internal parties early in the tool selection process. We’re talking your Chief Technology, Information, or Security Officer as well as Chief Legal Counsel.

No matter how hard you try, there are still plenty of ways GenAI can get things wrong. Here are some tips to help you get the best possible output:

• Get to know your tools. Understanding their capabilities and limitations will help you get the best results.
• Develop templates and libraries. Creating custom brand templates and prompt libraries will help make GenAI repeatable and scalable.
• Fact check all output. As you’ve probably heard, GenAI can give you information that’s just plain incorrect. Be sure to check everything before hitting that “publish” button.
• Don’t lose the human element. Put AI at the center of every AI process. And always make sure the final product is reviewed by a human with a critical eye.

The verdict is in, and generative AI is solidly part of our future. While challenges remain, marketers have a lot to gain by getting started with GenAI now.

By working hard for internal alignment, setting clear boundaries, and creating a culture of learning, you can encourage adoption and start seeing a return on your AI investments.

“The proof,” explains Jessica, “is in, can you take a dream or a vision and actually make it happen, and bring people along with you?”

Keep an eye on new developments, but don’t wait to get started—the time to experiment is now.