The AI Revolution is Accelerating—Here’s How to Stay Ahead
by Henry Cowling, Chief Innovation Officer, Media.Monks
There’s no slowing down the AI revolution, and industry players both big and small are scrambling to keep up.
After ChatGPT-3 amazed tech professionals and the public alike with its ability to spin up humanlike speech, OpenAI recently upped the ante with the release of GPT-4, which drastically improves the chatbot’s performance in reasoning, knowledge retention, coding and more.
The ripples were immediate. That same day, Google announced introducing generative AI to the Workspace suite to help teams work and collaborate more efficiently—and Microsoft shortly followed suit by announcing Microsoft 365 Copilot. The message is clear: AI is transforming how we do business, and these efficiencies will continue to unlock even greater creative possibilities for digital partners and brand clients.
The delivery of hyper-personalized experiences, real-time insights via predictive marketing intelligence, and the emergence of owned machine learning models are just a handful of ways that AI has turned business-as-usual into an unfamiliar landscape that continues to evolve at the blink of an eye—enough to make marketers pause and question everything they thought they knew about marketing. Indeed, now is the crucial time for every team to familiarize themselves with AI, the various tools that are available, and their increasingly sophisticated capabilities.
Indeed, unlocking AI’s true potential relies on understanding how to uplevel teams to use the technology effectively. Those who can fully leverage the power of AI and infuse it within every aspect of their business will dominate the market. But for those who lag behind, this is a Kodak moment: there will be no loyalty for businesses that are slow to deliver AI-powered experiences that make consumers’ lives easier.
AI unlocks incredible new experiences—provided you have the skills.
At Media.Monks, we’re not just bullish about AI; AI and automation have played a significant role in helping us scale up our business and outmaneuver more traditional agency peers since day one. Likewise, the current AI boom offers a critical opportunity for smaller digital agencies to grow their potential to compete with the likes of the slow-moving, oversized firms who currently dominate the industry. Greater efficiency and budgetary gains will help them do more, yes—while paying those benefits forward to their brand clients.
My advice to teams right now is to embrace artificial intelligence rather than shy away from it. You won’t lose your job to an AI, but some may lose their jobs to those who can use AI better. So get yourself acquainted with the tools that can impact copy generation, the creation of images or video and more.
At Media.Monks, we’ve spent four years experimenting with generative AI in particular, from training a neural animation tool that turns a sequence of stick figures into original dance choreographies to creating an entire short film with the help of AI at every step of the production process. These experimental prototypes anticipated a future in which AI would open a new world of creative possibilities—a future that’s now come into view. Other teams can likewise get a head-start in the new era of AI by testing and learning with new tools or even new models as they emerge.
Don’t stop moving, or you’ll fall far behind.
Experience with AI is rapidly becoming table stakes, particularly for partners whose job is to help brands continually adapt to new tools and consumer behaviors with confidence. Every new technology prompts brands to consider whether they’re willing to hire, train and manage new specialists in emergent roles, and each of these questions present opportunities for partners to guide their clients lead in the brave new world we’ve suddenly found ourselves in.
But the very same opportunities also exist for a wide range of small AI-focused startups and brands, meaning there’s no time to wait; those who are fastest will create powerful new legacies.
In that respect, we’re only seeing the beginning of change as we enter the AI revolution. On the individual level, it’s easy to see how generative AI tools will evolve writers and designers, once focused on content creation, into editors whose focus now lies on content refinement. And as brands begin to transform IP into their own unique models, their partners will move from simply building creative to instead building and maintaining owned data sets that give brands a competitive edge.
The AI landscape continues to rapidly shift week by week, day by day, and brands will need to move quickly to avoid falling behind. Likewise, we need to be ready to help guide them along the path. Experimentation and upskilling will be crucial to defining the winners and losers of the new era—and if you haven’t been paying attention yet, now’s the time to start.