Strategies for implementing generative AI to transform content infrastructures

As generative AI begins to permeate a variety of areas in enterprises to optimize and enhance workflows, its application for content creation and publishing open a world of possibilities.

KMWorld held a webinar, Accelerate, Augment, and Automate: How AI Can Supercharge Your Content Lifecycle, featuring Lisa Gately, principal analyst at Forrester, Martin Owen, CEO of Quark, and Emerson Welch, VP of marketing at Quark, to break down how generative AI can reimagine content infrastructures, ranging from supporting content strategies to embracing new testing capabilities.

The discussion kicked off by highlighting that 62% of enterprises expect AI investment to increase, according to Forrester’s 2023 Priorities Survey. With the exploding popularity of generative AI in the last year, this certainly comes as no surprise.

The speakers further emphasized that generative AI could fuel changes in maturity for B2B content. This sort of growth will manifest as leveraging AI to advance content capabilities while simultaneously “working differently” and mitigating recurring challenges with content waste.

This application of AI is easier said than done, however. The speakers advised that a critical step in adopting more AI to optimize content infrastructures is to identify early use cases of speed and value. Reviewing daily activities and pinning down where a smarter way to perform repetitive tasks, or to accelerate planning, production, and promotion, builds a strong foundation for AI implementation.

While many enterprises have yet to successfully adopt AI to reshape their content strategies, some early adopters must now adapt to the introduction of generative AI, illustrating excellent examples of how to integrate with this iteration of the technology.

According to a collection of sentiments from leaders of various enterprises, creating efficiency and extending the value of content play a crucial role in early adopters’ experiences with generative AI. They offered the following insights:

• Automate repetitive tasks such as image resizing.
• Get to market faster with short-form content.
• Spend time using data to inform decisions.
• Reduce copywriting time and costs while increasing engagement.
• Spend less time editing for style guide and voice and instead focus on creative ideas, backlog, and content operations.
• Get more value out of longform and event content by repurposing, reusing, and promoting it.
• Move the content team toward embracing a more diverse skill set: from being copywriters to a team of writers, editors, fact checkers, reporters, or journalists.

While generative AI has the capacity to flood the industry with a variety of strategies toward optimization, there are still areas of concern, particularly in relation to consistency, collaboration, trust, copyright, and security.

Ultimately, the speakers argued that organizations need a foundational level of content maturity before applying generative AI to improve content quality, scale, efficiency, personalization, and impact. In this way, concerns may be alleviated due to already in place methods and infrastructure that inform the way AI securely and effectively manifests in an enterprise.

When embarking on the journey toward integrating with generative AI, best practices and certain steps may separate enterprises that successfully and continuously implement, and those that struggle with widespread adoption. The speakers concluded the discussion by offering the following action items:

• Prioritize education to learn how AI works and explore content use cases.
• Assess your organization’s current content maturity to determine areas for improvement and uses of AI.
• Select narrow use cases to build a foundation for success.
• Identify sponsors, champions, and experts to help with pilot projects, measuring progress, and team learning.
• Prepare your team for ongoing development in content skills and capabilities and in evolving workflows.

For an in-depth discussion of applying generative AI to content strategies, including relevant statistics and models, you can view an archived version of the webinar here.