AI Pitfall: An Army of Average Marketers.

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How often are you using ChatGPT in a day now?

2, 4, 6 times? More than that?

What if I present a contrarian view on ChatGPT- the more you use it, the more average marketer you may become?

As per a recent study:

Stanford University conducted a study involving 60 employees each from four companies—two in Europe and two in the United States.

These employees, divided into small teams, were tasked with solving business challenges like developing internal training resources or scaling up B2B sales.

Teams were split into a control group, which did not use AI, and an experimental group, which used an open-source version of ChatGPT.

All teams received a brief presentation and detailed information sheets on their respective problems, then spent 90 minutes generating solutions, initially working individually and later collaboratively during a brainstorming session.

The experimental groups were allowed to use ChatGPT throughout.

The solutions were anonymously judged by the problem owners within each company on a scale from A ("highly compelling") to D ("not worth pursuing").

Contrary to the researchers' expectations, teams using ChatGPT only produced 8% more ideas on average and scored 7% fewer D's and 2% fewer A's, while receiving a similar proportion of C's and 8% more B's.

Although the use of AI led to fewer poor ideas, it resulted in more average ones. Interestingly, surveys revealed that AI-utilizing teams gained significantly more confidence in their problem-solving abilities—a 21% increase—even though their actual performance didn’t notably surpass that of the non-AI teams, indicating a potential mismatch between perceived and actual efficacy in problem-solving with AI.

And this is my biggest fear with AI.

Fellow and budding marketers are using it for very broad, open-ended and generalised questions.

In fact, after reading through the work of many content writers, and social media experts recently, I can tell whether a piece of work is completely AI-led or is a mix of AI plus Human.

We humans will get better at identifying AI-generated content.

Now, there is nothing wrong with using AI-generated content.

However, it becomes difficult to gauge the critical thinking ability and creativity of an individual.

We marketers need to make smart use of AI.

Here are my suggestions that you can consider when you use AI in your marketing job to avoid becoming an average marketer:

1. Define the Problem Clearly

To effectively use AI tools, be precise about the problem you aim to solve.

Generative AI, like ChatGPT, tends to produce generic responses based on the most likely word sequences.

For innovative solutions, it's essential to frame your questions with detailed specificity.

For example, rather than a broad query like "How can we improve customer satisfaction?", a more effective approach would be, "What changes to our onboarding step will improve retention by 10% for my business that is into B2B SaaS?"

2. Interact with AI as a Collaborative Partner

Instead of viewing AI as a one-stop solution provider, engage with it as you would with a human colleague in a continuous dialogue.

Iterative interactions with the AI can lead to more refined and effective solutions.

Avoid settling for the initial ideas it generates; these often represent basic, less creative responses due to cognitive biases like the Einstellung effect, which draws people towards familiar solutions.

Individuals that actively engaged in detailed conversations with AI, asking specific follow-up questions, tended to achieve higher-quality outcomes.

3. Using AI more of ideas generation than content:

For marketers, turning to AI for help should be as natural as a habit of Googling. But when you Google and get responses, you apply your logic, critical thinking and experience more often than not. That underlying behaviour should not go away when you use AI too.

Strategic thinking, creativity and critical thinking, is where humans are superior (as on date) compared to AI.

If a business faces the challenge of low RoAS, they can get a checklist of ways to solve it with ChatGPT. But prioritising the solutions, pros and cons of the solutions will be very broad if they rely completely on AI.

Yesterday, we kicked off the 4th batch of the Dream Performance Marketing Masterclass.

A small batch to keep the sessions personalised, and interactive.

In case you still wish to Join the recently started batch, reply to this email, we will share the recording of the first session with you and you can join the LIVE masterclass next session onwards.

We recently concluded our online event on Chat to Stats where you can get more details on how to avoid becoming an average marketer.

In case you missed attending the live event, get access to the recording of the event.

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Cheers,

Apurv