Amanda Cecconi
Founder, Punching Nun Group LLC

"Content is King" remains a business axiom, but overreliance on artificial intelligence in communications for marketing and customer experience is already undermining some brands, suppressing sales and diminishing the once-trusting relationships that are essential to lasting customer satisfaction.

It is still "early days" in the expansion of adoption of AI and large-language models for marcom, customer experience and reputation management.

The advent of generative AI -- notably ChatGPT, CoPilot and other tools -- is occurring just as prospective buyers have more choices than ever when shopping for solutions or services, and the competition for customer or stakeholder attention has become fierce.

This makes engagement and other CX functions increasingly important and difficult.

While the use of AI in content creation continues to evolve, many marketing leaders already suspect that AI pitfalls could outweigh AI benefits, far into the future.

While there is a lot to ponder, clearly marketers must step-up efforts to resist the drift toward the stagnant, low-impact content that could actually thwart marketing strategy, dethrone even market leaders, and make breaking through the noise of the marketplace even harder for entrepreneurs.

Fortunately, there's also reason for optimism among enterprise leaders, marketers and customers, alike.

First of all, it is unlikely that any external AI data-lake user will soon know and understand more than your management team does about your company's unique history, your culture and values, your customers, your capabilities, and your lessons learned.

Second, by working to ensure that the "voice" of your brand and your key marketing messages are always distributed at the right time, through the right channels to the right audiences, you will find that your fact-based and reality-driven story contributes measurably to sales, referrals, customer experience and reputational gains.

Third, marketing communications professionals have for a generation or more confronted and successfully leveraged technology-driven waves of change.

True, it hasn't always been pretty. Yet, whether we labeled marcom eras as "high tech, high touch, high hype or high turbulence," we have preserved marketing value by using all the tools and talents available to us.

Marketing is at its essence storytelling and, for a long time, the world will continue to need the human storytellers' superpower.

More than ever, I still believe all companies -- at every stage of maturation -- must connect their story about their solutions or services to their target audiences in memorable ways.

There's no doubt in my mind that preserving or improving the originality of your content does pay real dividends.

If you're tempted to "make-do" with AI, remember that flaws that you personally might not recognize are very often detected by Google and other search engines, which are continually scouting to downgrade and demote "SEO-First" AI-repackaged items. Search algorithms can spot and demote volumes of such content much more easily than we humans can.

Also, if your instincts suggest there's an AI "tell" within internally or externally generated content you've been absorbing, focus on that quirk, rather than dismissing it as a risk-free anomaly.

Those triggering "tells" may include copycat or "sound-alike" quality, lack of insights, pretentious style, possible plagiarism, undocumented assertions or other flaws that less cautious managers might dismiss as 'the cost of doing business'.

If your team drifts into over-reliance on AI, the cost to your business may prove much bigger than you think, because lack of relevance, accuracy and authenticity have never been keys to customers' hearts.

Amanda Cecconi MBA is founder and managing partner of 13-year-old Punching Nun Group, based in Franklin, Tenn. Earlier, she held senior marketing and fractional CMO roles with multi-sectoral startups and enterprises, including, Cybera, Change:Healthcare, Saint Thomas Health Services, EBM Solutions, Covad Communications, Cendant Marketing Group, Ford Motor Company and other corporate and advisory roles. Related VNC coverage.

last edited 1509 6 August 2024