How can CEOs harness the power of generative AI?

 Less than a year after generative AI began to come to the fore, one-third of companies say they are already using it regularly in at least one business function.1 While executives may think that Generative AI is synonymous with ChatGPT and can be only used to generate text, it is capable of creating images and audio as well, offering the potential to transform work processes across marketing, customer services, supply chain, HR, and other functions. 

For the business to use AI effectively, however, the C-Suite – and especially the CEO – must embrace its potential and become a champion of the technology across the business. 

Marketing collateral to order – automatically 

Generative AI is a game-changer for marketing professionals. Previously, businesses couldn’t use these tools for commercial purposes, as the images they created were subject to copyright. However, certain well-known creative software companies have now developed their own versions of the tool, which use stock images from their databases. These can be used by marketing professionals without fear of copyright infringement.   

If you’re a brand manager who has half an hour to create a personalized ad, this tool can rapidly source the exact image type required and transform it into viable marketing material. It can even be trained to follow brand guidelines, ensuring it uses that the correct font, colors, and shapes. The tool could produce several different versions of the same ad, tailoring each option to a specific audience, platform, or purpose. 

As well as adverts, AI image-generation tools can be used to generate videos for social media, logos, and product images for marketing purposes.  

As business use of Generative AI becomes commonplace, the role of the marketer will shift and, with it, the nature of marketing strategy. Marketing professionals will become experts in the use of generative AI in the creation and personalization of campaigns.  

This type of generative AI could be used in other areas, such as in the supply chain, by allowing a supplier quickly to create images of product prototypes or an instruction video to showcase a product to a potential buyer. 

A new voice in customer service 

As well as creating marketing content, generative AI can also be used to enhance customer service by replicating the voice of a human assistant, lending a more humanized, authentic feel to online chatbots and automated phone calls. 

Generative AI may even be able to achieve a greater level of personalization of customer service than can a human assistant, for example in its ability to switch instantly to a customer’s native language. The AI can also learn from customer conversations, gathering their data and moderating tone and intensity according to how the customer responds. It can also pass relevant customer information on to other functions, benefiting the business as a whole. As well as this, AI can work in conjunction with humans, acting as a gatekeeper and assessing when it is necessary to transfer the client on to a customer-service employee. In this way, Generative AI can take on the general enquiries that make up the bulk of customer-service calls, leaving staff to focus on dealing with more complex queries.