Financial services marketing executive Abbas Merchant discusses the rapidly evolving generative artificial intelligence (Gen AI) and its role in changing the way businesses engage with, inform, and sell to consumers. I've been thinking deeply about it.
There's no doubt that marketers in every industry are excited, humbled, and cautious about the efficiencies that AI has brought, and continues to bring, to their campaigns and product offerings, but none more so than financial services. There are probably no high-risk areas. Regulation, reputation, and intense competition from fintech alternatives mean that AI, and especially artificial intelligence, is not something banks and credit unions can easily adopt.
BAI sat down with Merchant to explore this topic in a discussion drawn from his recent white paper. Additionally, he provides marketing use cases that you can consider today. Some answers have been edited for length and clarity. For the full white paper, visit Merchant's LinkedIn profile.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is not new to marketing, including financial services marketing. But generative AI is rapidly opening up new worlds. What has changed in just a short period of time?
AI has been widely used for many years with great results in many applications such as decision-making, targeting, ad serving, SEO, and attribution. Additionally, AI is being effectively used to optimize the content (messages, images, CTAs, subject lines, etc.) of email messages and display ads.
From personal experience, combining AI (for content optimization) with multivariate testing has yielded meaningful results, increasing click-through or conversion rates by over 50%. However, most of these applications utilize “narrow AI” that relies heavily on classification and prediction capabilities. Nevertheless, AI has been very effective in improving our ability to predict consumer behavior by analyzing large amounts of data and performing sorting and simulations, which previously We can now evaluate numerous scenarios at a scale and speed that was previously impossible.
But now, the sophistication of a generation of AI that leverages large-scale language models (also known as LLMs), vast amounts of data, and vast amounts of computing power has advanced rapidly in recent years, offering an entirely new set of capabilities. is expected. This allows marketers to automate part of the creative process by transforming text into engaging audio, images, and videos that evoke strong emotional connections with their target users. Until now, this has been strictly limited to the realm of human creativity. Multimodal large-scale language models (MLLMs) are already being introduced, with the ability to create content across multiple modalities such as text, images, audio, and video. By integrating multiple senses such as sight and hearing, MLLM can interpret and respond to a wider range of communications. This allows for more natural, intuitive, and more human-like interactions.
Therefore, if AI can significantly enhance our left-brain applications (which require logic and calculations), generational AI has the power to enhance right-brain functions (creative and artistic expertise). This new kind of AI (Gen AI), combined with the power of automation and cloud computing, is creating a new set of use cases that represent the opportunities (and challenges) that marketers must now address.
We would be wise to learn from the Greek myth of Icarus that it is important to understand the power and dangers of new technology before introducing it, and that once introduced, its effects are difficult to control. Recent developments in AI present us with similar opportunities and challenges.
You mentioned that innovation in AI brings both opportunities and challenges. What do you think are the big challenges facing financial services executives?
AI and automation have given us tremendous capabilities, but the inability to distinguish fact from fiction is pervasive. And bad actors have access to these same powerful technologies and use them to commit fraud. Therefore, marketers must address these challenges to maintain consumer trust.
Here are some questions to consider to proactively manage risk and maintain trust in your brand.
- How can you be prepared to proactively detect and prevent fraud in the first place?
- So how can you educate your customers while providing them with the right and timely tools and insights to avoid falling prey to scams and scams?
- And most importantly, how can you win and maintain customer trust? This is important so that you can feel confident sharing information with brands you trust, and allows us to provide more personalized solutions to meet your needs.
Can you share some examples of how marketers can use Gen AI beyond “chat” applications?
There are many use cases, but here are two that seem feasible at this point.
Use case #1 – Content development and automated deployment
Currently, the majority of marketing resources and staff are dedicated to important but tactical and mundane tasks. This includes writing content and copy, designing creative, managing campaigns, and processing data. These tasks take effort and time. In the near future, we will be able to streamline much of this work by leveraging the capabilities of new versions of generational AI technology.
Specifically, gen AI can be used to create great first drafts of messages, content, copy, creative, subject lines, etc. that teams only need to review and refine, rather than writing from scratch. Therefore, marketers can spend significantly less time reviewing and refining the output produced by Gen AI technology, instead of designing creative and creating content, which is extremely time-consuming. Reviews and necessary corrections by content authors and designers are important to ensure content is accurate and reflects the tone, voice, and image that aligns with your brand. This feedback loop is essential to training the AI engine to ensure tone, voice, language, images, and more accurately reflect your brand.
Combining this capability with marketing automation technology (decision making, dynamic content optimization, personalization, campaign automation, testing, etc.) enables us to deliver highly targeted, precise targeting at scale we could only dream of. You will be able to carry out customized marketing. Many marketing platforms already have gen AI natively integrated within their applications, including Salesforce, Microsoft, and Sprinklr, to name a few. This makes Gen AI capabilities easily accessible and available to marketers at scale rather than for their one-off use cases.
Use case #2 – Content accessibility and consumption
Social media channels (YouTube, Instagram, X, TikTok, etc.) have trained users to consume information in short and engaging formats. Even for consumers who have the patience and desire to read long-form articles, it can be difficult to glean insights from these articles that are relevant to their specific situation. Therefore, it is not surprising that many of these articles and his web pages have high bounce rates and low view times.
Imagine if you could feed these articles into a generative AI engine and make that content accessible in a question-and-answer format. Additionally, these new technologies can transform long-form articles into easy-to-understand tips, infographics, and audio or video responses tailored to a customer's specific questions. Text-to-audio, image, and dynamic video conversion capabilities already exist (GPT-4V with Google's Gemini and Open AI), but to automate content creation and publishing, these can be combined with content management systems. Must be integrated.
Content authors and designers can review and stress test the responses produced by the generative AI engine to ensure that the generative AI engine is working properly (no hallucinations) and to ensure that the generative AI is smarter. It is important that you provide feedback so that you can understand. Additionally, real-time feedback from users, when combined with usage data about whether users prefer text, audio, or video formats, can provide additional input to the generative AI engine, so it can continually improve its responses. as well as user-preferred formats.
This is an interesting use case because the risk is very low, which is a major concern in today's generation AI deployments. This is because the content on which the Gen AI engine is trained has already been reviewed and approved by marketing, legal, and compliance departments and represents the organization's unique advice, guidance, and thought leadership.
How can Gen AI be used for product innovation?
The Gen AI platform sifts through vast amounts of shared social data and finds patterns within different contexts to provide relevant and valuable insights about a specific brand, product, service, or category.
These insights are invaluable in understanding the challenges, concerns, preferences, and sentiments of specific segments of consumers, and in gleaning insights that can help improve existing products and solutions or develop new ones. It's precious. For example, marketers can ask specific questions such as, “What are the challenges that 25- to 35-year-old consumers face in paying their bills on time and their perceptions of brand and product performance?” You can ask questions.
This could be a very quick and easy way to conduct consumer research and could enhance the traditional approaches we currently use.
How can Gen AI change the role of marketers?
The role of marketers will shift from focusing on campaigns and creative briefs to developing strategic marketing briefs. A strategic overview focuses on the primary marketing goals (not campaign goals) and outcomes the marketer wants to influence, and specifies the broad segments to be targeted. AI-powered marketing assistants can perform all the tedious tasks we do today, using data and Leverage all optimization features in a seamless manner to help you run more efficiently. This frees up resources to focus on precision marketing efforts and scaling up strategic aspects of marketing.
It is important to note that tactical execution will continue to be as important as it is now. But this new generation of technology will enable and support even more of that. As we adopt gen AI, the role of content creators/writers, designers, and marketing operations will become even more important, especially in curation and validation of content generated with the assistance of gen AI.
What impact do you think will be made on the efficiencies gained from the introduction of genetic AI and automation?
Some argue that some organizations will use the efficiencies from leveraging these technologies as savings from reduced headcount. While this may be true to some extent in the short term, in the long term this argument is unpersuasive. Technological change has created new industries and occupations, creating not only more jobs than before, but also higher-paying jobs.
Capitalist incentives force us to invest more in marketing efforts that yield attractive business results. Most importantly, you can now demonstrate your marketing results more clearly and objectively than ever before. This situation will continue to improve as we move more of our marketing to precisely targeted marketing efforts.
In conclusion, imagine the marketing department of the future..
This change requires CMOs to reinvent their operating models, retrain existing staff, and attract new talent with very different skill sets than they currently have. This also creates the concept of two related but separate marketing command centers: 1) a strategic command center and 2) a tactical command center. The first acts as a think tank and the second operationalizes the strategy and focuses on a continuous stream of testing, learning and optimization to deliver greater results. This division allows CMOs and marketing strategists to run through different scenarios and develop strategies based on a deeper understanding of customers, the results of strategies and tactics, and learning from what doesn't work.
This new order values skills over qualifications, strategic thinking over tactical thinking, curiosity over experience, and change over status quo.
merchant of Abbas Senior Leader in Consulting Financial Services Marketing. He most recently served as his CMO and EVP for Regions Bank.
