• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, September 25, 2023

Having a verbal conversations with a machine to help plan advertising strategies will soon become common. The Brandtech Group has been working for the past three to six months on a generative artificial intelligence (GAI) tool that allows brands to audibly ask questions as they create strategies.

Questions during meetings, for example, could relate to anything from media buys to strategy, said Rebecca Sykes, a partner at The Brandtech Group, gave this example: what would happen if we decrease out of home (OOH) spend by 20% and increase display by 30%?

The input relies on historical company data, as well as data partnerships, so all businesses across the company can interface with the tool, while the output is returned in a variety of ways, from line graphs and text. Verbally communication is not far away with the latest technology OpenAI announced. All to provide answers.

The industry has moved into the next generation of AI content. Much of it is conversational.

Sykes called the ability to work with all types of data and making it available to anyone in the business a “game-changing idea.” The GAI models are based on prompts and the client’s data. Through this interface, anyone can query the data. Clients do not need a full-time analyst to read the outcomes or turn around the queries.

The tool is being tested with a couple of clients.

Brands do not view GAI campaigns the same way they did earlier this year. Now they are looking at the technology and trying to determine how to build it into processes and services such as the ability to converse with the technology.

Google and Microsoft have been working on their own “conversational experience." Google has been working with a small group of advertisers during the past few months to once again change the way advertisers build ads.

Microsoft this past week introduced Compare & Decide Ads, a suite of conversational chat experience that will arrive in closed beta in early 2024.

Sykes leads the emergent technology practice that supports Unilever, Bayer, among others. She oversaw The Brandtech Group’s implementation of Gen AI at every step of the process, from creating a workable legal framework with clients to review and manage Gen AI tools.

She also has forged forward to prototype inclusivity in AI assets, and assisted in The Brandtech Group’s 2023 acquisition of Gen AI creative platform Pencil. Helping to share the product and services roadmap came next, including the recent launch of Pencil Pro, - an updated iteration of the platform designed for large multinational enterprises.

One of her favorite projects at The Brandtech Group, the ability to address bias in data sets used in image generation.

If you ask an image-based model to give you an image of a CEO, 97% of the images returned will be a white male,” she said. “That stat in real life is about 88. What do you do if you’re not comfortable with that percentage? Change something to make it right.”

The Brandtech Group did. It built a prototype called the Bias Breaker, a “roll-of-the-dice probability tool” consisting of six most common types of bias such as age, gender, disability, race, and others. When you put a text prompt into the tool, such as “CEO,” it rolls the dice and adds between one and two types of inclusivity. It has the potential to return more diverse and inclusive prompts that can be used in any image generator.