Michael Cohen is the global chief data and analytics officer at Quebec-based marketing agency Plus Company. He will be participating in Marketing Brew's event “The Marketer's (Early) Guide to AI” next week.
Ahead of the event, we spoke to Cohen a little about how he and Plus Company are leveraging AI and what he thinks about the technology's potential.
Does your company have a policy regarding the use of AI? If so, what are the main tenets? Plus Company has implemented a global agile policy and program known as “Acceptable Use of Artificial Intelligence (AI)” to guide employees in using AI in their daily work. Perhaps the most important element of this policy is human-centered decision-making and creation. Our employees know that human judgment is the arbiter of what AI generates, recommends, and executes. Continuous learning and development of individuals, teams and business processes is guided through our commitment to providing continuous and up-to-date training. Individual innovators and leaders across our network are diving deep into AI use cases and best practices as part of our quest to leverage AI to transform the way we work and the quality we deliver.
What AI tools are you currently using? What are you using them for? We have a long list of approved, unapproved, and unapproved software solutions. These solutions rely on several major types of AI (large and small data augmentation, language models, diffusion models, reinforcement learning, revenue models) and some pure predictive approaches. These are used for solutions that increase the productivity of existing tasks, such as drafting paragraphs, creating arrays of prompt images, and creating blocks of computer code. It is also used to solve systemic problems such as missing or dirty data (late data, walled gardens, privacy-protected PII data, etc.) and is used to solve various Identify better ways to make your weakest team members as productive as your own. most powerful), or remove unnecessary steps completely (timesheets).
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What is the best real-world application of AI that you have seen in the marketing world? Combine data augmentation with conversational UI/UX to directly provide marketing managers with market data-driven questions, creative integration, communications planning, and data insights to help them do better, cheaper, and more. Let it run faster.
In general, the best real-world applications are those that take significantly less human time to run.
There are many proposed use cases for AI, from customer service applications to improving brand voice to customer lifecycle analysis. Which applications are most promising for you? Which one is least promising? Most promising: Use cases that change outdated business models, such as time- and materials-based (such as the scalable introduction of cars to replace horses).
Least promising: Those that automate tasks that would only be needed in a world without AI (such as introducing robots to maintain stables throughout a city).
What advice do you have for marketers and brands who are considering using AI but don’t know where to start? Follow two tracks. One is leveraging AI to improve the productivity and quality of your employee base (for example, using AI to create images, prose, and computer code). The other allows us to strategize about what is possible and rethink what we do. What we do, how we do it, and what the value is for our customers and our business.
