Since the launch of ChatGPT a year ago, much of the B2B branding and marketing world has been contending nervously with generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) and the role it could play in business. 

At The Frameworks, we’ve delivered brands, campaigns and content over almost 35 years based on a foundation of creativity, strategy and technology. Being eager early adopters of technology has always given us an edge. This year, we established a working group to manage experiments with the latest GenAI tools and review their potential.

From the very start, we had a gut feeling that the influence of GenAI on marketing and branding would be broad and, over time, deep. 

In our working group, we explored three distinct hypotheses. First, GenAI will power critical tools to help marketers deliver more impactful results across content and strategy. Second, it will enable teams to automate some of the customer sales journey, if not nearly all. Third, it will dramatically reduce baseline expectations on how much time projects should take and what they should cost. 

GenAI will eventually get deployed in ways we cannot yet conceive of – across all industries. But we think we have a good sense of what to expect for marketers in the next year or so. 

‍AI transformation (“Big AI”) ‍

The next generation of digital transformation will be the institutional implementations that very large organisations undertake to optimise their operations over time. Far more than just the rollout of Microsoft’s Copilot, it will involve big digital consultancies helping large businesses reconfigure various functions to work within an AI framework. The process will be expensive and have timelines beyond 12 months.  

‍Middleware AI ‍

This is all about team and department-level projects designed to cut costs and improve accuracy or efficiency. These won’t be driven by huge contracts with consultants but by leaders both enlightened and terrified about the potential of GenAI and other emerging digital tools to transform their business for better or worse. The timelines will be driven by quarterly KPIs.

‍Small AI 

We’re most excited about the discrete strategic and creative GenAI-powered tools or experiences that will help businesses better understand and engage their customers. These are brand and marketing assets in the traditional sense – for now – that are empowered by the ability of GenAI to learn from user inputs and then summarise and craft a response attuned to both the user's need and the business’s goal. 

Small AI projects get built fast, can be deployed within weeks and deliver results that always align with a brand’s goals. 

Small AI is nimble, achievable, and understandable to our clients and doesn’t require vertigo-inducing contemplations about an unknown future state of business or markets. These are digital brand and marketing tools, powered by GenAI, which we — a team that loves to research, experiment, fail fast and learn by doing — know how to prompt, design for, and measure.

We recently launched one of these small AI projects to deliver impact at a previously unattainable level of customisation and personalisation for our client and their customers.

‍AI is a collaborator

AI can’t work alone. 

Marketers still need to deliver experiences that align with their values and increase their understanding of their customers' wants and needs. 

In the same way that having access to Adobe Creative Cloud doesn’t make anyone a designer, access to GenAI tools won’t result in quality output unless it’s produced in collaboration with an expert.  Combining hands-on experience with these tools and genuine professional expertise will produce the best results. 

In B2B as elsewhere, the key to taking advantage of the opportunity presented by GenAI is to simplify your thinking: identify one or two things you believe you could do better than everyone else and build a new experience around them.

Talk to us if you’re thinking about how AI could power your next brand or marketing campaign. We love these kinds of challenges, and we have the track record to demonstrate the results.