Digital Transformation in the Age of AI
In this chapter: Google I/O and Adobe Firefly
Those who know me well are aware of my passion for change. It's the driving force that led me into the dynamic realms of marketing and technology, and ultimately, to the epicentre of digital transformation. Today, we teeter on the brink of a revolution. An inflexion point, once the stuff of theory, now unfolds before us as AI pervades our personal and professional lives with breathtaking speed.
We are currently witnessing an impending S-Curve of change, a seismic shift that's set to disrupt enterprises more significantly than the internet itself did 30 years ago and an unpredictably fast speed. The capabilities and potential of GPT-4.0 and its successors are surging towards a highly disruptive destination. Many jobs will be supplanted, many will be vastly enhanced, and the entire paradigm of work is poised for a revolution.
However, my experience spearheading digital transformation initiatives has instilled in me a key lesson: the human element is the critical success factor in any transformation journey. Despite their remarkable adaptability (evidenced in wars, pandemics, and more), humans often resist change when given the choice.
Successful transformations recognise this, placing equal, if not greater, emphasis on the human factor as they do on the technology itself.
Welcome to Chronicles of Change, a regular series exploring the unparalleled opportunities generative AI presents within the realm of business transformation. Here, we'll pragmatically dissect the latest AI news, evaluate its implications for businesses, and provide actionable insights for its implementation in your corporate ecosystems.
Let's lift the veil and dive into this week's content.
Featured Insight: Google I/O
On Wednesday we heard long-anticipated updates from Google on how they intend to utilise generative AI. On the surface, most announcements included:
"Help me write"Â feature in Gmail can suggest and create full email drafts based on prompts entered by users (Grammarly on steroids).
"Immersive View for Maps"Â allows users to preview their journey before travelling, including air quality, traffic, and weather information.
"Magic Editor"Â in Google Photos helps you edit your photos in more powerful ways, like repositioning subjects, recreating missing parts of the photo, and adjusting lighting and colour.
PaLM 2 model: Google's latest language model, trained on multilingual text with improved logic and reasoning capabilities, and fine-tuned for specialized domains like security and medical knowledge.
Gemini: Google's new multimodal foundation, efficient at tool and API integrations, and built to enable future innovations like memory and planning.
Upgrades in Bard: Bard now supports coding capabilities with 100+ languages and it can also directly chat with other Google apps and third-party tools/extensions.
Will this change the lives of marketers at Fortune 500 companies? Probably not. It's an evolution, a significant one, but still a stepping stone.
What was truly interesting, especially for enterprise customers, was the integration of Bard (Google's "ChatGPT") with Adobe Firefly.
Adobe Firefly
Firefly is Adobe's creative generative AI tool focussed on image and font creation (currently available in beta to select creators). In many ways, it is similar to DALL-E or Midjourney but with one major difference: we know how it has been trained.
Currently, all the popular image generation tools have been trained by scraping billions of images from the web. This includes copyrighted content, such as brand logos, characters and branded content in general which might appear without notice in the AI output. As a brand, the risk posed by activating an asset that might contain copyrighted material is simply not acceptable, not to mention the ethical sourcing issue.
Adobe Firefly provides reassurance on this front, stating that once out of beta (for now the images cannot be used for commercial purposes anyway) the images produced by their AI will be free from copyrighted material, hence safe for brands to use.
Moreover, Firefly, with its intuitive UI and full integration with Adobe Creative Cloud and the broader experience cloud ecosystem, significantly streamlines workflows. With Workfront in the mix, the picture of speed and efficiency truly comes together.
If you haven't already, I encourage you to join the waitlist for Firefly or have your creative team do so.
Spotlight on: Prompt Box
If you have been playing around with ChatGPT or Midjourney I am sure you have realised the importance of prompts by now. As with pretty much everything in life, the more quality you put in the input, the more you can expect from the output.
Power users are already familiar with the concept of prompt engineering, and you should be too. Prompt engineering, at its core, involves writing prompts that provide a template or context for the AI.
Template-based prompt
Write a marketing campaign outline using the 'Sunk Cost Fallacy' framework to persuade [ideal customer persona] to continue investing in our [product/service] by highlighting the resources they have already invested and how it would be a waste to not see the returns on that investment. Emphasize the potential losses and regrets of not taking action and how our product can help them recoup their investments.
Context-based prompt
You are a marketer with strong copywriting skills working at a multi-national company operating in the FMCG. Your company has just launched a new product aimed at existing customers it wishes to retain. The [product/service] is [description] Write a marketing campaign outline to promote the product.
You can, of course, mix and match both approaches within the same prompt.
Quickly, you realise that it takes time to tweak prompts, but despair not - there's a tool for that. Check out PromptBox, a simple Chrome extension that allows you to save your perfectly crafted prompts. You can even create templates for you and your team to use and it comes jam-packed with GPT characters and other useful prompts. Check it out.