Will generative AI ultimately be a help or a hindrance for creatives?
Accenture’s global head of analytics told AdNews that he sees the technology as "freeing up time for creativity".
Jatinder Singh, who leads Accenture Song’s data intelligence practice globally, said that generative AI has the potential to "widen the aperture" for the likes of agency creatives, planners and even journalists.
"Just as a strategic planner would use a whole series of qualitative and quantitative insights and distil them, generative AI gives you more information and a different perspective.”
Peter Smith, Accenture’s global MD of AI, echoed Singh: “Creativity is typically a team sport, so the way I view generative AI is like we just have another member of that team. It's an exciting new introduction to that process that can super charge a lot of the work that we already do.
“When you think about the way a technology like generative AI can be applied, and how it impacts the economic model of a business, there's a growth mechanism to this, whereby we can provide more personalised content or individualised content to our customers and our audiences.
“At the same time, we can take costs out of the equation as well. Unlike some of the Web3 technologies that a lot of organisations have been thinking about as of late, this represents both a growth opportunity and a cost containment opportunity, and especially in this macro environment, it’s very attractive to the executives that we speak with."
Smith - whose role includes leading Accenture Song’s Large Language Model (LLM) and generative AI practice - said that the technology has provided benefits for unexpected industries.
“For example, there's been a lot of talk about the abstracting summarisation power of AI and LLMs; as we think about that particular use case as one example, there's some direct application to life sciences and the medical legal review process.
“If you had asked me a year ago if they would be one of the first industries to really get on board with this, they probably wouldn’t even make the top five, so there's some surprising kind of by-products of just how quickly the technology is evolving.”
As for what generative AI means for the media sector, Smith used the comparison to book publishers to emphasise the opportunity for monetising untapped data assets.
“If you think about book publishers for example, there's a whole corpus of books that just sit in a publisher’s backlist today. With LLMs, there's new opportunity to unlock and rediscover that backlist for customers, because we're able to analyse the context of those backlists and render new recommendations of old books to those customers.
“There's a lot of interesting applications to not only the day-to-day operations of what we do in media, but also in terms of the commercial side of that business, and how we can unlock and re-monetise data assets that have been kind of untapped for some time.”
Singh said that the typical conundrum for a CMO, chief growth officer or chief customer officer typically has been about ‘balancing the scales’ - am I going to get reach or am I going to get relevance? – but with technologies such as generative AI, they can now drive both.
“You can use generative AI to drive creativity to fuel emotional connections with brands, whilst at the same time ensuring that you are also generating the next iteration of content and optimising it. That trade-off that CMOs traditionally had of building brand at the cost of being relevant is no longer an issue.”
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