Leveraging AI Today and Preparing for Change

The creed of Silicon Valley is disruption: finding ways to upset longstanding industries and practices to find ways of doing things better. Occasionally, the small-scale disruption rolled out by individual firms is punctuated with major disruption: the transistor, the personal computer, the Internet and World Wide Web, smartphones, and now AI.

Researchers now understand that the pace of innovation is not linear, and that the pace of major disruption is increasing with each successive major innovation. Since smartphones went mainstream in the early 2010s, we’ve seen more incremental innovation than disruptive innovation in technology (which is why it’s easier to use a computer from 2013 today than it was to use a computer from 2003 in 2013). After a period of incremental change, we’re out of the habit of dealing with major innovation at exactly the moment when AI is poised to become what Bill Gates has calledthe most revolutionary technology since the graphical user interface—and perhaps the most revolutionary technology ever.

While the technical feat of creating AI is incredible, it’s the social implications of AI technologies that are generating the most excitement and the most concern. AI has the potential to change the ways we work and live as much as the industrial revolution did. The primary difference is that AI is able to do it on the scale of months and years rather than lifetimes. Keeping pace with this rapid change will challenge firms and institutions like nothing before has.

Who’s up for a challenge?

Nine months since ChatGPT kicked off the world’s focus on AI, we’re beginning to get a sense of the trajectory AI will take us on, at least in the short term. For our August webinar, we’ll chart what that trajectory looks like for marketing and PR professions and the industries we serve.

We’ll take a look at some of the direct implications of AI technologies including generative large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, Claude, and Bard, and the challenges they’re already posing in every industry in their current “wild west” era. We’ll also look at the current cutting edge of how LLMs and generative image models like Midjourney are being integrated into everything from HubSpot to AI website builders on platforms like Wix, allowing marketers to generate content and even complete websites with prompts.

We’ll also discuss the big question on everyone’s mind: Is AI good enough to start using for serious marketing campaigns? Generative AI has been plagued by problems including “hallucination,” in which the model dreams up false facts and presents them with authority. Hallucination is a potentially catastrophic flaw reputationally and even legally for many applications in PR and marketing, particularly for documents of record like press releases.

No, we can’t predict the future

While the immediate trajectory current AI tools are putting us on is beginning to emerge, the future remains unpredictable. This is exactly why the most important action most organizations can be taking now is building their capabilities for change management.

Fortunately, while we’re out of the habit of dealing with major technological disruption, the COVID-19 pandemic has given us a head start in operating in extreme uncertainty. These capabilities will be critical for firms that want to survive and thrive as AI disrupts the way we work and live on a civilizational level.