The theme for this year's International Women's day, Count Her In: Invest in Women. Accelerate Progress establishes a poignant tone for fostering authentic change. It perfectly mirrors the dynamic landscape of marketing, where change is the only constant. The last third-party cookie has finally crumbled, privacy laws are tightening, and now, Generative AI is quickly ushering in a new era of innovation and adaptation.
With mounting research demonstrating that gender-diverse teams outperform their peers time and time again, we turned the conversation over to the exceptional women thought leaders who are at the forefront of shaping the narrative surrounding Gen AI and marketing.
In celebration of International Women's Day, we speak with some of the most incredible female tech leaders from Amperity and Arktic Fox about the implications of Gen AI to the marketing ecosystem
Gen AI and driving a new data-driven future
"Gen AI is only as good as the data that powers it," says Joyce Gordon, Head of Generative AI at Amperity. Since customer data is notoriously complex, it takes a different AI process to unify it into accurate, comprehensive profiles that can feed your Generative AI tools to get the best results.
Gordon leads Amperity's generative AI product development and strategy. She's also worked on product development for many investments across the ML and ML Ops spaces, including launching Amperity's predictive models and infrastructure, which are used by many of the world's top brands.
According to Gordon, customer data tools can use AI to power critical processes behind the scenes, including data unification, insights, and predictions. So you have the answers to the questions "Who are my customers? What did they do? And what should I do next?"
"In a world where the same Generative AI tools for activation are available to everyone, the data you feed into your Gen AI systems will be a key competitive differentiator, since it determines the quality of the output," she adds. "In short, it's not enough to have AI tools at the last mile — it needs to be part of your approach from the first step."
Shifting the trajectory of the industry
"There are pivotal moments in the digital era that fundamentally alter the trajectory of the industry—the birth of social media and the launch of the iPhone were some of those moments," says Teresa Sperti, Founder and director of Arktic Fox. "And I believe the launch of ChatGPT is another one that really lit a match to the adoption of Gen AI."
Sperti is a highly seasoned and regarded digital and eCommerce leader with over 20 years of experience working with and for leading brands, including Coles, Officeworks and World Vision, among others. Since establishing Arktic Fox four years ago, Teresa and her team have been partnering with leading brands and scale-up retailers and CPG/FMCG brands to drive eCommerce adoption and capability build, to enable better utilisation of data to enhance the experience and deliver better omnichannel experiences and supported brands to utilise and invest in tech to underpin their strategy.
"In the tech world, we are already seeing strong adoption of Gen AI within marketing platform interfaces to automate creative development and support and enable smarter decision making. However, it is still very much the early days for Gen AI, and I think we're just scratching the surface. Brace yourself for a whirlwind of change in this space over the next 12 to 24 months."
