How to Put Big Tech and AI — the Biggest Threat and Biggest Enablers of Your Business — to Work (Episode 428)

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Big Tech and AI are the biggest threats to your business. At the same time, they’re also the biggest enablers of your business. Putting them to work for your business is a tricky balancing act. But it’s one that you can manage. The trick is building from five key themes that Big Tech and AI bring to the market.

What are those five key themes? How can you balance the threat and benefit of Big Tech and AI? And, most importantly, how can you put Big Tech and AI to work to build your business? That’s what this episode of Thinks Out Loud is all about.

Want to learn more? Here are the show notes for you.

How to Put Big Tech and AI — the Biggest Threat and Biggest Enablers of Your Business — to Work (Episode 428) — Headlines and Show Notes

Show Notes and Links

• AI is the Bear: Learning to Be a Better Marketer in the Age of AI (Thinks Out Loud Episode 422)
• The Best AI is Now Free For Everyone: Revisiting Will Your Customers Use AI? (Thinks Out Loud)
• Why You Need to Ignore the Coming AI Backlash (Thinks Out Loud Episode 417)
• Why AI Makes Customer Experience Even More Important for Your Business (Thinks Out Loud Episode 427)
• We Owe It To Our Customers to Make Their Lives Better (Thinks Out Loud Episode 361)
• What Marketers Really Need to Know About Putting AI to Work (Thinks Out Loud Episode 426)
• Deal With It: Digital Makes Marketing Easier for Everyone, Which Makes Marketing Harder For Everyone (Thinks Out Loud Episode 213)
• Google is Changing Search. How to Build Traffic and Revenue Beyond Google — Part 1 (Thinks Out Loud Episode 424)
• The CORE Methodology: How to Build Traffic and Revenue Beyond Google — Part 2 (Thinks Out Loud Episode 425) – Tim Peter & Associates
• Americans increasingly using ChatGPT, but few trust its 2024 election information | Pew Research Center
• Adverse impacts of revealing the presence of “Artificial Intelligence (AI)” technology in product and service descriptions on purchase intentions: the mediating role of emotional trust and the moderating role of perceived risk: Journal of Hospitality Marketing & Management: Vol 0, No 0 – Get Access

You might also enjoy this webinar I recently participated in with Miles Partnership that looked at "The Power of Generative AI and ChatGPT: What It Means for Tourism & Hospitality" here:

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• Digital & E-commerce Maturity Matrix. As a bonus, here’s a PDF that can help you assess your company’s digital maturity. You can use this to better understand where your company excels and where its opportunities lie. And, of course, we’re here to help if you need it. The Digital & E-commerce Maturity Matrix rates your company’s effectiveness — Ad Hoc, Aware, Striving, Driving — in 6 key areas in digital today, including:
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Running time: 22m 47s

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Transcript: How to Put Big Tech and AI — the Biggest Threat and Biggest Enablers of Your Business — to Work

Well hello again everyone and welcome back to Thinks Out Loud, your source for all the digital expertise your business needs. My name is Tim Peter, this is episode 428 of The Big Show. And I think we have a really cool episode for you today.

A big part of this podcast, something we talk about a lot, is the relationship between your business and big tech. And that includes a particular focus on how you can improve customer acquisition and ultimately lower the cost of doing business with big tech for your business. As a consequence of that discussion and of where Big Tech’s focus has tended to be lately, we’re also spending a lot of time talking about artificial intelligence, how Big Tech uses it, and increasingly how you can put it to work for your business.

For instance, if you think about some of the more recent episodes we’ve put up, you know, we’ve talked about how AI is the bear, how it’s running you down, and how AI makes customer experience more important, what marketers really need to know about putting AI to work, the reality of how big tech and lots of businesses bundle and unbundle and the role that that plays in customer acquisition.

And how Google is changing search, and because of that, how and why you need to build traffic and revenue beyond Google specifically, and big tech more generally. What I want to do today is highlight five big themes that each of these past episodes call out and how you can assemble them into a working plan, a useful strategy to make your business more successful.

And these five big themes are that Big Tech remains the single biggest enabler and the single biggest threat to your business. The second is that AI is changing customer behavior, and the biggest change is around customer expectations. The third is that AI makes it easier for your competitors to create great content and amazing experiences for customers.

The fourth is that failing to use AI to improve your content and your customers experience at all gives your competitors a massive advantage. And the fifth is that failing to use these tools well hurts your customers experience and drives them back to big tech to find someone else who can help them.

So I want to talk about each of these in a little bit of detail. First, Big Tech remains the single biggest enabler and the single biggest threat to your business. Big Tech are the channels by which you can reach your customers. That’s a huge benefit. They help you find customers and a wider array of customers that you often can reach on your own.

They make it easier to reach people you can’t reach on your own. They’re also gatekeepers. And as you’ve heard me say many times before, Gatekeeper’s got a gate, right? All of your competitors use these tools too. Your competitors live right alongside you on these channels. And big tech increasingly charges you for the privilege of showing up.

Alongside your competitors, right? When I say gatekeepers go to gate, that’s what I mean. They’re charging you just to show up. They’re raising the fees. They’re raising the price. They’re raising the tolls that you have to pay to actually show up. And you’re still showing up alongside competitors right next to them.

That’s not always great, right? So it’s something we want to be very conscious of, that there, there’s a lot of benefit to big tech, and there are some downsides there, and we have to find the right ways to balance them for our businesses. I mentioned the second one is that AI is changing customer behavior, and the biggest change is around customer expectations.

If you think about how customer behaviors are changing, it often happens without customers even being aware of it. And I’m, I’m talking about how Big tech is using AI to improve the experience customers have. Think of features like AI curated feeds on Instagram or Facebook or TikTok or LinkedIn or Pinterest.

Think about Google’s AI overviews. Think about Amazon’s use of artificial intelligence in its recommendations and its logistics operation. Big tech is using AI under the hood to improve their customers experiences. The customers don’t even realize what’s being done, they just know that it’s better. And it’s changing the expectations that customers have for what good experience looks like, what it feels like.

This is actually how this always works. If you think about when Amazon started offering free shipping, suddenly free shipping became something customers expected, pretty much from everybody. The same thing happened when they went to two day shipping. In hospitality, this is a known reality. It’s called amenity creep.

At various times, things like breakfast buffets, or flat panel TVs, or curved shower rods, or free Wi Fi were luxuries. Now, pretty much every hotel in the world has them, if not better. Customers just expect that those are things you’re going to get everywhere. The third big trend, the third big theme, is that AI makes it easier for your competitors to create great content and offer amazing experiences.

You’ve heard me say, A billion times on this show that content is king and customer experience is queen. Together, content and customer experience help you connect with customers directly and bring them back to you again and again and again. Content and customer experience are two sides of the same coin.

Content is your 24x7x365 salesperson and it is your 24x7x365 customer service rep. Great content is the first leg of the stool towards providing your customer with a great customer experience. If they can’t find what they’re looking for, if they don’t get good answers to their questions, they’re going to go looking for a better answer.

And, as you know, the place they’re going to look is on Google, or Facebook, or Instagram, or Amazon, or Copilot, or LinkedIn. In other words, Big tech, right? It becomes this vicious cycle. By contrast, great customer experience drives loyalty. It’s what causes customers to seek you out by name. My favorite brands, think about it, your favorite brands, aren’t ones you need to search for.

You don’t have to go searching for a solution to a problem that your favorite brands already solved. You know who they are. You look for them by name. That’s the position you want to be in. Because that’s one of the ways you bypass big tech. That’s one of the ways you drive down your cost of customer acquisition by building loyal customers who come back to you.

I mentioned the fourth big theme is failing to use AI to improve your content and your customer’s experience at all gives your competitors a huge advantage. Many companies are now using AI throughout the customer journey to improve their content and improve their customer experience. I mentioned this a moment ago in terms of big tech, but you’re seeing it with plenty of smaller companies too.

Just to give some examples, AI allows you to better identify customer segments. We know who we want to provide a message to. Artificial intelligence also allows you to create a greater variety and more targeted messages for those customer segments. It enables a more personalized experience. It enables a better experience because you’re speaking to the specific customer you need to.

In their voice and in their language and doing it far more economically and far faster. I think about this a lot generally, but I’m thinking about it a lot specifically these days. I don’t know about you, but I’m watching the Olympics a lot right now. I’m a big fan of the Olympics. It’s, it’s always so much fun to see these.

Amazing athletes do the peak of human performance, perform at the peak of human ability. And, you know, if you’re watching something like track and field, if one of the runners switched to riding a bicycle, and we’ll pretend for purposes of this discussion that using a bike was legal in track and field, Then everybody else who was just running would lose.

It would no longer be track and field, it would be cycling. But bicycles literally would change the game. If swimmers raced against folks in boats, again, they’d lose. It would literally change the game. Technology is a game changer. AI specifically is a game changer, or at least it is when it’s used well, and I’m going to talk more about this in just a moment.

Years ago, though, we had an episode called Deal With It. Digital makes marketing easier for everyone. Which makes marketing harder for everyone, right? AI repeats that mantra. AI makes marketing and customer experience easier, easier for everyone. Which makes them harder for everyone. We need to be using the technology appropriately.

We need to be using it well if we want to compete in the same race that our competitors are running and that big tech is running. They’re all using bicycles or cars or jets to create better content and create better experience. If we’re not, we’re stuck at the starting block. We’re not even running in the race.

Now, the fifth big theme, and this gets to the core of it, a moment ago, as I said, if you fail to use these tools at all, that’s going to create a huge advantage for your competitors. If you fail to use these tools well, then that hurts your customer experience and drives them back to big tech to find someone else who can help them.

And this is, this Maybe the key point I want you to think about, as I noted in our episode about why AI makes customer experience more important, it’s not about the tool. And let me be clear, AI is just a tool. It’s really no different from your CRM, or your CDP, or your mobile app, or your website, or anything else you use to connect with your customers.

If that tool is not focused on providing a great experience, if you’re not using these tools to improve your customers experiences and truly their lives, then you’re not really helping your customers. The funny thing about how you can do this well, though, is that Big Tech might be providing a playbook here, as they so often do.

A few minutes ago, I mentioned that Big Tech was building these capabilities behind the scenes, under the hood of their customers experiences. Sometimes the customers aren’t aware. That these companies are using big tech, excuse me, using artificial intelligence, rather, to improve the experience. And there may be a reason why they’re doing that.

There was recent research published in the Journal of Hospitality Marketing and Management that shows that, and this is a quote, the inclusion of the artificial intelligence term in descriptions of products and services decreases purchase intention and that emotional trust mediates this relationship.

In other words, customers want the benefits of AI, but they want a human face attached to it. They want to deal with people. They want to deal with people who treat them really well. So, you need to be thinking about How you can treat your customers as human beings to provide the experiences that they increasingly expect.

No matter what tools you’re actually using under the hood to serve those customer needs, you want to make it friendly. You want to make it human. As my friend Mark Schaefer says, the most human brand wins. And he is so right when it comes to that. If you’re not thinking about how to treat your customers as human beings, Regardless of the tools, then you’re actively encouraging them to keep looking for a better service, a better product, a better company who is focused on their needs.

Which means that you’re going to have to pay the gatekeepers again and again and again for the privilege of talking with your customers. Which is not the place you want to be. So, obviously, I didn’t lay out these themes just to scare you. We also want to talk about what you can do with it. And it always starts in the same place.

It’s where I just left off a moment ago. You focus on your customers as people and focus on what they care about. You’ve probably heard me tell this story before on the show about former Amazon CEO and current Space Cowboy, Jeff Bezos. Always saying, when people ask him about what would change over the next five years or the next ten years, he liked to ask, what won’t change?

What are the things your customers always care about? Start there. We know customer experience is one of them. Think about and answer the question of what customer experience means for your business. Obviously, customer experience means different things if we’re talking about a hotel, or a restaurant, or financial services, or retail, or software as a service, or manufacturing, or on and on and on.

But think about what it means to your customers and your business. One technique that we’ve found valuable The goal is to use ChatGPT or Google’s Gemini to test ideas about customer experiences and test customer service before putting them in the field with actual human beings. These tools provide a solid way to conduct user testing, air quotes, easily and inexpensively.

We can understand things, we can kind of brainstorm what it is the customer might expect and make it work. Another thing that we know that customers want are answers to their questions. What are the questions that your customers routinely ask? Again, we’ve used a variety of AI tools from Microsoft or Google or SEMrush or HubSpot to process our clients data and understand what customers are actually looking for.

We can then use those tools to brainstorm new content ideas, build out functional content calendars, and in some cases, improve drafts of content designed to answer those questions. We’re also using AI tools from, among others, Google and Microsoft and Meta, to promote that content so that customers know it exists.

Notice, by the way, what are we talking about here? Content is king. Customer experience is queen. Because they don’t change. The specific answers might change. The expectations might change. But the need to provide great content and a great customer experience Doesn’t change. There are of course other things that won’t change that are specific to your business.

Take some time to think those through. Use ChatGPT or Gemini or Claude to brainstorm your ideas and see how you can identify how to leverage those for your business. Notice though, That those tools, and yeah, big tech, are also the instruments by which you improve your content and your customer service.

They are a threat, but they can be a massive enabler. So to wrap this up, remember that there are five big themes you want to keep in mind that we’re all dealing with. One is that AI is changing customer behavior. Two is that AI makes it easier for your competitors to create great content and amazing experiences.

Three, failing to use AI to improve your content and your customers experience at all gives your competitors a huge advantage. Four is failing to use these tools well hurts your customers experience and drives them back to Big Tech to find someone else who can help them. And five, big tech is the biggest threat and the biggest enabler of your business.

Use them wisely and use them well to see your business grow. Use Big Tech to help create great content and great experiences so that your customers will want to work with you. They’ll come back to you again and again and again. And then you won’t have to rely on Big Tech quite so much to find those customers.

Instead, customers will find you. I can’t wait to hear how you do.

Show Wrap-Up and Credits

Now, looking at the clock on the wall, we are out of time for this week.

And I want to remind you again that you can find the show notes for this episode. As well as an archive of all past episodes by going to timpeter.com/podcast. Again, that’s timpeter.com/podcast. Just look for episode 428.

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Show Outro

Finally, and I know I say this a lot, I want you to know how thrilled I am that you keep listening to what we do here. It means so much to me. You are the reason we do this show.

You’re the reason that Thinks Out Loud happens every single week. So please, keep your messages coming on LinkedIn. Keep hitting me up on Twitter, sending things via email. I love getting a chance to talk with you, to hear what’s going on in your world, and to learn how we can do a better job building on the types of information and insights and content and community that work for you and work for your business.

So with all that said, I hope you have a fantastic rest of your day, I hope you have a wonderful week ahead, and I will look forward to speaking with you here on Thinks Out Loud next time. Until then, please be well, be safe, and as always, take care, everybody.