How Marketers Can Leverage Generative AI for Creative Breakthroughs, Scalability, and Speed

The conversation around generative AI naturally veers toward productivity, but people overlook this one, salient benefit: jumpstarting creativity. The best marketing combines data insights and creativity—and that’s where one of the many generative AI opportunities is for marketers.

But that doesn’t mean we drop everything to obsess about AI. The battle for mindshare is a game of extreme consistency. That concept is from Al Ries and Jack Trout in Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind—a book every marketer should read. But it comes to mind when I think of generative AI and how it’s transforming everything including the marketing industry. As compelling as this technology is, it shouldn’t upend the work you’ve already put in. It should augment and enhance it.

Machine learning (ML) is already an essential part of our marketing at Snowflake, and I expect generative AI to enhance so much of what we do. Here are four immediate, high-value applications of generative AI that marketing leaders should investigate and embrace:

• Generative AI will transform predictive analytics. At Snowflake, Sales and Marketing is a unified effort. Because there are lots of human touch points across the sales cycle and customer journey, we can use AI and machine learning to predict what our pipeline is going to be six months from now in which territories around the world. That helps us adjust our marketing investments to make sure we’re always at that exact level of investment. That has been a game changer for us. Generative AI can act as a co-pilot to make our process that much more intuitive and accelerate the lifecycle of ML and predictive analytics initiatives. 
• Generative AI will scale teams and speed processes. Predictive analytics powered by generative AI, like our ML-powered sales forecasting, will help us identify emerging opportunities, optimize marketing budgets, and make informed decisions about future campaigns. For the rote but necessary tasks, generative AI is shifting how my team uses their time. Let’s say I need a list of the 200 largest companies in Texas. Instead of putting that prospect list together manually, it’s now done in seconds. Suddenly team members now have hours of their day back to be creative or focus on higher-impact activities. In the future, we envision having interactive apps powered by proprietary data and generative AI support marketers asking questions and getting answers in real time.
• Generative AI will kickstart creativity. Great marketing rewards the bold, and creativity drives innovation. This doesn’t mean generative AI will do it all; instead, we see it streamlining our existing process. Creativity happens when people come together. One person comes up with an idea but the broader team helps iterate on it until we have our new campaign. Generative AI will be a part of that pressure testing. If the original idea comes from my team but uses generative AI during the feedback loop—to generate punchier headlines, for example—we maintain the human touch but maybe get more blog engagement. We can expand the use cases to content creation, creative design, and more. 
• Generative AI will automate personalization. Generative AI is an opportunity to serve personalized campaigns at scale, using your own CRM data and more. With the release of Document AI in private preview, our team can even leverage unstructured data—such as notes from account executives in Salesforce after their calls, or emails from prospects—to train personalization models for ABM one-to-one pages, for example. A creative asset, such as a report or webinar, can be more quickly and effectively merchandised with a well-trained generative AI tool that can take the content and create effective, audience-specific landing pages, emails, and social posts, and set up A/B tests to further enhance performance. 

Generative AI offers huge potential—and yes, plenty of potential pitfalls, too. We’ve already seen it become a point of debate when it comes to ethics, copyright, and privacy. 

As marketers starting to leverage generative AI, we should work with cross-functional teams of data scientists, lawyers, and security and compliance professionals to establish the necessary guardrails.

Generative AI will transform marketing for the better. The innovations this could catalyze are hard to even fathom. We will have to proceed with thoughtfulness, but augmenting human creativity with the power of generative AI will be a monumental and rewarding shift for us all.