A recent report from Accenture stated that “Gen AI is poised to provide the most significant economic uplift and change to work since the agricultural and industrial revolutions.”
That’s a big statement. And even if it’s partially true, we’re all currently experiencing one of the largest technology disruptions of our lifetimes.
Like any seismic innovation, Gen AI brings both incredible opportunity and significant risk. In order to intelligently navigate these rapidly changing waters, I’m proud to announce the launch of MG Labs—our R&D testing team dedicated to uncovering the most impactful uses of emerging technology for our people and our clients.
We’ve always been an agency that likes to experiment and dig in. During this critical moment of intersection between marketing and Gen AI, the only way to get smart is to see what these tools can do. MG Labs has already tested several popular AI applications (check out the key findings from some of our experimentation with ChatGPT and Hubspot AI), but there is a LOT more to come.
Here’s what we’ve accomplished so far.
What is MG Labs?
As part of our new MG Labs initiative, we are going to be continuously evaluating Gen AI applications across the marketing and PR stack—from content generation to video production to earned media measurement and digital marketing. And we’ll be sharing actionable findings as we go. All of our testing is done in a secure environment that doesn’t use any client data. If a tool shows promise, we will evaluate it against our responsible AI guidelines based on industry best practices and consider it for wider adoption across the agency.
The fundamental question we are trying to answer with MG Labs is, what is the ideal partnership between Gen AI and human talent? Tech investor and former Marketo executive Robin Bordoli captured this sentiment beautifully when he said:
“I think what makes AI different from other technologies is that it’s going to bring humans and machines closer together. AI is sometimes incorrectly framed as machines replacing humans. It’s not about machines replacing humans, but machines augmenting humans. Humans and machines have different relative strengths and weaknesses, and it’s about the combination of these two that will allow human intents and business processes to scale 10x, 100x, and beyond that in the coming years.”
– Robin Bordoli, technology investor and CMO at Weights & Biases
We are constantly renewing our relationship with technology. It’s not about replacing humans; it’s about equipping our teams to be more efficient, engaged, productive, and satisfied at work. That requires a deep understanding of how we can best augment our people with emerging capabilities that adhere to the ethical values that we share with our clients.
The reason marketing is leading the way in Gen AI adoption across industries is because the technology holds enormous potential to accelerate productivity and transform the way we all work. However, it’s one thing to talk about potential. Determining where today’s tools can actually deliver value for our clients and for our industry is another story.
Take content creation, for example. Highwire PR recently shared the results of a study they conducted with PR Week, which found that “content generated by humans was twice as effective as machine-generated content across all of the metrics that matter except for volume.” Neil Patel found similar results when he ran an internal study at his agency that found human-written articles outranked AI-generated content on Google over 94% of the time.
I bring up these content creation examples to illustrate why we created MG Labs. Right now, Gen AI content tools seem capable of providing a decent starting point for deliverables. However, they still require significant shaping by human talent to reach a final version that resonates (and that’s not including the ethical considerations of machine-generated content that requires its own blog post!). I’m sure the ideal human-machine relationship will continue to evolve into the future as these tools get more sophisticated—Gen AI is only going to get better. But the only way we’ll know is if we keep experimenting, so we hope you will stay tuned and follow our journey.
For more information on the latest Gen AI advancements, check out the MG Labs information hub or head to the Artificial Intelligence industries page to learn how we can help you break through the AI market noise.