The AI Economy: The Community Helping Marketers Master AI

Losing sleep over artificial intelligence? Is your boss asking how the company will use AI? Unsure how your audience will respond? Fearful of algorithms and data safety? If you’re a marketer in distress, don’t worry! The AI Marketers Guild might be your digital guardian angel.

Plus, discover the new Seattle conference on April 29 designed to give business leaders practical advice on using AI.

And stick around for some personal news!

The Prompt

A Community at the Intersection of Marketing and AI

What impact will artificial intelligence have on my marketing strategies? Who owns the rights to the artwork we created using generative AI? Am I at risk of losing my job to this technology?

These are just a few of the questions marketers want answered. And many are turning to a new group called the AI Marketers Guild (AIMG) for professional guidance. Started by marketing expert David Berkowitz, this community now boasts more than 1,000 members, all united by the common goal of effectively integrating AI into their work.

“[Generative AI] has been different on so many levels. The most impactful thing I’ve seen is how visceral generative AI is, that as soon as you start interacting with it, you don’t just see but feel what happens from that,” he says. “So there’s this kind of god mode that you get in. And a lot of the time, it’s likened to having superpowers, and I think there’s something to it.”

A keen observer of marketing and technology trends, Berkowitz explains he was compelled to launch AIMG because he felt a community-led group dedicated to helping marketing professionals navigate the AI era didn’t exist.

Along with networking opportunities, AIMG membership includes access to “AI Insiders,” a weekly call that typically features guest speakers discussing the latest AI developments. However, sometimes it’s just free-flowing conversations. Berkowitz shares that participants ask about recent news topics, such as the merits of Microsoft’s Copilot being better than OpenAI, how agencies should respond when a Request for Proposal (RFP) inquires how firms use AI, and ways to ethically use AI.

Additionally, AIMG provides consulting services through 1-on-1 interviews or half-day workshops.

The community also allows Berkowitz to assess how the industry thinks about AI. This week, AIMG released its inaugural Marketing AI Adoption Report. Based on a sample size of 115 members from the group, the report reveals that 83 percent are already starting to integrate AI into their strategies. 13 percent have already completed the process.

An overwhelming majority (80 percent) say AI is primarily used for creative and design purposes. Delivering personalized content and campaign optimization follow.

Do marketers have a preferred AI tool? OpenAI is the frontrunner, with 56 percent of respondents declaring they utilize ChatGPT and the text-to-image generator DALL-E 3 for their marketing campaigns. Other tools — Hugging Face, Google Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, Midjourney, Claude, and Perplexity — received single-digit percentage votes.

Other key findings from the report:

• Time saved was the top metric marketers used to evaluate AI’s usefulness (73 percent), followed by cost reduction (30 percent) and Return on Investment (23 percent)
• An overwhelming majority of marketers rate AI’s impact on business positively (73 percent)
• 93 percent of those surveyed believe AI will be “most beneficial” for content-related roles

Check out other takeaways and learn more about the AI Marketers Guild from my interview with David Berkowitz.

Dent Brings AI Event to Seattle, Wash.

The San Francisco Bay Area, home to AI, hosts hundreds of tech events each month, ranging from meetups and hackathons to conferences. But it’s not the only place in the country where AI development happens. Seattle, Washington has its fair share of AI startups and investors. It’s also the home of two Big Tech firms working in the space (Amazon and Microsoft).

To conference organizers, Steve Broback and Jason Preston — two people who have had their finger on the pulse of technology for years and are dedicated to bringing people together — the Emerald City is an underserved market for quality caliber AI conferences.

It’s why the metropolitan city was selected as the location for Dent: AI, a one-day conference focused on delivering practical and actionable insights into AI. The event is a spin-off from its parent event Dent the Future, which Broback describes as a “very diffuse” conference similar to TED and is attended by “multidisciplinary folks who are ambitious, curious and are working to make a difference.”

In contrast, Dent: AI promises to be less philosophical and more pragmatic, giving attendees advice on AI use that they can implement as soon as they return to their office. I’m told the Dent editorial team spent time carefully curating topics to ensure Dent: AI addresses questions plaguing business leaders: “What [are we] seeing, hearing and feeling that [they] need to understand to make this transition into this new era, especially since it’s all changing so quickly?”

Among the listed speakers are creative strategist and product designer Kyle Kesterson, Exit83 CEO Matt Kowalczyk, musician and Sweet Spot Studios founder Felice LaZae, 3Lines Venture Capital’s Sumanth Channabasappa and Unsupervised founder Tyler Willis.

Sessions focus on safely using AI, data management, agent software and automation, AI and the law, and what will happen in the next 12 months.

Dent: AI will be held on April 29 at the Town Hall venue in Seattle. Tickets cost between $699 and $799.

▶️ Read more about Dent: AI here

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A Personal Update

I’m pleased to announce that I’m returning to VentureBeat next month as a Contributing Writer and Editor. Undoubtedly it’s an exciting time in AI and I’m looking forward to covering all the latest developments and learning as much as possible. Moreover, I love reuniting with a publication I consider one of the best media outlets covering AI today!

I’m currently accepting pitches, particularly if you’re at the intersection of where data meets AI in the corporate world. Whether it’s disruptive tech, application layers, data infrastructure, generative AI, compelling case studies, groundbreaking research, or anything else — tell me about it!

Pitch me at ken@venturebeat.com

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Quote This

“We were steeped in agents from the beginning, right? That’s what all of our games work is. We believe that agent systems are actually what you need for intelligence…The next step is for these systems to do things for you, solve things for you, book holidays, restaurants, whatever. You can give them goals, and so on. We’re experts in doing that.”

— Google’s DeepMind founder Demis Hassabis on the company’s development of agent software (Big Technology)

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Today’s Visual Snapshot

Madrona Ventures investors Sabrina Wu and Vivek Ramaswami produced this week’s chart, outlining how five major cloud providers are building their AI tech stacks. They’ve detailed the application layers, infrastructure and models used by Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Snowflake and Databricks.

In a few cases, some data doesn’t exist. Snowflake isn’t developing in the application layer, nor does it have any models. Additionally, neither Amazon nor Databricks has developed their own respective LLMs.

This Week’s AI News

🤖 Machine Learning

• Large language models’ emergent abilities are a mirage (Wired)
• Anthropic’s Claude 3 Opus LLM surpasses OpenAI’s GPT-4 for the first time in a language model showdown (Ars Technica)

✏️ Generative AI

• Microsoft’s new safety system aims to prevent hallucinations in chatbots (The Verge)
• OpenAI built a voice cloning tool using a 15-second sample, but it’s not yet publicly available (TechCrunch)
• Customers are complaining Microsoft’s Copilot doesn’t work as well as ChatGPT. Microsoft says they’re not using it right (Business Insider)
• How Adobe’s bet on non-exploitative AI is paying off (MIT Technology Review)
• Adobe’s Firefly Services releases over 20 generative and creative APIs for developers (TechCrunch)
• Apple’s AI App Store could surface in June at the Worldwide Developers Conference (Apple Insider)
• Elon Musk’s Grok chatbot will soon receive an upgraded model with “improved reasoning” (TechCrunch)
• OpenAI showcases new third-party-created videos powered by Sora (VentureBeat)
• The startup using gen AI to fight noisy audio (TechCrunch)

🛒 Commerce

• Amazon’s palm-scanning service now lets you sign up from your phone (The Verge)
• Walmart, 7-Eleven and Chick-fil-A are trialing new drone delivery technology (Axios)

☁️ Enterprise

• MineOS’s new tool gives the enterprise improved governance over AI (VentureBeat)
• Oracle brings hundreds of AI features to Netsuite to improve productivity in finance, accounting, supply chain, operations, sales and marketing, and customer service (Axios)
• Pure Storage and Nvidia partner with new infrastructure solutions to help enterprises better manage AI deployments (VentureBeat)
• How much did Salesforce pay to have Einstein be the face of its AI strategy? (Bloomberg)

⚙️ Hardware and Robotics

• Intel, Google, Arm, Qualcomm, Samsung and other tech companies team up to challenge Nvidia’s chip dominance (The Verge)
• Meta to add AI to its Ray-Ban smart glasses, helping to identify objects, monuments and animals (The Verge)
• Google reverses course and will bring Gemini Nano to the Pixel 8 (9to5 Google)
• Intel says Microsoft’s Copilot AI will soon run locally on PCs and confirms next-gen AI PCs will need 40 Tera Operations Per Second (TOPS) of NPU performance to run it (Tom’s Hardware)

🔬 Science and Breakthroughs

• HeHealth claims to use AI to detect STIs from photos of genitals — it’s a privacy disaster (Forbes)

💼 Business and Marketing

• Why AI search engines can’t kill Google (The Verge)
• Adobe’s GenStudio app lets brands use gen AI to create safe and measurable content (TechCrunch)
• How media agencies are pivoting towards gen AI content in influencer marketing (Digiday)
• The extremes Meta is going to pursue AI talent: Job offers without interviews, emails from Mark Zuckerberg, and abandoning the practice of not increasing pay for those threatening to leave (The Information)

📺 Media and Entertainment

• SAG-AFTRA official Sarah Elmaleh explains how the union views the use of AI (VentureBeat)
• NBCUniversal reveals how it’s using gen AI to match ads with viewers and how these ads perform up to 49 percent better (Business Insider)
• How AI is revolutionizing the news business (Quartz)
• BBC says it will not use AI again to promote its “Doctor Who” series after receiving criticism from viewers in a prior marketing campaign (Deadline)

💰 Funding

• Amazon fulfills its $4 billion commitment to Anthropic with a $2.75 billion investment (CNBC)
• Crypto exchange FTX agrees to sell its shares of Anthropic for $884 million (Decrypt)
• Google’s philanthropic arm to invest $20 million in nonprofits using generative AI (TechCrunch)
• Data labeling startup Scale AI reportedly raising new round of funding at a $13 billion valuation (The Information)

⚖️ Copyright and Regulatory Issues

• White House mandates federal agencies have a “chief AI officer” and implement policies to protect the rights and safety of those impacted by AI use (Semafor)
• U.S. House bans the use of Microsoft Copilot by staff members due to data security concerns (Axios)

🔎 Opinions and Research

• Pew Research Center: More people are using ChatGPT at work (Wired)
• AI Education Project: 28 percent of educators believe AI will be beneficial to their careers, but 25 percent say it will have a negative impact (Axios)
• Blueprints for evaluating AI in journalism (Sachita Nishal, Charlotte Li and Nicholas Diakopoulos/Medium)

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End Output

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Until next time, stay curious!