Meet your new BD and marketing team

Written by Caitlin Roxburgh

The common consensus is that we’re currently living through a fourth industrial revolution. Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been a topic of research and discussion since the 1970s, but Open AI’s publication of Chat GPT in November 2022 wrenched this topic into the mainstream.

Anyone with a smart phone or computer now has the capability to form a website, write a role player game, or generate an animation. It also means any BD and marketing team that is equipped with the right tools has the ability to accelerate their client work.

How can it benefit your marketing and BD team?

Harvard Business School conducted a study with employees at the Boston Consulting Group where some had access to Chat GPT 4, and others did not. The group who had access worked 25% faster and put out work that was 40% higher in quality than their colleagues who did not have access.

In a group of marketers, asked by Survey Monkey, the majority said that they (as marketers) were better than AI at creating marketing campaigns, but that AI was better than marketers at gaining insights from data. 60% of marketers polled said that they were most excited about AI automating repetitive tasks and allowing them to focus on higher level tasks, while 74% said that, if they are able to use it to their advantage, it will make things easier for clients to discover their company’s services.

In August 2023, Open AI released Chat GPT Enterprise, a GDPR compliant version of GPT 4.5 with specific analytical and administrative capabilities. This was swiftly followed by Chat GPT Team in January 2024, which can be tailored to suit businesses with more diverse sizes and requirements.

For professional services firms, this means that working with the marketing and BD consultants you are comfortable with will only get better. If they know how to effectively utilise AI, their specific approach and output will be significantly enhanced, providing you with robust data, and allowing them to focus on the marketing flywheel of client satisfaction and growth.

What are the risks of integrating AI into your business?

Like with any technology, there are a few vulnerabilities associated with surrendering this level of control to generative AI. In a paper published recently, researchers described a viral prompt they used to hack an AI email assistant causing it to steal data and distribute spam emails containing the same prompt. This results in what is known as a ‘no-click’ viral infection which could outpace efforts to control it.

There is also the question of AI’s effect on employee capability. The Harvard Business School study mentioned above found that the staff using GPT 4 were more likely to make mistakes on tasks that could not be done with AI’s assistance.

However….

Both the AI email assistant, and the virus used to target it, were created in a lab environment by authors of the paper, meaning that such an attack has never been seen in the ‘wild’. When they published their results, the researchers notified Open AI and Google, prompting Open AI to release a statement promising to strengthen their system.

Similarly, Harvard Business School’s findings are less of an indication of AI’s dangers than they are a testimony to a period of transition in the corporate world. Of course, employees given access to new technology are going to struggle at first to apply artificial intelligence alongside their own with maximum efficiency. Just as the wave of change that is engulfing us now is inevitable, so are the ripples that will continue as the water settles.

In conclusion, while professional services will increasingly leverage AI for efficiency and innovation across marketing and BD, it’s essential to recognize that AI will complement rather than replace human expertise. While AI can automate tasks and enhance decision-making, it cannot replicate the nuanced judgment, empathy and creativity that humans bring. Thus the future lies in integrating AI to augment human capabilities, rather than usurp them.      

Can you guess which of the paragraphs above was written using Chat GPT (I’ll give you a clue, we wrote the rest of this post in 2024, not in the Middle Ages…)? Let us know!