Issue #32: Future of marketing in the Age of AI, Microsoft Copilot Pro, new tools

Good morning.

What if you never had to “be online” or on the internet, ever again? 

What if you could put your marketing on autopilot, with self-correcting and self-optimizing behaviors?

What if all these GPTs, Agents, and Copilots could do (almost) everything for you? 

What if all you did was give creative direction, ideation, and articulating a vision?

Would you still be a marketer? Or a copywriter? 

Where’s the value, to you, in what you do? 

Where’s the value, to others, in what you do? 

Take a deep breath, think this through, step-by-step. I’ll tip you $200.

In today’s issue:

• Microsoft’s new “Copilot Pro” (for marketing).

• Microsoft’s “Future of Work with AI” report.

• Interesting tools worth your time.

• Create marketing on your laptop.

• The future of marketing in the Age of A

Let’s dive in.

BIONIC JUICE

Microsoft recently released its new AI Copilot “Copilot Pro”, which is like ChatGPT Plus in many ways.

And it comes with one very similar feature to custom GPTs:

“Copilot GPTs”.

It seems like, for now, the naming of these tools are settling around: 

• Copilot.

• GPT.

• Bots

• Agents.

They’re not all the same, so there’s plenty of confusion. 

Agents, for example, are not the same as GPTs or Copilots. They have a degree of autonomy over what they do. 

GPTs are like Bots. It’s a set of instructions (and often include knowledge files and context) for repetitive tasks.

Aside from the Copilot GPT feature, there are plenty of other features that can be useful for any marketing team (and probably yours).

Code Interpreter

With the new Code Interpreter, you can analyze complex data quickly.

You can analyze the efficiency, margin, profit, and other statistics of campaigns as they are running which can be useful to pivot tactics or strategies if they aren’t getting desired results.

Word

With Copilot inside Word, you can generate drafts instantly (with simple prompts), which can be useful for sales page copy, product descriptions, marketing campaign copy, and more.

Once again, I see this as making AI do things that were already possible, just in a faster and more efficient way.

At the same time, Copilot can also take any command based on what’s in a Word document and complete that task, such as summarizations, editing text, making points more clear, or even bringing new information on the topic to light.

Copilot’s GPT-4 + Build your own Copilot

Similar to Custom GPTs, you can use their GPT-4 to create your own Copilots to run automatically on specified tasks.

Say you have a problem with data analysis and summarization for weekly performance metrics.

With Copilot and its integration with Google Sheets, plus Copilots, you could create an automated sequence that summarizes the most important data, and spit it out into an Excel sheet that’s emailed to everyone who needs that information.

Microsoft Teams

Copilot’s new integration with Microsoft Teams allows it to schedule meetings automatically, clean out schedules, suggest talking points, take notes throughout meetings, and even summarize meetings after they’ve ended.

Where’s the true value?

I don’t see any of these things as incredibly significant, as most if not all the features have been done with AI at this point.

There are AI agents out there that could do all of these things, but there isn’t one that can do them all at once.

This is how I see it:

Copilot Pro is a way to stop using 12 different AI agents to run everything in your marketing team.

One platform. One bill. One tool to learn.

It puts everything together and integrates everything that most people already use, such as Word or Excel.

Being a combined tool to run all different applications is powerful, and shouldn’t be overlooked.

All that being said, here are a bunch of tools you should at least try: 

(No affiliate links, by the way).

Voice generation (great for marketing) ➝ Lovo.ai

Videos from text ➝ Elai.io

Really good stock images ➝ Stockimg.ai

Pretty good content generation ➝ Cohesive.so

Easily build custom marketing apps, no code ➝ Softr.io

AI-powered workspaces ➝ Saga.so

LATEST DISCOVERIES

Microsoft released its new future of work and, of course, it’s all about AI.

Recent interesting numbers from a survey of enterprise users of Microsoft Copilot 365:

• 73% agree that Copilot makes them faster.

• 85% said it would help them get to a good first draft faster.

• 72% agreed about spending less mental effort on mundane or repetitive tasks.

Almost three-quarters of people agreed with all of these questions, and they are all about time.

What have I been saying? 

AI can make you more efficient, and the first part of efficiency is time.

That’s the start (optimize what you’re doing).

Once you’ve seen gains in efficiency, you’ll uncover ways you can maximize your work (improving the quality and impact).

The hype will make it seem like everything is forever changed and we’re all about to “lose our jobs!” tomorrow.

(And there’s your co-worker on AI, breathing down your neck, outgunning you for the promotion, upstaging you in meetings—or another copywriter has secret magical mega prompts for magic internet money—or this, or that… it’s all very tiresome).

The limitation of scaling AI comes down to computing power—sort of.

At the same time, it’s incredible that you can practically download any open source LLM you want and run it on your computer (with, for example, GPT4All or LM Studio, and so on).

If you’re a copywriter, you can use any of those tools, download an uncensored model, and have the craziest copy written for you.

If you’re a marketer, you can do the same—and get whatever content done.

Then, throw in some good open source alternatives for data analysis, “chatting with your own documents and data”, image generation, and you can have a full AI studio running on your laptop.

On your laptop.

On. Your. Laptop.

What a time to be alive.

Finally, Generative AI is reinventing online marketing and giving it a new future.

Content creation costs are going to zero (or near zero).

The “costs” involved are, for now, things like learning how to use these AI tools, setting up automations, Agents, and the tech.

But even that is 100x simpler now than even a year ago.

You have hundreds, probably thousands, of options for generating any kind of content—text, images, audio, video.

And you can no longer tell the difference between robot-made vs. human-made.

What happens next? 

You’re able to do your best work at a fraction of the cost and time.

Your small marketing team (one or a few people) have the same tech available as huge Fortune 100 marketing teams. 

New channels and formats are coming (this goes beyond inserting a CTA into your public GPT’s response).

The hopes and dreams of personalization are becoming possible.

Your experience of a campaign (or funnel), from the ads you see to the price you pay (offers), can be unique and different.

If I buy the same product, my journey and experience will be different from yours (and I’ll probably get a different offer, too).

Add interactivity into the mix, where at different points you’re interacting with an “Assistant”, either your own or from the company you’re buying from. 

(That assistant will also look, sound, and feel like a real human being).

The leverage that’s now in the hands of even the smallest marketing team cannot be overstated.

For you to produce, say, 100 video shorts, 1,000 Facebook ads, 100 emails, a custom website, 50 articles, 5,000 social media posts—the cost and time to make this is reduced 100x. 

Until now, you’d need a full team, time, and resources. It would cost a ton of money. And involve a lot of people, with lots of different technology.

Now? 

Give me a handful of apps and I can have it done in a few hours, maybe a couple of days if I take my time.

The true limitation?

Imagination and creativity. 

A vision for what you’re hoping to create—and the ability to articulate it in text, visuals, audio, and so on.

You can have a landing page with continuous variants thrown up for testing—and you just monitor the numbers, as AI makes the new landing pages autonomously. 

You could set up guidelines, rules, and outcomes—and an AI-powered system will work it out for you.

Pretty soon, we’ll see a leveling off, a plateau, in results. 

Market saturation becomes possible—at speed and at scale. 

From there, and even before that happens, you’re seeing new marketing channels, like chatbots.

I’m not bullish on chatbots. They’re largely a novelty and require you to interact with one. 

But I’m bullish on AI Agents and Copilots.

These are small-scale systems that perform work or tasks.

And become channels of their own. 

As much as humans always “market” themselves, ideas, or products—there are aspects of marketing that were invented out of necessity, limitations, and the technology at the time.

Marketing is mature. There hasn’t been much true invention happening in the marketing world for a long, long time. Most of what we do are derivatives and variations of the same things.

Moving into the Age of AI, I believe we’ll see a reinvention—with new formats, channels, experiences taking shape.

One thing I expect to see: 

AI Agents going out across the internet to find buyers—and interact with them. 

You won’t have to click ads, or open emails, or do anything other than get a pling! notification (if you have those enabled) from, say, Becky Bot who wants to show you a killer pair of sneakers.

Last week, you saw those sneakers in your social feed. You hovered long enough over the post, or engaged with it, and indicated interest or buying sentiment. 

You accept the request from Becky and watch a video of “Becky”, showing you the sneakers. Then, she extends you a special discount offer, if you act now. 

Or, better yet:

You have a Buyer Bot roaming the web for deals on things on your wishlist. This bot knows your likes and dislikes, what you want to buy, and is like an autonomous assistant that does all the buying for you.

And this Bot interacts with the Becky Bot—you don’t even need to bother. 

Run with this idea a bit further, for all your work.

I hope we get to the point where you can go through most, if not all, of your life—without the internet.

You can choose to engage with the internet if you want to.

But your life can be lived without it.

Instead of face to face with a screen all day (which can now be strapped onto your face)...

You can live face to face with real human beings.

Talk again soon,
Sam Woods
The Editor