👋 Hello!!

There it is! We are closing this crazy year 2023, the very first year where Generative AI, has transformed our job from top to bottom.

This past month, I have read over a hundred newsletters, reports, and predictions from influencers and major players in Generative AI + Marketing for 2024. I have selected six of them. For each, I provide you with the key takeaways and which prediction I consider to be the most relevant for 2024.

Happy New Year 😘!!

🔮 In Today’s edition - 2024 Predictions time!

• 5 marketing & AI predictions from the Gartner Report

• 9 SEO, content & AI predictions from Search Engine Land

• 29 journalism & AI predictions from Nieman Labs

• 8 tech & AI predictions from Standford HAI Faculty

• 5 media, entertainment & AI predictions from Alix Partners

• 8 consumer tech, web 3 & AI predictions from a16z

• 21 AI tools I used the most in 2023

Read time: 12 min

Marketing & AI

📍The Gartner Marketing Predictions Report

🔎 The Short of it

• By 2026, 80% of advanced creative roles will use generative AI to achieve differentiated results, requiring increased spending on creative talent rather than reducing costs.

• By 2026, 60% of CMOs will adopt content authenticity measures and guidelines to shield brands from misleading information generated by AI.

• By 2025, 50% of consumers will significantly limit social media usage due to perceived decay from misinformation, toxic communities, and bots.

• By 2027, 20% of brands will position themselves as "AI-free" to differentiate based on authenticity and address consumer distrust of AI.

• By 2028, brands' organic search traffic will fall 50%+ as consumers shift to AI-powered search engines like Google's Generative Search.

🧠 The one I believe in the most

‘Brands will see a 50% reduction in organic search traffic'. Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) must prepare for significant disruptions in customer acquisition as AI transforms search engines, social media, and other marketing channels. Welcome to the era of zero-click searches! Building trust, developing unique high-quality content, and experimenting with new channels will be crucial to compensate for the decline in organic visibility.

So what?

The personal brand will evolve into a unique channel distribution and destination. Customers may not click on any of your brand content anymore, but if they know and trust you personally (aka, if you’re known) they will actively seek you out. To quote Seth Godin’s my way, Personal branding is the only marketing that is left.

Source: Check the full report (Here)

SEO, Content & AI

📍 Predictions & tips from Search Engine Lands top SEO Experts

🔎 The Short of it

• Focus on scaling high-quality content production using AI, but with significant human input to improve output quality (Kevin Indig).
• Target mid-funnel keywords focused on product comparisons and buyer personas rather than high-volume keywords (Eli Schwartz).
• Keep pace with emerging content consumption trends that influence algorithm changes rather than overly focusing on responding to AI (Mordy Oberstein).
• Evaluate optimal content distribution strategies across search engines and social media platforms tailored to different audience search behavior (Suganthan Mohanadasan).
• Create "we experience" first-hand knowledge content at scale by engaging loyal customer advocates (Dan Taylor).
• Analyze Google search features like Topics and Filters to understand user search journeys and potential content needs (Gianluca Fiorelli).
• Shift from a focus on content production, link building, and site optimization to improving overall business helpfulness to users using expertise across domains like CX, PR, and product (Jono Alderson).
• Monitor ongoing Google lawsuits for insights into ranking factors like page quality, links/anchors, and especially user behavior metrics (Alli Berry).
• Leverage unique, proprietary data to create insightful analysis that stands out from AI-generated content (Dixon Jones).

🧠 The one(s) I believe in the most

• Leveraging unique proprietary data to create insightful content. This is where one of the true values of AI lies for content marketers and strategists, far surpassing its use in basic content creation, which isn't very effective. Pay particular attention to the section about data wrangling below👇.
• Thanks to AI, creating outstanding, personalized, and highly targeted content based on your data is now more feasible and cost-effective than ever before.

• All the ones that place satisfying user’s behaviors and content consumption habits at the core of any SEO strategy.We must focus on creating content that triggers and allows real human connections to engage our audience most authentically and humanly possible.
• It's somewhat cliché for a content strategist to claim that creating useful content for our target audience is the key to a successful content strategy. However, with AI now capable of writing and speaking as effectively as humans, our true advantage lies in leveraging our unique human qualities.

Sources: Check the full report (Here)

Journalism & AI

📍 The 2024 Journalisms Predictions from 144 journalists curated by Nieman Lab

🔎 The Short of it (& my favorites)

• Journalists will look for answers outside the news industry (Leezel Tanglao).
• Everyone gets an AI Agent (Javaun Moradi).
• Channels change the publishing game on WhatsApp (Meena Thiruvengadam).
• Print isn’t dead, it’s just being delivered by mail (Mizell Stewart III).
• AI will democratize disinformation (Matt Skibinski).
• We navigate deep uncertainty with community (Ax Mina).
• Behold, the journarator (Rishad Patel).
• Podcasting goes bionic (Joni Deutsch).
• Build your own platform (Rick Berke).
• Publishers’ short video strategy is put to the test (Snidgha Sur).
• Visuals get a boost from AI-powered tools (Amara Aguilar).
• AI kills the one-size-fits-all model (Nikita Roy).
• Memberships go off-platform (Francesco Zaffarano).
• Fact-checking needs a reboot (Bill Adair).
• “Link in comments” won’t save democracy (S. Mitra Kalita).
• The Homepage is back (Andrew Kaczynski).
• Scale is a trap (Ernie Smith).
• Journalists abandon social media, and news audiences follow (eventually) (Jacob L. Nelson).
• To build trust, news outlets prioritize transparency (Sue Cross).
• Publishers will finally be influenced by influencers (Andrew Losowsky).
• The algorithm will be the message (Alvarazo Liuzzi).
• TV reporters become TikTok Influencers (Jessica Maddox).
• News confronts reaching audiences in a post-social world (Sam Cholke).
• The press adopts a new level of transparency around images (Stale Grut).
• Celebrities will endorse publishers (and will get paid for it) (Ryan Kellet).
• Hyperlocal information warfare rises (A.J. Bauer).
• Journalism prepares for a post-search, post-social future (Alfred Hermida).
• We get past “post-platform” (Sarah Marshall).
• Headlines are going out of style (Zizi Papacharissi).

🧠 The one I believe in the most

All of them!! Remember those days when marketers were encouraged to turn their brand into a media? Since then, we, as marketers have consistently drawn inspiration from how journalists create compelling content for their target audience. And here we are, back at that point again.

In this collection of predictions you’ll find all the essential marketing elements for your 2024 marketing strategy in a world of AI, post social media, and beyond Google search. Your magic formula for 2024 = personal branding + unique, personalized, trustful content creation + community.

Source: Check the full report (Here).

Tech & AI

📍Stanford HAI Faculty Predictions

🔎 The Short of it

• Mass adoption of AI will shift white-collar work - knowledge workers will see productivity benefits but also changes to their jobs.
• Advances in multimodal models will lead to more convincing deepfakes - consumers and policymakers need to be vigilant.
• There may be a global shortage of GPUs to power AI systems as demand surges - alternative hardware solutions are needed.
• More capable "agents" will emerge who can not just chat but also take actions and connect to services.
• Progress towards multimedia AI with models that can process video in addition to text and images.
• Hopes for US regulation like bipartisan CREATE AI Act and adherence to Biden's Executive Order on AI.
• Organizations will need to set guidelines on permissible uses of AI and be prepared to update policies.
• Companies will navigate complicated new regulations on automated decision-making that let consumers opt out of certain AI uses.

🧠 The one I believe in the most

‘We will see a lot of controversies of “Is this AGI?” and “What is AGI?” I think people shouldn’t be worried about AI Taking over the world. That’s all hype. But we should be worried about these harms that are happening now - disinformation and deepfakes. We’ll certainly see more of that in 2024’.

This opportunity will be a significant business venture for any ambitious AI entrepreneur in 2024. Even if Apple, which is heavily investing in AI next year, does not seize it, major tech companies and venture capital firms like Andreessen Horowitz or Khosla Ventures might. Wherever there are substantial financial prospects, there is likely to be a brilliant mind motivated enough to find quickly a solution to the problem.

Sources: Check the full report (Here).

Media, Entertainment & AI

📍 The 2024 Media & Entertainment Predictions from Alix Partners

Alix Partners’ approach to AI implementation

🔎 The short of it

• AI will radically transform operations and competitiveness, with a significant impact on advertising and the creator economy.
• Generative AI will not fully replace human creative work, especially for premium content. AI will help streamline tasks, offer insights, and assist in aspects of content creation (summarizing or editing) which will enable creators to focus on artistry and innovation.
• Three rising generative AI use cases: creative ad generation/modification, post-production like deepfake dubbing, and real-time video analysis.
• About 80% of initial effort in AI/ML projects is data wrangling (the process of cleaning, transforming, and preparing raw data for analysis) - media companies must assess their level of readiness.
• Change management will be crucial as new generative AI tools are adopted and humans need to work differently.

🧠 The one I believe in the most

The data-wrangling part.

‘Media and entertainment companies vary on the maturity scale in terms of mining, structuring, and leveraging data. These companies must assess and determine their starting point based on data readiness. While they have treasure troves of proprietary data, it is often not in good enough shape for ML and GenAI. By addressing issues like granularity, data provenance, duplication, and accuracy, companies can transform their unstructured data into a foundation for scalable ML and GenAI solutions’.

Done properly, this one leads straight to transforming a media into his AI Agent which could be an awesome move to switch the business model of most media. Another one is the recent move from Axel Springer to sign a deal with Open AI to authorize them to train their AI on their content.

Source: Check the full report (Here)

Consumer Tech, Web 3 & AI

📍a16z Big ideas for 2024

🔎 The short of it

• Voice-first apps will become integral to our lives.
• Narrowly Tailored, Purpose-build AI: While ChatGPT was a great general AI assistant in 2023, it may not excel in every task. The future holds AI platforms tailored for specific purposes such as research, journalism, and design.
• AI tools will teach kids.
• Code-free AI Generators Spark New Behaviors.
• Creativity gets supercharged.
• AI & blockchain will come together.
• New models of storytelling, beyond text-based chat.
• B2B AI products embedded in our workflow.

🧠 The one I believe in the most

‘AI revolutionizes the way we produce information — changing society, culture, politics, the economy — it also creates a world of abundant AI-generated content, including deep fakes. Crypto technology can be used here as well to open the black box; track the origin of things we see online; and much more. We also need to figure out ways to decentralize generative AI and govern it democratically, so that no one actor ends up with the power to decide for all others; web3 is the laboratory for figuring out how. Decentralized, open-source crypto networks will democratize (vs. concentrate) AI innovation, ultimately making it safer for consumers’.

Andrew Hall - Professor, Standford Graduate School of Business.

The big excitement - quickly deflated - for the metaverse and the crypto winter have too quickly buried the "Web 3". The blockchain that underlies Web 3 is a robust technology that is here to stay. For over a year, I have been convinced that at the intersection of Web 3 and AI lies the solution to some of the biggest challenges posed by AI, including deepfakes and synthetic media.

Sources: Check the full report (Here).

My AI Tool Stack in 2023

The one I used daily

Using some AI tools in my job as a Content Strategist helped me become X10 more productive (and independent).

👉 Here are the 9 AI tools I can’t live without (Here).

The one I use sometimes

• Thoth: AI-Powered infographics. Turn any text into 1-page infographics in literally 1 minute (🔗 Here).

• Character.ai: Trigger different types of conversations with an AI and turn them into content (🔗Here).

• MagicBookifier: Turn audio into a Book. Great repurposing tool if your main platform is a Podcast (🔗 Here).

• y2mate. com: To help you download audio and video from YouTube (🔗Here).

• GapScout: Helps you identify gaps and emerging trends in your industry by providing you with data mining Reviews from Amazon, Capterra, G2, Trustpilot, and WordPress Plugin Repo (🔗 Here).

• Remesh: Helps you organize and lead online focus groups at scale, interact with them through real-time conversation via their platform, and generate automatic reports with all insights and data based on the surveys (🔗Here).

• Castmagic: A pure gem. Just download your video. Click on the “AI Content” tab and let the magic (for real!) happen (🔗 Here).

New ones from this past month

• Pika: Supposedly the new Midjourney, etc. Nice one, it’s true. But haven’t been that impressed (yet). That being said, when you live in Miami Beach all year long, any snowy atmosphere is a blast!

• Search +: This one is ok. It’s a Chatbox designed specifically for interacting with very large PDFs. Typically, I use Claude for working with PDFs. However, those pasts weeks, I’ve been utilizing Search+ extensively to delve deeper into and extract key information from a massive PDF I’m working on. It has honestly saved me a lot of time. The tool requires mainly single-topic use, as its interface is not particularly user-friendly when switching between different PDFs or topics. 

• Learniverse: Harness AI to curate tutorials for your unique goals. Adjust and adapt your curriculum seamlessly as you evolve. I tested it. It’s ok, not wow, but ok. It allows you to curate both video and written content on a specific topic you wish to learn about. For the free version, it curates up to 6 pieces of content (Here).

• D-ID: Turn still images into speaking digital persons in seconds. I did this one in less than a minute. The free version doesn’t offer a great scope of creativity but for a few $ (ranging from $6 to $16 per month) you can build nice videos with your avatar. Here is my wishing you (again) a sweet, peaceful, and energetic New Year (Here).

A Gem for you

• ChatHub: I literally can’t live without this one now. It saved me hours of work. It’s a Chrome App that enables you to chat with the most used Chatbot currently available (they recently included Gemini Pro and Grok) on 1 screen. 

  From 1 interface (you can choose to display up to 8 bots on the same page) you can chat and get all your conversations. You can download each of them whenever you’d like to. A really cool tool (Here).

  You’re welcome 🙃. 

   

That’s it for 2023 !!

I’m just gonna ask you one more thing to wrap up this year. It takes me several hours per week to conceive it. If you found it useful in any way this past year, you would make my year if you’d considered sharing it with anyone in marketing passionate about AI.

Thank you 💜.