Artificial Intelligence (AI) has taken the world by storm in recent years, progressing at an explosive pace, particularly since the introduction of Open AI’s ChatGPT a year ago. But how will it impact business? six entrepreneurs share  their thinking…

Generative AI, the use of deep-learning AI models to generate new, high-quality content from text to images, audio and videos, based off the information inputs they were trained on, has been transformative.

Nearly a quarter of surveyed C-suite executives in the latest annual McKinsey Global Survey, said they are personally using gen AI tools for work, and more than one-quarter of respondents from companies using AI say gen AI is already on their boards’ agendas. Three-quarters of all respondents expect gen AI to cause significant or disruptive change in the nature of their industry’s competition in the next three years.

While it is still early days, adoption of AI in the workplace is already having a significant impact on businesses.

We spoke to 8 business founders and members of Entrepreneurs’ Organization on how AI is changing their business and in particular their marketing, and what they will be doing differently in 2024:

Daniel Lohrmann, Founder & Managing Director of Ikaros and Entrepreneurs’ Organization Sydney Member

“Artificial Intelligence (AI) continues to revolutionise business, far beyond current perceptions. Despite recent upheavals in OpenAI’s board, the real potential of AI remains largely untapped.

Presently, we see AI’s influence through Generative Pre-trained Transformers (GPTs) for text and image processing. The trend, however, leans towards businesses creating value-added layers over these AI platforms. This involves specialised prompt engineering, process optimisation, user interface enhancements, and vector embeddings. Such adaptations are crucial for tailoring AI to specific industries, though they also pose challenges in creating sustainable competitive advantages. Building moats will hinge primarily on unique vector embeddings from proprietary data.

Platforms like OpenAI’s GPTs are becoming marketplaces, with monetisation strategies expected to emerge in 2024. These platforms, taking a share of the revenue, will likely dominate the AI landscape.”

Costa Vasili, Founder and CEO of Ethnolink and Entrepreneurs’ Organization Melbourne member

“In 2024, generative AI will play a transformative role in our marketing strategy, serving primarily as an ideation engine. The technology’s ability to rapidly generate ideas will provide a fertile ground for our marketing team to cherry-pick, refine, or discard concepts. This collaborative interplay between machine and human intelligence will not only enhance creativity but also streamline the ideation process.

However, it’s important to note that generative AI is not a panacea for all marketing challenges. While it offers scalability and efficiency, its output can sometimes lack the nuanced understanding that only human expertise can provide. Therefore, it’s crucial for our team to work in tandem with generative AI, revising the technology’s output with the human touch to ensure authenticity and relevance.

The second significant shift in our 2024 marketing approach will be a ramp-up in content production and publication frequency. Generative AI’s capabilities will enable us to exponentially increase our output, allowing us to tailor content more precisely for our target audience. The resultant higher-quality work will not only resonate better with our audience but also provide enhanced value to our clients.

In essence, generative AI will act as a force multiplier for our marketing efforts. It will amplify our team’s capabilities, but the ultimate success will depend on how well we integrate and build upon the technology’s output.”

Sam Bass, Owner of businessforsale.com.au and Entrepreneurs’ Organization Queensland member

“With the rapid advancements in AI, I genuinely believe that the biggest game-changer for businesses in 2024 will be how AI is making our teams more efficient and, interestingly, smaller. It’s not about replacing people with robots; it’s about empowering small teams to do more with less and do it better.

AI tools are becoming incredibly sophisticated. They can handle tasks that previously required entire departments. Think about things like market analysis, customer service, even aspects of design and content creation. With AI’s help, a small team can now manage these tasks more efficiently than a larger team might have done in the past.

This shift towards smaller, AI-empowered teams isn’t just cost-effective. It also fosters a more focused work environment. Teams can respond quicker to changes, adapt strategies in real-time, and innovate at a pace that was unthinkable just a few years ago.

Of course, the human element remains irreplaceable. The goal is to strike a perfect balance – using AI to handle data-heavy tasks, freeing up our human workforce to guide what the resulting output should look like.

As we embrace AI in our teams, we have seen improved results and happier employees and it is just the start of what AI will bring. It’s an exciting time for businesses, and I believe those who leverage AI wisely will be the ones leading the charge in 2024.

Chris Fraser, Managing Director of Intentional and Entrepreneurs’ Organization Melbourne Member

“Google just announced that Gen-AI will be coming to their Performance Max campaigns in 2024! Performance Max was the big shift in Google Advertising for 2023. Advertisers were forced to embrace the machine learning & AI driven algorithm of Google, losing many of the manual changes we used to be able to make.

The addition now of the creative being AI driven continues to remove the opportunities for advertisers to stand out vs the crowd through typical ‘engineering methods’

We created a new role Creative Strategist in 2023 this role is 70%+ research – betting that the insights are where the value is. We expect Meta to follow suit on the GenAI capabilities and so being able to leverage lightning fast edits and concepts to help capitalise on the insights created rather than spending 70% of time doing the edits, making the physical changes to campaigns.

The Creative Strategist role is working well – rather than fighting against the advertising platforms, being able to lean into what it does best and focus on the human elements it maybe can’t understand today. The cultural nuances of certain trends and applying those into ad creative.

To be honest, we felt the initial excitement around ad copy via ChatGPT hasn’t lived up to it’s workflow time savings, with often low impact copy and/or the time spent prompting resulting in it being faster to write the copy ourselves.

We expect to spend more time in building out Sheets/Bots that use the AI to help with concepts and rapid iterations.

While many have fought against it, the role of AI in media buying has been some of the most advanced. What we did 2 years ago even in manual campaign optimisation has mostly been deprecated or replaced by AI. While initially creating a moment of ‘wait we’re going to be wiped out’

Instead to focus our attention on what can we still do the best, working with a brand on their creative insights, research, trend analysis, competitor and adjacent industry learnings and building this into briefs and prompts.”

Linh Podetti, Founder and CEO of Outsourcing Angel and Entrepreneurs’ Organization Sydney Member

“This year, our successful AI approach involved tripling content production across all our social media channels and website articles for SEO. We were also able to create more innovative automations to scale our clients’ operations. On top of all that, we’ve started incorporating AI technology into our internal scheduling system; now some of our team members have AI auto-scheduling meetings for them with the tool ReclaimAI!

Our Marketing department and Systemise & Scale Up department definitely benefited the most from AI so far, in terms of tripling content production and creating solutions to scale our clients’ businesses. In 2024, we plan to maintain this momentum in both departments while introducing even more groundbreaking strategies. An example of how we’re looking to roll out more AI is for our clients to integrate their Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) into an AI chatbot, which will be able to provide instant answers to their employees. This will help save time since employees won’t have to dig around for answers in mountains of existing SOPs and policies.

We’re also excited to train all the virtual assistants in our network on AI tools and techniques, and we’re looking to release more cutting-edge automation for our clients and growing audience—for free. We hope this will help more entrepreneurs experience unprecedented efficiency in their remote operations.”

Shivani Gupta, CEO of AskShivani and Entrepreneurs’ Organization Queensland member

“I am considering integrating AI-powered chatbots or virtual assistants on my website and communication platforms. These tools can provide instant responses to common queries, offer recommendations for people seeking my coaching services or interested in my speaking engagements.

What worked for me this year was setting a slightly crazy speaking target and pivoting my business to help other small to medium businesses. What I am planning on changing next year is to create more resources including a book that I plan to publish mid 2024 with a publisher.

The area of my business that AI has helped me so far is for my team who help me manage blog posts, podcasts and social media.  They are still employed but their output has doubled.”

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