A little community-building can yield a lot of inspiration. At Northbound, we value community connectedness, especially with evolving team collaboration models. When we can expand our community beyond our coworkers, it grounds us in real lives and businesses inspiring our best thinking. Most of all it reinforces the inimitable nature of a face-to-face conversation between smart, passionate people.
Northbound hosted a roundtable inviting a handful of participants from within our community of big tech and start-up tech clients to open up to each other on the topic of AI in their workstreams, in brand building, and for their teams.
The conversation was inspiring, real, and fun. We started by getting candid about the concerns, frustrations, and questions that live at the intersection of brand building and AI:
- Messaging that tells us how we’ll feel using AI — “easy” or “effortless” or “simple” — is far less defensible than those words that are grounded in a real, tangible outcomes. In everyday experience, one moment we may be appreciating what it lets us do and how it makes us feel, and the next moment we may feel like it’s disrupting or complicating our plans in the most frustrating ways. It’s true for us as practitioners as much as it’s true for us as consumers.
- Even pros working alongside the very engineers designing AI products can struggle to frame what it is and why it’s valuable. It’s not for lack of words, access to technical expertise, or comprehension – it's because the desire to explain can dominate and crowd out the need to position and define purpose. Be mindful of that balance, and where you need your strategy and messaging to help establish a new perception versus just convey facts.
- Brand leaders are facing a call to deliver progress on more AI-related metrics of success across product, sales funnel, and brand perceptions. Can AI keep up with KPIs? These metrics include tool adoption and utilization, user engagement, and share of sales. We’re collectively excited to see what future barriers we can break with AI, but in the short term, there’s a lot of knowledge sharing to be done within our community as we discover what just works.
In any good roundtable, there will be some polarizing and definitive takes — this group was no exception. There were a range of attitudes toward AI including some remarkable points of convergence:
- On AI as a differentiator: Differentiation simply by offering an AI product experience is fleeting and it’s headed for parity in the same way “.com” and “SaaS” differentiators have. For that advantage to be sustainable the AI application needs to be linked to what a customer cares about regardless of the underlying technologies. Even for brand leaders whose product suite is dominated by AI, their most effective messaging and positioning approaches rarely make AI the hero.
- On sharing decision-making with AI: At minimum, you should be getting out of your comfort zone and experimenting with AI as a personal productivity and decision-making tool. To stay up to date, you should be leveraging the analytical and iterative superpowers of AI to extend your time to focus on being a leader. And to think ahead...well, that means considering AI as both collaborator and approver in critical brand and business decisions. Our discussion was divided 50-50 on welcoming an AI participant to join a workshop or board meeting — where do you stand?
- On AI disintermediating between consumers and brands: Just as search engines transformed how people shop and find products to overtake the biggest share of digital marketing spend today, AI is completely changing the experience of the search bar. Instead of links, we see AI-curated recommendations, and it’s only going to get more complex when shopping agents meet CX agents. As practitioners, our roundtable agreed that as AI creates new paths for brand engagement, more consistency is required to make an impact through new layers of agents.
- On personalization diluting brand identity: There is such a thing as too familiar! Where some brands are stumbling into the uncanny valley by relying on AI for visual design and creative production, others risk hyper-personalization that triggers feelings of creepiness or invasion of privacy. The difference-maker for useful and positive experiences is whether that personalization is authentically trying to improve my experience in context — or if it’s hollow chat.
As humans, we’re never more inspired than by engaging with each other, and we are grateful to our roundtable participants for approaching the topic with curiosity and candor. We’re looking forward to gathering more brand professionals together for future roundtable discussion; and hopefully creating more wisdom worth sharing.
.png)
.png)
