Generative AI (artificial intelligence) has escaped laboratory environments. Today, it has proven its potential to re-establish how corporations and consumers interact with computing systems. Surpassing conventional autonomous systems, generative AI demonstrates more dynamic and less robotic features when it helps you write reports.
Some brands want to embrace it to accelerate how their in-house teams design, prototype, test, and upgrade products. Others want 24/7 customer support chatbots to engage multilingual audiences. However, does this trend also suggest some new risks that brands must mitigate?
Moving Carefully is Key
Leaders must recognize the specific threats that will likely impact more industry peers and regulatory stakeholder expectations in the decades to come. Remember, the business suitability of most generative AI (GenAI) tools relies heavily upon compliance assurance aspects.
The following two simple questions are for global leaders, investors, and consumers to ponder:
- Is GenAI great for scaling processes and reducing manual workload on workers? Absolutely yes.
- Does the transition toward a more AI-integrated work culture indicate unpreceded exposure to data ethics, authenticity, and intellectual rights controversies? Unfortunately, once again, the answer will have to be yes.
Every branding specialist advocates that brand voice must be more than words because it strategically reflects an organization’s personality, values, and identity. In other words, every message, policy clause, media caption, or campaign visual will build or break stakeholder trust. Consequently, if the leadership allows machines to create and manage content, the stakes rise. Such practices necessitate a more comprehensive examination of what qualifies as the acceptable use of generative AI in branding, marketing, and workplace collaborations.
Why Brand Voice Matters
One must revisit the basics of what a brand voice implies. It is the human element that affects every corporate identity, capable of attracting or alienating stakeholders. It impacts startups as much as established industrial conglomerates. Essentially, it is how a company sounds or feels to the broader audiences. Do you want them to consider you a warm, bold, quirky, or serious company? Then, ensure that your messaging is suitable and use a consistent style across all your content distribution channels.
For instance, if you want to solidify your image as an enterprise driven by authentic beliefs, you will firmly support initiatives aligning with your promised values.
Now, ask yourself whether letting cloud-hosted generative AI projects perform these activities will be okay or inappropriate. While you do that, recall that audiences will not be satisfied with one-off messaging. It is indeed unavoidable that the collective tone across your marketing, customer service, mission statement, investor disclosures, and business mergers or divestitures will shape stakeholder perception.
Many industry-leading firms, whether regional or multinational, actively experiment with AI-generated text, video, image, audio, and custom application features. However, not everyone is fond of these changes. Can you guess why?
Customers Still Drive Trust
Customers do not buy products, service packages, experiences, extended warranties, or spare parts. Rather, they seek trustable, empathetic, and advanced yet easy-to-use support. As a result, your clients want access to various means to ensure the company they purchase from caters to their needs, long-term aspirations, and ideals. In short, they buy into what a brand stands for.
That explains why consistency is key. If a company has a dozen different policies about the same business activity, stakeholders are less likely to trust it. So, one area where generative AI can be a friend of your brand voice is to conduct a bulk examination of your legal, promotional, and educational publications to find contradictory statements.
Detection is Already in Use
Throughout the history of modern humans, marketing and communication professionals have devoted considerable effort to specifying brand guidelines. They never stop reviewing their tone, content presentation style, audience-specific vocabulary, and the ultimate emotions they want to create. Still, a few downsides of employing generative AI to produce branding or marketing assets are not hard to list.
Every consumer, investor, and administrative officer can acknowledge that many essential documents and marketing tools now feature GenAI capabilities. They also utilize manual or tech-based methods to check whether the brands’ online presence is backed by human contributions or an AI content generator is at the core of it.
Barring the extreme cases where individuals support or oppose generative artificial intelligence without offering any explanation, genuine fears regarding privacy infringements or devaluing human expressions have noteworthy merit. In turn, leaders must encourage their teams to adopt transparency and disclose their use of GenAI early on.
Educate and Empower
This era of misinformation aggressively propagates odd claims about individuals, brands, and nations without verifying the context of policy shifts and accounting for the uniqueness of their culture, geopolitical positioning, or local demographic needs for resources. If corporations allow unsophisticated generative AI platforms to create, check, publish, promote, and update their promotional or customer support content, they might also distribute unreliable, highly biased information.
The preferable approach to avoid supporting impractical ideas and attracting controversial media coverage due to GenAI implementations is the ethical co-creation philosophy. For example, your data partners and technology admins must train other workers on responsible use of generative AI.
Each piece that mentions your branded offerings must also present the latest, expert-vetted, and straightforward material to global audiences.
Customers must always have the option to contact human representatives. Brands cannot force them to rely solely on generative AI virtual assistants for all interactions. Furthermore, leaders must pay attention to internal and external feedback regarding the suitability of GenAI in branding and customer service. Later, they can modify their AI adoption policies and strategies to balance the role of human and non-human contributors.
Generative AI: Friend or Foe?
So where do we stand? Generative AI offers three major advantages:
- It improves tone consistency with scalable context awareness
- It helps reach global audiences through multilingual content
- It provides 24/7 support
Given these positive circumstances, leaders might be eager to jump on the bandwagon without thoroughly preparing for related compliance, disclosure, and reputation risks. Without adequate strategies, policies, and tech partnerships, companies must not adopt generative AI. Failing to do so can backfire, leading to a future where generative AI becomes a foe of your brand voice instead of being a friend who helps it grow.
Disclaimer: This guest article is authored by Supriya Dixit, SVP – Marketing at SG Analytics. Views expressed are personal and do not represent Biz Bracket’s editorial stance.
