Ben Person

Q&A | December 7, 2023

Marketing’s AI moment

The future of enterprise marketing will depend on how well it leverages AI, says Tenon CEO Ben Person, but humans will always have a role

Effective marketing not only inspires an audience to act, but also quantifies and measures that audience’s response. For that reason, directly linking marketing spend to revenue has always been a priority. That’s why Ben Person, a longtime technology marketer, co-founded enterprise marketing technology company Tenon last year to provide organizations the ability to automate marketing workflows with as much accuracy and accountability as any other business function. (Tenon runs on the Now Platform.)

Person is also the co-author of Total Customer Growth, which introduces marketers to specific online account-based marketing strategies to differentiate customers just looking from those ready to buy, making sales more likely and saving marketing dollars in the process.

Now, the rules of marketing are changing as AI-related marketing tools are just beginning to proliferate. Person, however, doesn’t see AI replacing marketers, but rather as a way to empower them. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Grow skills to be an in-demand ServiceNow expert

There’s no question that AI is going to play a role in marketing. Will it allow writers to produce better, faster content? Likely. Does it replace human thought around how to cut through the noise, how to make something unique and different? That is where the human element is always going to exist from a creative perspective.


A lot of today’s marketing still is based on gut feeling and guesswork. We need to use AI and analytics to help us figure out how best to spend every dollar and to justify why we spend those dollars. That is one of the biggest challenges marketing organizations face. They're getting their budgets reduced, their teams shrunk, but the number that they must hit for the year is not changing. AI could play a major role in helping them do more with less—or at least do more at a higher quality.

AI really moves the needle by automating workflows. You want AI to look at all these signals across companies, industries, and personas, and figure out who’s actively looking to buy. Then you need to either let AI automate the process or provide you with just the right intelligence, so you don't have to spend other resources doing that. That's where I really see automation and AI playing a major role in the future.

 

A lot of today’s marketing still is based on gut feeling and guesswork. We need to use AI and analytics to help us figure out how best to spend every dollar and to justify why we spend those dollars.

 

There must be checks and balances in the output and action taken by AI. Would I allow a Generative AI solution to auto-adjust where I spend my dollars as a marketer? Of course not. Just like I wouldn't allow AI to move money around my bank accounts. So, there are several areas where I would be very cautious. And then there’s quality control. I’d want to know everything that AI is touching. Am I allowing AI to read all my blog posts and write all my content? There's a lot of oversight that needs to be put around that.

 Multimedia feature

The low-code innovators

Related articles

Put GenAI to work
ARTICLE
Put GenAI to work

Generative AI will supercharge productivity and enable new ways of working

Experience in the age of AI
ARTICLE
Experience in the age of AI

Companies are putting AI to work as they interact with customers, employees, and the world

 

GenAI will take your job (and make it better)
ARTICLE
GenAI will take your job (and make it better)

Emerging tech promises to transform jobs and humanize work

 

Loading spinner