How Marketers Can Bring The Power Of Generative AI To Their Organizations

64% of marketers say AI is either very important or critically important to their marketing success over the next 12 months.

This reasoning is linked to generative AI: in marketing, your KPIs probably relate to scaling content creation, driving engagement and conversions, and/or building brand loyalty — all areas where generative AI can help. But while the possibilities for what you can create with generative AI are nearly endless, the million dollar question is: how do you get started?

The simplest answer is that you don't try to build AI-powered experiences on your own. (The resources required are seemingly infinite.) At the same time, you don't want to add too many disparate vendors: having one vendor for review response and another for generative AI-led content creation — for example — leads to silos and disjointed activities. 

Instead, you need to find the right platform — with the right, model-agnostic approach — to bring generative AI to your organization.

A few quick pros of buying from a vendor: 

• Lower cost
• Better time to value (you don't need to spend weeks building and iterating)
• Research is done for you (you don't need to reinvent the wheel)

Finally, the right vendor will know that AI isn't about any one trend, like a chatbot this season and robot the next (kidding — sort of). That's where themodel-agnostic approach comes in, allowing you to continually upgrade to the best AI capabilities so you're always taking advantage of the best models.

In this guide, you'll learn how Yext can help you save time bringing generative AI to your org and set you up for future success through our efficient, model-agnostic approach. 

First: what is a model-agnostic approach?

If you're wondering why you should care about the "model approach" behind the platform you use for generative AI applications, you're not alone.  

A "model-agnostic approach" means that software is not built with a dependency on any particular Large Language Mode (LLM). Although some type of model is always required to power a platform's generative capabilities, the platform is built in a way where any new LLM could be swapped in at any time. This approach makes it easier to react quickly and adopt the best model available for a particular use case — from powering your chatbot to generating website content. (In other words, you'll always have the right model for the job.)

That's why Yext is not reliant on one particular Large Language Model to support its generative AI capabilities. For example, Yext Chat was originally built using Open AI's GPT-3.5, but a new model could be swapped in in the future if there is a better option.

We spend the time building in-house models, borrowing open-source models, and building on top of them — or buying the industry's best large language models, so that we can always choose the model best-fit for the job you need to do as a marketer.

Second: why does this matter? And how does Yext set me up for success?

Here are three benefits Yext can offer as you look to leverage AI at your organization:  The AI landscape will continue to change. If you look at the rapid innovation in this space over the past year, it's clear that the best solution today may not be the best solution tomorrow. 

Building experiences on Yext means that you will automatically take advantage of the best models possible. This way, you don't have to worry about switching vendors, evaluating new solutions — you can rest assured that Yext technology will evolve with your business.  Do you have AI fatigue already? As a marketing leader, you probably already know that it's time-consuming to try to stay up with the latest trends in AI — especially when it feels like a new model comes out every day. (To capitalize, your organization would probably have to staff full-time engineers to test and evaluate models on a continual basis — in addition to any research or evaluations your marketing team is conducting.) 

That's why Yext does staff an entire team of data scientists to research every model we elect to use and evaluate on a continual basis if there is a better option out there. You'll save valuable time on research — which you can then use to focus your efforts on driving more leads.  Everyone's use cases for AI differ.

Some experiences you're looking to use to engage your customer might be very basic: helping customers locate stores near them, finding directions, and looking up the hours — in a conversational, step-by-step format. Or, you might be more interested in leveraging AI to scale content creation: generating bios, blog content, and more.

In the same way that you wouldn't use heavy machinery to do a job that can be accomplished with hammer and nails, you don't need an extremely complex, expensive model to accomplish every job. Yext selects lightweight, faster, more cost-effective generative models when possible, passing on these benefits to your organization. (Your finance and IT teams will be thrilled, too — you'll save costs, be secure, and stay compliant.) 

Conclusion

With the right, model-agnostic platform — like Yext — you can bring the power of generative AI to your organization to scale content creation, engage customers, and more. You'll have powerful tech and the ability to leverage the best models on the market while only paying for what you need (which should make it easy to get all stakeholders on board — from marketing to legal, finance, and IT).