So, B2B marketers, what do you think: will generative AI become our most trusted companion, or will it devour us all? To reach a verdict, we sat down with an expert who could give us a unique, global perspective.
Meet Lynsey Barron. She lives about an hour outside of London. Unlike most of us who are lifelong marketers, Lynsey started her career inside a Big Four accounting firm. Then she trail-blazed her way into B2B and, eventually, B2C marketing. And now, she’s the recently promoted President of Unreal Digital Group, where she’s redefining what it means to be B2B.
Lynsey recently led a fascinating panel discussion on Demystifying and Reducing the Fear of AI in B2B Marketing at Demandbase’s SMART Day 2023. The event was held at the London Zoo, which got Lynsey super pumped.
“I’m all for B2B breaking down those preconceptions that we’re all in sweaty conference halls eating curly sandwiches, because we’re not,” she says. (“Curly” sandwiches, by the way, are bland, often stale fare once offered on London rail cars. We learned this by asking Bard, naturally!).
Lynsey believes that the progression of generative AI in marketing will be similar to the evolution of a wolf. Why? That’s what Cari and Dana asked her on the latest episode of our Marketing Gets Real podcast. A few of the highlights:
“[Generative AI] isn’t that thing that’s going to come in necessarily and remove jobs. It’s actually going to enhance what human beings could do.”
Lynsey starts her analogy by taking us waaay back to the earliest days of humans. “We would have to forage and hunt for our food, and we originally did that in human hunting groups,” she says. A single hunt could take two-to-three days or longer.
But then, humans began integrating wolves into their packs. “They could enhance our capabilities,” she says. “The wolf was able to run for longer and faster than us. That expanded our prey and the types of animals we could hunt.” Fast forward to today, and wolves remain in our lives. Many of us still have their descendants (dogs) as our best friends.
Generative AI, Lynsey figures, is similar to a wolf in that it takes away the mundane tasks we as humans don’t want to do—and may even do them better. That’s a good thing. Yet on the flip side, we still need to respect AI. “A wolf is still a wild animal; it will bite you if you get too close,” she says. “That’s the thing we need to keep in mind with AI.”
“We’re all going to have to figure out what’s the magic equation, just like we did for SEO years ago.”
As the conversation turns to AI use cases, Lynsey, Dana, and Cari have lots to say. Lynsey explains a few of the use cases shared by Demandbase panelists, including using generative AI to write first drafts of copy. “AI doesn’t replace writers, but it’s a starting-off block to do research around a topic or create content that [a writer] can just adjust and edit,” Lynsey says.
Another emerging use case: Having sales use generative AI to calculate a company’s total addressable market. “Using AI to do that is super smart,” Lynsey says. “[So is using AI] to have interesting conversations with those customers and not just reading off a script.”
Circling back to content-related use cases, Dana and Cari begin discussing generative AI discoverability. “AI will help us get to content faster, but ultimately we believe [brands] are going to need more content,” Dana says. That content also must be unique. “If we’re all using generative AI to generate our content, you’re not even going to come up in those searches because [the AI engines are] regurgitating what your competition has already put out there,” Dana says.
To illustrate her point, Dana talks about a recent search she did when trying to locate a webcast platform with a specific feature. She ran a Google search and found that the major webcast solutions providers all showed up near the top (good work with SEO, marketers!). But when she did the same search using generative AI, some of the biggest brands in the space were totally absent. (Listen to the whole episode to learn which ones!)
“It’s tax advisor, not taxi driver!”
Our team at Unreal Digital Group has learned so much from Lynsey in just a few short months, not only about generative AI, but about her personal background… and about British slang! She says that earlier in her career, she thought she’d be the Chancellor of the Exchequer (that’s the Head of Finance in the UK). But while she enjoyed her time in the financial services world, she did run into one roadblock.
“Every time I tried to explain what I did to anyone I met, they always thought I said “taxi driver,” she says. “And it’s shocking to think that seemed more relevant and more likely my personality than a tax advisor, so I realized I’m probably in the wrong career.”
Uber’s loss is B2B marketing’s gain!
If you’re ready to learn more about generative AI, B2B marketing, and Lynsey, listen to the full episode. You’ll get Lynsey’s thoughts on how generative AI may influence paid media in the near future. You’ll discover why Dana is learning to love Biscoff spread. And you’ll discover how Cari and Dana’s dogs hunt their prey (bratwurst and full loaves of bread, that is).
Learn more about Unreal Digital Group