With more than 20 conferences hinged on Generative AI, the Possible conference in Miami this week addressed the challenges and opportunities associated with technology head-on. Linda Boff, a veteran marketer and global marketing director at GE, acknowledged that the hype cycle is still ongoing, but she sees practical applications beginning to emerge.
“It’s less of a promise and more of a start of practice,” she said in a video interview with Digiday, adding: “I still don’t think it’s over. We need a lot more use cases, a lot more examples, a lot more opportunities where we can show the effort, the result – the result of the effort.
Boff cited market research as an example of where the practicality of AI is starting to have a positive impact on a feature of the industry that has lingered too long in traditional methods.
“From my perspective, market research hasn’t been disrupted since I’ve been a marketer, so it’s been decades,” Boff said. AI, Boff continues, is starting to give marketers the ability to find data sets and business insights from a much broader audience, with what she says is “pretty fantastic efficiency.”
“So using things like synthetic surveys, we can get a sense of how the aerospace industry perceives something. Previously, we had to carry out a lengthy survey, and these people are difficult to reach.
Although Boff cautioned that the industry needs to be “sober about what the data tells us,” she noted that AI offers the opportunity to take the final steps toward more comprehensive consumer intelligence.
“Sometimes knowing that 80% is correct and then validating that the other 20% is more efficient, much smarter and more profitable,” she said.
Watch our full interview below:
