Tell us about yourself and your role at Forum3. We’d love an overview of some of your latest AI enhancements and products.
I’m co-founder and co-ceo of Forum3, alongside my long-time friend Andy Sack. We have created an “AI Lab” combining content, software, and services. And we have already developed and released a couple of exciting different AI products, from Spok, our latest and most intricate AI marketing application, to Hive3, our AI creativity + community site, where our community of AI creators compete for prizes against design briefs, to our “AI First” book and community in partnership with Harvard Business Review.
Take us through your new AI marketing expert, Spok, and how Spok powers critical processes for modern marketers:
Spok allows marketers to take full advantage of generative AI, without the marketer having to be an AI prompting expert themselves. We combine two different leading AI models with 3rd party keyword data and trend research, wrapped together with just the right “marketing intelligence” (our own secret sauce prompting) in an easy to use UO, all to give marketers insights, content strategies and marketing plans nearly instantly. The kind of marketing research and insight driven planning process that used to take a week, can now be served up in minutes.
Why is AI in martech and modern marketing something that more marketing leaders and marketing executives across the hierarchy need to optimize and train further on?
Marketing is one of the first areas that will get majorly disrupted and enhanced via AI. This is because so much of the “jobs to be done” in marketing are centered on getting the right message to the right audience at the right time. Given how good gen AI is at analysis, strategy, messaging and creativity – the future of marketing is going to center on marketers leveraging and managing AI systems – many times in the same way they leverage marketing teams and agencies today. Those marketing leaders that learn how to excel at that will have a competitive advantage over those that are slow to do so.
What about AI and marketing should industry participants be weary of and what should they be most excited about?:
Marketers should be wary of spending big sums of money and effort on expensive custom AI apps that may be quickly obsoleted. In reality, most of the frontier AI systems are likely going to be so capable over the next year on their own that marketers should focus now more on AI education, training and proficiency so that they can leverage the systems on their own, and be positioned to figure out what to build vs but as the AI rapidly gets better. And that’s what should excite market participants the most: this technology is like having your own marketing strategist, researcher and content marketing team at your fingertips – and it’s going to get better and better without you having to invest a ton upfront in it.
If you had to share five predictions on the future of AI and martech before we wrap up, what would they be?
1 – AI agents are going to be the next big thing, coming next year, and they will be able to implement marketing actions for you, not just advise you. This will lead to totally autonomous (self-driving, so to speak) marketing implementation down the road. Where the AI will follow a marketing leader’s goals, budgets, and guardrails, but will be able to spin up content plans, marketing strategies and go run those strategies, making optimizations and reporting out as it goes.
2 – Text to video creation using AI will get a step change better and easier by the end of this year. Along with text to image using AI already fully capable, AI video and image creative will become mainstream, saving huge time and costs for marketers.
3 – Ads will “come to life” in 2025, where conversational ads (voice and video, as well as text) will start to become commonplace. This will be a form of marketing personalization, but will be so much more dynamic and effective than just a targeted piece of static creative. Imagine actually conversing and interacting with ads regularly – will be game changing.
4 – Personalization at scale will get unlocked for marketers due to AI; a holy grail of sorts, finally, will be affordable and accessible to marketers at mainstream.
5 – AI systems will act as “middleware” and help bring connective tissue and integration between currently siloed and disconnected elements of a brand’s martech stack and data sources. Because the AI is general purpose and intelligent, it can unlock a brand’s ability to bring together these systems and data sources without expensive and time consuming efforts.
