Consider these recent incidents:

• In June 2023, The National Eating Disorders Association took down its chatbot within a month of launch after it started doling out advice that would exacerbate eating disorders;
• In January 2024, Dynamic Parcel Distribution’s AI chatbot started swearing at customers and then disparaged its own employer; and
• In April 2024, New York City’s AI chatbot was caught telling businesses to break the law, even though it was launched to help small businesses navigate the city’s rules and regulations.

These examples are the tip of the iceberg and fit into a broader pattern that contradicts the increasingly erroneous — yet popularly held — narrative that AI will replace humans. For example, “A December EY survey of 1,000 U.S. workers showed that two-thirds are concerned about AI replacing their own job,” per CNBC.

Although AI is advancing and poised to remake much of the modern workforce — especially as natural language processing, machine learning and generative AI become more capable — the value of humans has never been clearer.

As AI Grows, So Does Humans’ Impact

It’s paradoxical that as computers grow more powerful, they’re actually revealing the indispensability of humans.

I speak from experience. As COO of Blazeo — formerly ApexChat — we’ve helped more than 35,000 small businesses since 2008 across North America leverage chatbots. I know first-hand at a professional level what bots can do for small businesses and what they can’t. Our firm has leveraged AI to its maximum capacity, and we continue to train our bots to become increasingly useful. But at the same time, we’ve also grown our human headcount and made live human agents the core differentiator of our business model.

For our customers, relationships matter, empathy matters and so do flexibility, complexity and nuance. For example, drug treatment programs and mental health centers use our services. When you approach a clinic for help with addiction, you don’t want an impersonal bot on the other end. Law firms use Blazeo to help find new clients. When people want a lawyer, they’re often in the middle of a crisis. They want an understanding voice on the line that only humans can offer. Plumbers use our services. If you have a pipe burst in the middle of the night, you want a human agent to talk to when you’re scheduling service. To be sure, there are plenty of customer cases, like ordering food or an Uber, where chatbots can get the job done well. But for the industries where relationships matter, humans provide indispensable value.

Affirming The Integral Role Of Human Intervention

That’s my own professional experience, but a growing body of corporate and academic research seems to confirm the irreplaceability of humans, particularly in customer-facing applications.

Car dealerships, for example, have found that consumers want to communicate with humans before they purchase a car. Deloitte’s 2024 automotive report found that 79% of American consumers want to interact with real people when buying a car. In India, China and Germany, the share of consumers who want a human salesperson ranged between 80% and 90%.

Early last year, in the Journal of Retailing and Customer Services, a team of Chinese and Italian academics found that “customers hang up on AI tele-sellers faster than their human counterparts,” because customers feel no empathy for bots — and vice versa.

A survey of 2,201 consumers by SurveyMonkey is particularly revealing, as it found that consumers value product recommendations provided by AI. Gen Zers, especially, like personalized deals that AI can create. However, when it comes to customer service, it’s not a close contest. Nine out of 10 consumers “prefer to get customer service from a human rather than a chatbot,” per SurveyMonkey.

When the report drilled down into the details, it found an important explanation behind consumers’ insistence on human interaction, “61% of consumers say that humans understand their needs better than AI.”

Ultimately, as people worry about their role in a labor market increasingly disrupted by admittedly powerful AI, what they need to know is this: Humans’ greatest asset is, and will always be, their humanity.

Cory Halbardier is the Chief Operating Officer of Blazeo, a provider of ad conversion tools and expertise.

The post In The Age Of AI, Human Value Is Clearer Than Ever appeared first on Demand Gen Report.

Solution Overview

Conversive seeks to help businesses connect more personably, build trust and increase loyalty with customers, clients or candidates to accelerate positive outcomes that occur during 1:1 digital conversations.

Back-Of-The-Box Details

Conversive offers AI enriched conversational messaging features and integrations with CRM platforms including Salesforce, Zoho and HubSpot. The platform works to deliver personalized messaging capabilities across channels including SMS, Chat, WhatsApp, Facebook, LINE, RCS and Voice. Features include:

• Pre-built messages for the most common use cases;
• Automated campaign flows;
• One-click CRM integrations;
• Out-of-the-box dashboards and analytics tools;
• Full opt-in/opt-out consent management;
• Global regulatory compliances; and
• Data privacy controls for delivering highly personalized and trusted conversations.

Who It’s For

Conversive helps sales, marketing, operations and customer service departments deliver more than 300 million messages per year across more than 190 countries.

What Makes It Special

According to Conversive, it is the leader in AI conversational messaging and assures businesses that every digital conversation across their customer lifecycle is always connected, intelligently personalized, trusted, compliant and easily deployable.

Contact

Conversive

The post Conversive Digital Messaging Seeks To Deliver Personalized Conversations appeared first on Demand Gen Report.

Back-Of-The-Box Details

CallRail’s recent integration with Intuit Mailchimp, an email marketing and automation platform, is designed to help mutual customers to bridge the gap between online and offline channels. The collaboration seeks to provide users with prompt, customized customer engagement based on lead attributes and AI-identified conversation insights to engage customers and prospects with personalized and timely email or SMS marketing.

The partnership reportedly harvests insights — such as why customers called, what they are looking for, overall sentiment and more — of each call, text and form fill and applies them to Mailchimp’s segmentation and tagging capabilities.

Who It’s For

The integration was formed to help small business send automated follow-up emails or SMS messages to prospects after the first interaction.

What Makes It Special

According to CallRail and Mailchimp, small businesses are better suited to customize customer experiences by eliminating manual processes and leveraging the power of conversational AI. Companies can automate different messages for customers based on:

• Sentiment, which uses AI to identify call sentiment for customer segmentation;
• Bespoke tags that leverage AI to create custom tags for keywords and phrases spoken during a conversation;
• Revenue/customer value, which triggers unique follow-up emails based on customer needs and anticipated customer value; and
• First-time caller insights, which provide customers with a pre-appointment nurture email containing information about what to expect once a service is scheduled.

Contact

CallRail

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The CallSine AI platform was created to extract essential elements from diverse sources (such as PDFs, PowerPoints, websites and various word documents) to distill a company’s offerings into captivating messages explicitly aimed at influential decision-makers. By synthesizing content that these executives find most engaging — based on insights automatically drawn from their websites or LinkedIn profiles — CallSine plans to streamline content creation processes and enhance the outcomes of inbound engagement by leveraging:

• Vector embeddings to analyze and understand customer interaction data, identifying key themes, interests and preferences;
• Retrieval augmented generation (RAG) to leverage insights gained from embeddings to retrieve the most relevant information or content pieces for each customer segment or individual inquiry; and
• LLMs to generate personalized outreach materials tailored to the customer’s profile and enriched with relevant information.

“At CallSine, we elevate sales communications by leveraging RAG and our automated intelligence-gathering tools to research additional data points and craft cohesive, personalized messages,” said Logan Kelly, Founder and President of CallSine. “Unlike generic AI tools, we build a detailed knowledge base about your company and prospects. This allows us to use AI to generate truly relevant and tailored messaging beyond acknowledging a prospect’s standard profile information.”

The post CallSine Debuts AI-Powered Platform Designed To Enhance Personalization appeared first on Demand Gen Report.

Leveraging an ensemble model approach to AI, Da Vinci reportedly uses the power of deep learning, predictive AI and generative AI to help generate highly personalized content and messaging tailored to each customer. According to Movable Ink:

• Creative IQ will curate content for each customer based on their unique tastes, preferences and motivations via short-lived content, subject line generation and prediction and multi-objective optimization;
• Messaging IQ will monitor all data to determine the highest likelihood of engagement, with a focus on automatically optimizing when and how often a customer receives a message; and
• Performance IQ includes enhanced analytics and reporting tools designed to provide insights into creative asset effectiveness, audience trends and engagement metrics, as well as automatically and continuously experiment to eliminate A/B testing.

“Capturing customer attention is more challenging than ever,” said Vivek Sharma, CEO and Co-Founder of Movable Ink, in a statement. “Click-through rates hover around a mere 2% — batch messaging programs must do better to engage their entire customer base and drive bottom-line metrics. Da Vinci empowers brands to engage their full customer files and boost revenue while optimizing for brands’ unique business objectives. The one-size-fits-all approach is a relic of the past. Welcome to a new era of precision, prediction and personalization.”

The post Movable Ink Adds 3 New Features To AI-Native Personalization Solution appeared first on Demand Gen Report.

To combat this issue, AI detection tools have emerged to help determine content’s most likely origin. However, as the sophistication of AI increases, so does the quality of content, making AI content detection more difficult. Even the most cutting-edge AI content detection tools run the risk of producing false positives that mistakenly identify human-written content as AI-generated.

False positives from AI content checkers can derail marketers’ content strategies, limiting their ability to effectively reach and engage audiences. Think about it: If a marketer receives a false positive result on a piece of content they planned on publishing later that day, they will think they have to go back to the drawing board to secure a fresh piece of content written by an actual human, wasting both time and resources and pushing the publishing timeline. The latest Google core update has amplified this challenge by prioritizing “original” content in search results — i.e., not AI-generated — and penalizing content it flags as being written by AI by torpedoing its rankings in search results.

To help keep their content on the first page of search results, marketers must leverage advanced AI tools that accurately distinguish between human-crafted content and AI outputs while simultaneously adapting their strategies to align with Google’s evolving priorities. Creating genuinely valuable, original content will resonate with target customers and keep search result rankings high.

Clarifying Content’s Creator

Figuring out whether content was created by AI or a human is no simple task because of the unending diversity of human writing styles and the ever-increasing sophistication of AI outputs. However, several factors can play into making the assessment. Accurately determining content’s origin hinges on the analysis of its perplexity and burstiness:

Perplexity

Perplexity determinations are based on the content’s unpredictability, which is inherent in human writing, such as overcomplicating sentence structures or inserting a fragment. The more perplexity in a piece of writing, the more likely it was written by a human — AI content is typically more predictable.

Burstiness

Burstiness deals with the variability of human writing. A human’s writing is likely to have sentences of varying length and different levels of complexity. AI, on the other hand, produces much more uniform, no-nonsense writing with sentences of similar lengths.

Measuring these two factors can help marketers decide if a piece of content was most likely written by a person or LLM. But even with these quantifiable details, assessing whether something was written by AI or a human is not foolproof, so it’s important that safeguards are in place to further help prevent false positives to most accurately determine content’s origin.

Tips For Telling Where Content Came From

Marketers can better prevent false positives by:

1. Implementing A Human Touch

Human editors are irreplaceable in determining if something is written by AI or a person. People, unlike AI, have intuition and empathy, which can help in deciding the most likely origin of content.

2. Using A Tool That Aggregates Several Content Checkers

Content checkers produce a probability score of whether content was AI-generated. Comparing multiple scores can give a better idea of the likelihood of it having been created by AI.

3. Reviewing Tone & Flow

Well-written content will have a natural flow and consistent tone, but beware — AI is always improving at mimicking human language patterns. Sometimes human writing can be stilted and inconsistent, too!

Combine Human & Tech Intervention

As stated, determining content’s origin is a complicated process, but layering technology tools and human intuition can help prevent false positives by allowing marketers to make the most informed decision possible. This approach is critical to prevent accidentally publishing AI-generated writing that will be penalized because of Google’s recent core update prioritizing original content. If Google flags marketers’ content as AI-generated, their search result rankings will drop drastically, losing both clicks and customers.

Moving forward, the smartest marketers will implement content-checking procedures that intelligently combine AI-powered content checkers and very human “gut feelings” to most accurately determine how content was created.

Andrew Kirkcaly is the CEO and co-founder of Content Guardian, an AI content detection platform. He is an experienced and results-driven brand, digital and E-commerce marketer. with more than seven years of experience working at the strategic executive board level for an FTSE 100 business. Kirkcaly has been in the digital and e-commerce field for more than 12 years, with 10 of those at AO World. He is now focused on building a new media publisher startup in the gaming and technology sector, By Gamers For Gamers, and Content Guardian.

The post Is Your Content Strategy Lacking? AI May Be To Blame appeared first on Demand Gen Report.

In a recent webinar, “Cutting Through The Clutter: How To Harness A Simpler Approach To Personalization,” Navu’s John Greely, VP of Marketing, and Colin Zealear, Head of Sales, walked attendees through the mechanics of a simpler approach to personalization built around audience segmentation and first-party data. While the full webinar is now available on demand and dives deeper into the nuances of personalization, here are four key takeaways that reflect the power of personalized website messaging:

1. Send Targeted Messages That Guide Visitors To Relevant Content

According to Zealear, there’s a “huge” opportunity for businesses to nurture website visitors when they’re still in the research phase, which includes sending out targeted messages that guide visitors to relevant content in the middle of their journeys.

“When you think about the top of the marketing and sales funnel, you have very targeted ads with different messaging aimed at different audiences — same is true at the bottom of the funnel,” he continued. “But in the middle, prospects are wandering around your website, and most marketers are sitting on their hands hoping visitors will find what they’re looking for and spamming all visitors with the same messages.”

2. Engage Self-Service Buyers Via Unified Messaging

Those targeted messages can also help cut through the content overload of years past, which caused buyers to become more discerning and increase their reliance on third-party sources. According to Greely, this led to more sophisticated and savvy buyers, who don’t respond to campaigns in the same way.

“If somebody comes into your website from Google, they already have one story in mind,” he continued. “They think you’re going to solve one problem, and that’s what they’re looking for — if your website has multiple messages and gives them the wrong content early on, or they can’t find what they’re looking for, you’re in danger of them bouncing. These early touchpoints are critical, so you need to use whatever information is at your disposal — whether it’s third-party data or acquisition-source campaign information — to create unified messaging.”

3. Onboard The Right Tools To Assist With Personalization Efforts

While there are several tools at marketers’ disposals to help assist with those personalization efforts, Greely warned marketers to proceed with caution and perform their due diligence onboarding new technologies.

“AI and ABM tools are supposed to help you fill a need in your marketing team, but oftentimes they end up being unwieldy and make marketers’ jobs harder,” he explained. “Most times, you’re trying to make the tool work rather than having the tool work for you. There is so much productivity to be gained from these tools, but you need to ensure you’re adopting them with caution and not getting lost in the weeds.”

4. Ensure Marketers Remain In Control Of Messaging

Zealear echoed Greely’s sentiments about the potential pitfalls of technology, advising marketers to ensure they remain fully in control of all technology-related processes.

“AI is all the rage right now — it’s what everyone’s talking about,” said Zealear. “However, despite making huge strides in generating accurate responses and content, there’s still a long way to go before AI becomes truly dependable. You need to keep marketers in control and adopt tools that don’t need a lot of time or maintenance, because people are busy and the last thing they need to do is worry about artificial intelligence functioning correctly.”

To learn more about this simpler approach to personalization, check out the full webinar on-demand now!

The post 4 Personalization Tips For Optimizing B2B Websites appeared first on Demand Gen Report.

The research — conducted by email signature management platform Exclaimer — discussed the power of personalization in a time where 55% of B2B marketers believe it’s harder to reach customers due to an increased difficulty capturing customer attention (82%), a rise in required touchpoints (65%) and trouble differentiating against competitors (58%).

“By prioritizing bespoke interactions over generalized mass marketing, marketers are better poised to address the unique needs of their audience — increasing engagement and brand loyalty,” said Carol Howley, CMO at Exclaimer, in a statement. “Especially in today’s loud, digital landscape, a personalized marketing strategy will make your audience feel like valued individuals as opposed to just another nameless prospect, fostering deeper connections that last.”

Previously released research from Exclaimer provided more color around email and personalization, as more than half (52%) of prospects and customers leverage email as their main channel of communication, and 38% indicated that personalization was one of the main factors that made them trust business emails.

However, to execute an impactful personalized marketing strategy, implementing the right technology is imperative: 72% of B2B marketers found CRM systems most beneficial in tailoring their marketing efforts, followed by social media and marketing automation tools (55%) and AI and machine learning (36%).

The post 86% Of B2B Marketers Agree Personalized Content Is Key To Success: New Research appeared first on Demand Gen Report.

With the goal of helping B2B teams modernize audience engagement, the new features include:

• Personalized destinations that deploy landing pages, microsites, event pages and more via Uberflip’s drag-and-drop destination builder, which also leverages users’ centralized content hubs to automatically personalize destinations for each buying persona;
• A mobile-adaptive design created to rapidly build destinations optimized for mobile viewing;
• Real-time analytics for visibility into content engagement to inform future actions;
• The ability to segment content assets by industry, persona or buyer stage; and
• Enriched account-specific analytics that sync with marketing automation platform data to attribute engagement to specific contacts and accounts.

Additionally, Uberflip plans to release an AI-powered personalization feature in summer 2024, with the goal of creating destinations that listen, absorb signals and enrich buyers’ experiences with personalized resources, insights and suggestions.

The post Uberflip Reimagines Platform To Help Users Keep Pace With Self-Service Buyers appeared first on Demand Gen Report.

The AI Avatars seek to enable marketers to create high-quality, personalized videos while minimizing the time spent recording and editing. According to the company, users can create their avatars by recording a two-minute training video for the AI to learn how the user looks and speaks. From there, users can generate videos by entering a prompt — from a single sentence to a full script — using Vidyard’s text-to-video technology.

“Vidyard AI Avatars are the answer to every sales and marketing professional’s dream – personalization at scale – which has, as yet, been almost completely unrealized,” said Jonathan Lister, Vidyard COO, in a statement. “By scaling their touchpoints to their customers and prospects, we are significantly lowering the barrier to the use of the high-touch communications tools they need to get the results that power success. The AI Avatars also benefits buyers, who get faster communication and responses from sellers and enjoy a more engaged and fruitful sales process overall. The feedback from recipients in our pre-launch trials has been very positive, with users saying messages delivered by AI Avatars are engaging and effective.”

Vidyard News Flashback

Previously, Vidyard teamed up with Gong, a revenue intelligence platform for B2B sales teams, to provide sales teams with greater visibility and automated insights into how their customers engage with personalized video messages and on-demand demo videos. Through the partnership, Gong implemented Vidyard’s video feature into its online site with the goal of increasing customer engagement and offering sales teams a more comprehensive view of customer-facing activities, behaviors and engagement.

Additionally, Vidyard also released launched Sales Feed, a digital media network designed to serve modern sellers with tips, news and entertainment. Sales Feed features original online shows, podcasts, video series and more to help B2B sales professionals.

The post Vidyard Reveals Personalized AI Avatars; Secures $15M In Funding appeared first on Demand Gen Report.