“Hey Drew, I can’t keep up with all the AI stuff; it’s just overwhelming,” shared a CMO at a $450mil tech company. The other Huddlers were relieved to hear they weren’t alone. A fascinating discussion ensued as these CMOs shared what they know, what they don’t, and how they’re sorting through the myriad of options. Here are some of their questions and an aggregation of the best answers.

How Are B2B CMOs Using GenAI Right Now?

Most CMOs admit they are still in the early days of GenAI adoption. Most don’t have a GenAI strategy. Most are creating content more efficiently. For example, those creating podcasts are doing so 5-10x faster by recording, editing, and publishing with just one person using Descript.

How Do We Get Beyond the “Go Play” and “Dabbling” Stage?

Strategy before tools. This means identifying the problems you want to solve, which, when solved, would have the most significant impact on the business. For example, you may need to translate and route hundreds of digital ads into fifty different languages multiple times per year for multiple ad platforms. That’s a lot of variations and the perfect labor-intensive task at which GenAI excels.

Benchmark your time sucks. Ideally, your team will be able to benchmark the current workflows for the most time-consuming projects. Some of these projects can be streamlined easily with one or more existing tools (like the podcast example). Focus on a few of these initially to record some quick wins.

Isolate the big wins: Others may require more complex solutions with API integrations – stuff that you used to have to get IT help with but can now solve with the guidance of AI. You’ll want to create a matrix (potential value, time to solution, complexity of solution) to help shape your priorities.

Training before licenses. Getting licenses for everyone on your team sounds like a great idea until you realize adoption is not universal. Giving them the tool alone does not improve productivity. Training your team together with some specific usage expectations will move things forward. Then, gather monthly to share problems solved and unsolved. Given the speed at which these tools evolve, expect to do training 2-3x per year.

How Important Is It That CMOs Use These Tools Themselves?

It’s imperative. First, every leader should have a folder on their phone's home page with at least 3 LLMs (I have the paid versions of ChatGPT and Claude and the free version of Perplexity). There’s no reason you shouldn’t use these tools multiple times a day to prepare for meetings, think through your ideas, and investigate something personal. Learn the basics of prompting. Better yet, become a master prompter.

Jeff Morgan, CMO of Elements, uses this prompt engineering framework:

S = Specifications

P = Process

A = Authenticity

R = Rules & Regulation

K = KPIs

How are you keeping up?

Written by Drew Neisser