In the following article, Darron Jermy provides insights from his attendance at the Smarter Data Meets AI conference. Read on to grasp how industry leaders stressed the importance of AI adoption for maintaining competitiveness. From unravelling AI complexities to offering practical strategies, discover key takeaways that will guide you into the world of future smarter data.

Last week I rocked up to the Smarter Data Meets AI conference and came away much more informed and inspired about using AI.  Apart from demystifying some things and a bunch of great tips, the key message of the day was “Just Get Started”!  If you don’t, you’ll get left behind. Even Boomers are giving it a go. Given the horrible NZ Productivity statistics released this week we all should be looking at how we can leverage AI to become more efficient.

Given NZ’s scale we heard how even our bigger companies like ANZ & Spark don’t have endless resources and how AI tools can help gain competitive advantage by doing more with less. Mat Bain from Spark shared their amazing journey and how Spark uses AI to deliver hyper personalisation and get much more targeted with their media with a relatively small team.

The opportunities and use cases for marketing are extensive from generating content to customer insights but one of the key things to watch is how its evolving search. A whopping 56% of AI users in Australia say they have already replaced traditional search engines with genitive AI tools. In the future will we be marketing to people or models?

There were some great take outs from all speakers and panelists if you are looking get started with AI including –

  • Have an AI strategy & put people at the heart of it to promote ethical use and appropriate use cases.
  • Get the data your right - what comes out will only be as good as what you put in.
  • Most businesses cannot do everything in-house so bring in an expert if you need to.
  • AI models can hallucinate!
  • Beware of Bias and don’t just accept what the models spit out.

Apart from the great speakers and all the take-outs it was fun to network and meet other marketers. I’m off to try out some new AI tools & see you all at the next Smarter Data.

Source: Darron Jermy, Founder DataIQ, 24 April 2024