How do B2B businesses view AI?

Excitement and caution, that is how many B2B businesses are viewing AI. In this ambivalence they are joined by the average member of the British public who according to the UK’s government tracker are increasingly pessimistic over AI.

For businesses, the excitement around AI comes from its ability to simplify work for marketers. Copywriting for instance is a task that could be heavily simplified by AI, with a series of prompts from the writer allowing AI to shape and craft a blog or word piece, with the writer then editing the finished product. 

AI can also be used to merge data sets to find new and deeper insights about the market and customers. Such a use of AI could transform measurement of marketing effectiveness and attribution of sales by generating a profile of the people that will see an ad, giving an accurate representation of what the ad could generate in terms of traffic.

This could in turn have huge implications for marketing budgets, with AI potentially giving marketers greater confidence to go to their senior management and give data based predictive accounts and results. 

Furthermore, there are suggestions that AI could be used to go a bit deeper to enable companies to enhance their SEO activities and drive more visitors to their websites. It could do this by enabling businesses to understand how different customers are using certain search terms.

However, despite all these upsides there is an element of caution amongst businesses when it comes to AI. Foremost amongst those concerns is the security of intellectual property. With AI systems learning from everything they are exposed to, there are concerns about giving the systems access to any content that features commercially sensitive material or intellectual property belonging to clients. 

This includes fears that AI could accidentally use design influences from other brands or give away design ideas to be copied by AI for use elsewhere. Especially as many businesses are sceptical that AI systems check for copyright ownership when learning.

Another concern pertains to cybersecurity. A particular anecdote comes from Hong Kong where an employee was a victim of a phishing attack. Although suspicious, he transferred $25 million to another company following a video call with senior managers-where he was convinced by deep fake versions of his colleagues that the payment was genuine. 

AI has many benefits and a few downsides, therefore it makes sense that businesses are viewing it with caution. Ultimately, whether businesses go all in depends both on their own research and the general attitude of the public.