Artificial Intelligence arrived in the mainstream with great fanfare in 2023, thanks to generative AI, but marketers are still scratching the surface of what this technology can do. Microsoft wants to change that, says Vera Hsu.
“Generative AI is changing the way that people work. They are rethinking or redesigning the entire business process to get the desired outcome,” said Hsu, director of product marketing at Azure AI, Microsoft. Microsoft’s 2024 Work Trend Index Annual Report shows AI “power users,” those who leverage the technology several times per day, save on average more than a half-hour every workday. Nine out of ten power users say the technology helps them be more creative, productive and satisfied, because it lets them focus on more important tasks.
“They feel like AI makes their workload more manageable,” said Hsu. “So they feel they are more motivated and enjoy work more. That is a really good step.”
To get the most out of the technology, marketers need to zero in on the areas and use cases where AI can improve business outcomes. AI can assist in streamlining many of the data management tasks involved in business intelligence and make marketing teams more efficient, Hsu explained.
Many CMOs claim to have a data-driven culture, but with AI they can truly integrate data and
sentiment analysis to improve customer experience and make customer service more effective, noted Hsu. Generative AI transforms customer service and sales by offering more nuanced, personalized, and varied recommendations, ultimately leading to better customer satisfaction and higher sales, she explained.
Shopping assistants can offer truly personalized services in a conversational interface, integrating data from many sources to make recommendations, address pain points and offer a better customer experience. An AI-powered shopping assistant can take all the feedback and customer sentiment analysis available, analyze thousands of offerings and present the customer with truly relevant content at speed, rather than leave the user searching across thousands of “retroactive” recommendations based on past purchases, said Hsu.
“It’s accuracy and speed,” said Hsu. “Maybe you only want to discover new gift ideas, and AI can curate a list from the millions and millions of products online, really tailored to what you like. Before generative AI, the recommendations were quite off.”
Shopping assistants can help build loyalty and customer lifetime value. Hsu noted she had a relevant experience recently, when she wasn’t able to get help with a malfunctioning power source on a recliner from the furniture retailer where she bought it, but was able to resolve the issue through a virtual assistant online. “I was super happy about the services that I got from the virtual assistant,” she said. “I already was a customer, now I’m a loyal customer.”
How CMOs can enable AI
CMOs can lead in the adoption of AI by first identifying those use cases where the technology can contribute to efficiency and user experience improvement. This is where humans are irreplaceable, said Hsu—by defining goals for AI, ensuring it can integrate with existing systems (such as customer relationship management platforms) and setting the framework for operating the technology ethically and mitigating biases.
“We still need humans. As marketers, our role is to deploy strategies that effectively leverage generative AI to enhance customer service and sales. Before we deploy, we need to develop. We still need to do the ongoing refinement of our strategies,” said Hsu. “Because everything is changing so fast, you always have new capabilities. How do you use that technology and capabilities to continue improving and refining your solution? Humans, of course. It’s all about us and how we evolve remains essential.”
Marketing leaders can also lead that evolution by encouraging the development of those power users. CMOs need to become familiar and comfortable with the technology and encourage an environment where their staff are encouraged to do the same, said Hsu. It starts at the top, said Hsu, with leadership committing to training initiatives and passing learning certifications themselves.
This buy-in is key to AI adoption; the Microsoft survey found AI power users were 61% more likely to hear from their CEO about the importance of AI at work, and 53% more likely to get encouragement from leadership to think about how AI could change their jobs.
CMOs can facilitate AI development by enabling their staff to experiment with AI and encourage them to share their successes, said Hsu. Just as it helps improve customer satisfaction, generative AI can also help increase the job satisfaction of the marketing staff.
Many business leaders feel their teams lack the strategic knowledge and the data and technical proficiency in AI, which could hold up AI adoption. But employees are already racing ahead, Hsu noted.
Many staffers are already using generative AI on their own to make their lives easier and be more productive, said Hsu. Power users are 68% more likely than other employees to experiment with different ways to use AI and 48% more likely to stop before undertaking a task to ask themselves if AI could do it, according to Microsoft’s research. The survey found 78% of AI users are already bringing their own tools to work.
“The employees feel they want AI at work. And they don’t want to wait for companies to catch up,” Hsu said.
Leadership needs to focus on training and education, and encourage experiments in AI use among their staff, by sharing the efficiencies achieved by those independent experiments, so other employees can adopt them.
“The employees are already doing the training and learning themselves. Why don’t we, in the leadership team, make AI training a priority?” said Hsu. This can help build a culture of continuous improvement, another imperative to keep up with a fast-changing technology such as AI. She noted Microsoft already has a number of free online training resources available.
AI has become table stakes in many organizations; Indeed, more than three-quarters of professionals in the survey said they believe AI skills are necessary to be competitive in today’s job market. Power users are leading the way, but the technology is transformative at all levels.
Employees “already see AI raises the bar and breaks the career ceiling,” said Hsu. “They feel like AI is the future.”
