Don’t limit yourself to using AI only for content creation. Here are four ways AI modeling can deliver sustainable value for your marketing function.
The real power of AI: Doing work at scale
AI faces stark limitations when creating marketing content, but its capabilities are a perfect fit for a wide range of other marketing tasks and objectives.
It’s all about harnessing these capabilities for maximum impact. Predictive and generative AI are great at categorizing, retrieving, and evaluating information accurately and without error. They’re powerful tools for automating tasks and reducing tedious, time-consuming labor. Analyzing trends, identifying patterns, and making decisions can be so much easier than it’s ever been.
Most important of all, AI gives marketers the ability to build custom solutions without the assistance of engineers or programmers. With a little AI know-how and the right development platform, marketers can quickly create an AI-powered solution for whatever challenge they’re facing.
1. An internal AI chatbot that generates answers to common pre-purchase questions
When new salespeople, agency partners, and customer support personnel join a business, they face a steep learning curve to effectively and quickly answer questions asked by potential customers. Meanwhile, new product launches—as well as upgrades to existing products and services—increase and augment the information that customer-facing roles need to retrieve and reference.
Proper documentation of this information can help, but finding the answers among increasingly large libraries of documentation is burdensome for these professionals. If those individuals seek out another team member’s help in getting answers to common questions, the resource cost multiplies. At the same time, organizations take on an even greater risk by asking those individuals to do their best without reliable information.
The simple solution? Create an AI chatbot that can scan all internal documentation and quickly supply team members with accurate answers to their questions. This internal-facing chatbot can be set up in a Slack channel and trained by experienced marketers using a datasphere containing all relevant internal and external documents.
“If your chatbot needs to handle personal data, consider deploying your own LLM rather than using an external party like OpenAI. That way your data never leaves your own environment,” says Kay Vink, Head of Product Marketing at Bird.
“It’s all private, and it helps anybody else in the Slack channel answer any question—whether it’s a simple one like ‘Can I import an unsubscribe list from another ESP into the engagement platform?’ or something more complex.”
As the AI chatbot’s usage increases and its text-based documentation increases, this tool will become even more valuable within your organization. Experienced marketers and new hires alike can use this tool to source information faster and get back to customers quicker.
2. A virtual sales assistant to support customer decision-making
From product to service packages, most purchasing decisions involve choosing between a set of options. If a prospect is looking for a B2B software solution, they’re considering the cost, features, and varying service packages of each vendor.
The same is true for consumer purchases. Once a consumer is committed to buying a new tablet, they must compare the available options in terms of brand, cost, technical specs, and storage space. In situations where the prospect is facing a constrained set of options, AI can be an effective alternative to human sales support.
“Why do you need a human to help you choose between three options if the differences between those options are already well-defined?” asks Kay. “If you have a product where the questions from customers follow the same pattern, you can offload that to AI and create a personalized advice experience on any channel.”
Marketers can use Bird’s no-code visual builder to create an endpoint where consumers interact with a virtual sales assistant. From there, any AI model can be integrated into the backend to power the support bot—and since Bird’s platform is AI vendor-agnostic, you can easily upgrade to a different AI model in the future without disrupting the user experience.
While a virtual assistant reduces the labor required to support customer decision-making at the point of purchase, these documented interactions also generate data you can use to better understand your customers’ needs and priorities. Over time, these interactions will refine the AI model to improve the quality of its customer experience.
3. An automated lead-scoring tool
Most marketing teams have processes in place for taking new leads and building out a profile of relevant information. A lead’s contact information, the products and services they’re interested in, the needs they have identified, and their geographic location all influence not only their potential value but also the best approaches to customer engagement.
Results for this lead scoring process can vary widely from one business to the next. But when this process is supported with the integration of AI, it helps sales and marketing professionals optimize their outreach and increase the likelihood of conversion.
“You can give the AI a prompt to write an email from the perspective of a sales rep based on the information filled in on the lead’s profile,” says Kay. “If the AI-written email makes sense, you can press OK and send. If it doesn’t, you can go into your email account and edit it to make sure the message is accurate.
“As you can imagine, this saves so much time. Your customers get a quicker response, and your sales and marketing teams can handle a higher workload. It’s a better experience for everybody.”
Automated messaging also helps you quickly gather more information to accurately score each lead. Once leads are ready to be handed off from the AI tool to a human sales or marketing professional, these leads must be prioritized in order of their potential value.
Leads in certain countries, for example, may offer more value as a potential customer. Similarly, a B2B prospect with 500 employees will likely represent more revenue potential than a 25-employee organization.
“The other thing you can do is build an automated link scheduler to improve the ease of booking a meeting,” says Kay. “If somebody is qualified, you can make the scheduling link appear, and the qualified lead can immediately schedule an appointment.”
By using AI to enhance the reliability and efficiency of your lead scoring, you can improve sales and marketing resource management to focus your efforts on the best conversion opportunities.
4. Automated, AI-powered partner onboarding
A growing number of on-demand services, including food delivery and retail fulfillment, rely on a large network of independent partners to support their operations at scale.
From small businesses to individual delivery and fulfillment workers, these on-demand services depend on partner acquisition as their main growth lever. But new partners need to be properly onboarded to make sure they’ve been vetted and trained to succeed in their role and meet the company’s expectations.
To facilitate this onboarding, many businesses rely on partner interactions with human recruiters to collect information, run background checks, and update existing systems with new partner information. When executed manually, this onboarding process can take weeks. But, by using an AI-powered onboarding solution, the average timeline for onboarding can be reduced from weeks to hours. With AI, pictures and scans of all necessary documentation can be collected; this information can then be extracted into a platform instantly.
An AI-powered onboarding solution can help to accelerate expansion into new global markets while achieving a significant reduction in partner onboarding costs.
Build AI marketing tools that do what humans can't
The choice is simple. You could limit generative AI to content creation.
Or you could spend your time creating custom AI tools that help you do your job better, faster, and more efficiently than ever before.
It’s time for bold, forward-thinking marketing leaders to embrace AI implementations that would improve the revenue potential of their businesses. There’s no shortage of use cases to choose from: Pay one quick visit to the Hugging Face AI community, and you’ll find more than 536,000 (and counting) models laying the foundation for future AI innovation.
As you make plans to develop your own AI solutions, check out all of the tools and support built into Bird’s newly redesigned platform. We make it easy to create powerful, flexible AI solutions because our platform is AI vendor-agnostic, ensuring your solutions will integrate seamlessly with the latest and greatest AI models. Bird allows you to connect with any AI vendor (the popular ones like OpenAI or Gemini), but also even your own custom AI.
It’s time to think beyond AI’s ability to produce low-quality content. Bird has been using OpenAI for years—and for many use cases beyond content generation. We’d love to help you do the same for your business.
Ready to get started? Request a tailored demo of Bird Flows today.