From studying dozens of businesses on their AI adoption and having seen first hand what works we recommend the following steps to starting your AI Journey.
1. Educate key stakeholders and the wider team on AI in Marketing
In order to have confidence in your AI journey you need a good degree of education into what AI is and its key use cases in marketing. It’s crucial to ensure that key stakeholders (and ideally everyone) in the department understands the potential and limitations of AI in marketing. Further it is important that this education extends to other related teams including Technology, Information, Legal, Finance and procurement so they understand marketing needs and goals.
2. Develop an AI Charter for how your teams should use AI
Establish clear guidelines and principles for using AI within the marketing team. This charter should outline the ethical considerations, data privacy policies, and best practices for leveraging AI technologies. This clarity will ensure that AI is used correctly and in control and can prevent costly mistakes. This charter should apply not only to internal teams but external partners. It will include guidance on what data types can be used in different scenarios and can be joined up with a risk assessment on AI usage.
3. Appoint an AI leader and instigate a Guild
Designate a dedicated AI team and appoint a leader responsible for overseeing AI development in marketing. This group can then take the lead on evaluating use cases and setting up pilots and reporting back to the department on progress. Liaison with external teams will be crucial. Further, as AI success stories come in, this group can act as a centre of excellence for wider AI adoption.
4. Set up your AI workspace
Rather than using the free tools exclusively, you should have a workspace set up for AI usage. This increases the control and security of any AI activity and brings learnings back into one place. Your AI workspace can allow for the use of private/custom LLMs trained on your own data and indeed AI agents that deliver to your tasks can be set up with the workspace. Further techniques such as machine learning may be best deployed in your cloud infrastructure with appropriate controls.
5. Start testing pilots for your best Marketing use cases
With the above steps all in place it’s time to start using AI on your identified use cases and delivering business benefits. Not all pilots will prove effective. However, by adopting this approach, you can quickly drive success. Like a snowball gathering pace, each success-story breeds more confidence and activity towards a better AI future.
By implementing these strategies, marketing teams can effectively harness the power of AI to drive better results and stay ahead in the competitive landscape. TAU can help in getting these steps up and running successfully to kickstart your AI journey.
