AI, in the last year, became something that no tech-related conversation can avoid to discuss. Following the recent OpenAI keynote, it looks like most of our fears of AI replacing us are becoming reality at an accelerated pace.

Marketing in the era of AI is an interest of mine. Every business has to do marketing to some degree and doing it unsuccessfully will break even the most promising startup. It is also in the process of being disrupted by AI.

Using some scraping and AI magic, I analysed the current AI marketing tools market.

This will come as no surprise to anybody who is working in marketing currently. Copywriting by humans is coming to an end. It did not end yet, but the trajectory is clear. Humans can still come up with more relatable content. I write this blog post on a piece of paper because I have not been able to come up with anything better with AI.

Majority of copywriters now use AI-based copywriting tools. This is also where most of the AI companies had most success with. Older-era tools like Notion and Grammarly still take the cake, but newcomers are chipping in, considering how competitive this is.

Part of the problem with this category of tools is that it is at risk of being made redundant by more general-purpose behemoths like ChatGPT by OpenAI. It is both a blessing and a curse - copywriting startups can easily build their tools, because OpenAI tooling is so good. But ChatGPT is also becoming so good, that it can just take out a bunch of startups in one fell swoop.

It's not like the ad marketers had it easy for the last few years. First it was Apple with their privary tracking changes, now EU is forcing Meta to allow their users a No Ads option. It just seems like every year it becomes harder and harder to run well-performing PPC ads. Maybe AI will be our saviour?

Ad variations are easier to generate with the latest AI tools. Clickable and Quickads can to generate some ads based on your brand and products. But this is still in it's infancy - generated ads are basic compared to what skilled people can do in Photoshop. I'm still waiting on a day when somebody generates a high-converting ad.

When in comes to social media content - well, it suffers a similar fate. Yeah, you can generate posts, but they are in competition for the same mind-share as posts from top creators on the network. New generation of tools like Kendal help you fill your social feed with auto-generated posts and maybe someday these posts will be sufficiently high quality, but not today.

Meta and Google have all the data in the world, refined algorithms, tools and billions spent everyday in search for conversion. I believe that these corportations will find a way to fully incorporate the new generative AI tools in the coming months.

As long as I know what prompt to use, I can generate anything - best performing blogs, ads or social posts. The problem is that most of the time I don't know.

I'm a huge believer in making decisions based on data and GummySearch helps find you this data. It uses latest AI models to analyse content on Reddit to synthesize information that cannot be easily found elsewhere - insights that are only available to you. I personally use these insights to validate ideas, come up with content and so on.

5% to 11% of otherwise lost sales are recovered by abandoned cart email (Source: Shopify). It is as close to "free money" as it can be. But time and time again I find e-commerce stores that just don't do it. I'd guess mostly because of lack of knowledge or time.

AI emails are still in the infancy - TinyAlbert is the only tool that I found that is different in this space. It to fully automate all email marketing: from generating topics to generating emails themselves. It is better than nothing and sometimes it is just enough.

Compared to text, videos and images are harder to do right from the technology standpoint. In terms of videos and images for marketing purposes, there is little progress.

It is still hard to generate good-enough images for marketing campaigns that need your e-commerce product photos or use your brand colors. As for videos, it is even harder. We have to do all of this mostly by hand, today.

The incumbent market of chatbots and conversational commerce adapted to the new reality. Drift can now be even more human, but newcomers built on the latest AI models can catch up to the competition faster. I don't see much magic here since on the surface it looks like it has always been.

AI is not there yet to replace humans fully, but it is getting close. Copywriting was disrupted already but it is just the start. Copywriting apps will incorporate more nuanced writing styles and will eventually be able to do 99% of what humans can do.

It will take more time for ad, video and image apps to follow, since they are bigger effort endeavours so we are still a long way to go there.

I believe the future of AI marketing means incorporating more industry data into the general purpose AI models. It will both tailor the models to be more conversion oriented and protect the companies building them from platform risks.

AI business wave

Hey, I am Domas Bitvinskas.
I write recaps on marketing and business in the age of AI (2024+).