What ChatGPT’s New Agent Program Means for the Future of Business Marketing

We are no longer talking about bots on the internet. ChatGPT’s newest product, Agents, is task-oriented, more adaptable, and more flexible in collaboration. ChatGPT came out in late 2022, and it took the entire world by storm. This new Large Language Model, or “LLM,” was able to craft poems in the style of Eminem, but with the same vocabulary as William Shakespeare. It could draw up schedules and plans, and most recently, could function as a pseudo-secretary with a voice function that can link with your Outlook calendar and schedule out your work week. This shift from conversational tools to workflow assistants and business enablers has happened very rapidly on the human scale, and today we are going to explore why ChatGPT’s Agents is going to change the future of business marketing forever.

The artificial intelligence boom of the last few years has left an uncanny valley in its wake, just barely being good enough to use, but not good enough to fool the public. The use of words like “hence,” the “em dash” punctuation, and even the oxford comma have all been used as claims that someone was using AI to take the easy route. ChatGPT is now taking this experiment and is creating a new type of internet and computational interface that allows AI to directly control your computer’s actions. While the humanity of filling out website forms, completing puzzles and captchas, and two-factor authentication may be diminishing, the productivity of a small business or personal brand is about to take off.

They are Thought Processors That Can Act.

Think of accomplishing anything on the internet. It takes mouse clicks, keyboard buttons being pressed, remembering passwords, even identifying buses in a grid of nine pictures. ChatGPT’s Agents are now going to be able to streamline some of the more mundane parts or surf the web. These are purpose-built versions of ChatGPT that can perform specific tasks that you can set. You can schedule and execute multi-step actions, the GPT can retain knowledge of what and where it is doing and can interface with some of the most common business tools at most people’s disposal.

These agents are like having your own… well, agent, and they can help with scheduling, summarizing large documents, analyzing reports, and interfacing with multiple APIs across the web to save your company time and money. These agents can also be customized and tailored to whichever business or industry they are deployed in. All of this without any coding, technical knowhow, or even understanding on the business’ part.

Most people have used ChatGPT as a convenient, and more pleasing, body double to Google search. Usually, most people ask it a question, and ChatGPT will pull an amalgamation of responses from the internet and regurgitate a nuanced-sounding answer back to them. These new agents can click through websites, search through your emails, and develop action plans based on your own personal set of data from your business. With the right permission granted, ChatGPT agents can utilize all these functions simultaneously across platforms.

This new step forward in AI has allowed ChatGPT to use multi-modal functionality across your computer. It can combine text, image recognition, video recognition, and voice recognition to build reports, create charts, and create business plans in a fraction of the time. It does not end there, the simultaneity is impressive, but chaining tasks together is where these agents are really going to shine. A simple example of this is responding to an email. Imagine an AI opening your email, reading one, summarizing it for you, drafting a response, finding data in your files, inserting it into that email, and then sending it, all in the background while you work.

Some may say this is leaving too much power to the AI systems, and surely there are ethical concerns, but we must also remind our readers that people said the computer would kill writing skills, that the internet would kill intellectual property, and that the smart phone would make people forget phone numbers. Well, that last one happened, but I would rather forget a number and look it up on my phone over using a 34-pound book of phone numbers in alphabetical order, right?

Daily Administration and Campaign Deployment

Marketing automation has had huge leaps and bounds developed over the past 20 years with the advent of the internet and progressing technology. So many steps have been set to automatically launch after a contact has had a certain number of “lead score” points added to their profile. These new agents can take this process quite a few steps further. They can build blog outlines for your editors, schedule posts, create images of snippets from the finished blogs, and A/B test those ads they make all automatically now.

AI has already been launched across most websites on the internet but can be used in a much more precise way. Specific GPTs can be developed to answer more niche questions. They can be trained to operate specific sales functions of your website and guide customers more personally while looking up their data in a customer relations management system. These agents can use that lead scoring function to then nurture customers with follow-up emails to their specific questions, add notes to your CRM after the fact, and flag leads for follow-up calls with sales agents. Some GPTs can make calls themselves, and with the added compatibility of these agents, they will be scary good at this process. In addition to handling customers, these AI agents will be able to monitor competitors’ posts, summarize trends on social media, and build decks for presentations after gathering and compiling data from across the internet.

This is all to say that these agents can free up time for businesses to focus on production, relationships with customers and business partners, and creative strategies. Human input will always be required, we hope, for more nuanced interactions, ethical concerns, and contextual decision-making, but the line is getting slightly more blurred with every passing day. These ChatGPT agents will allow small businesses and marketing agencies to delegate menial, repetitive tasks to procedural work without dedicating too much labor to oversight.

Reporting, keyword research, and scheduling all become streamlined with an AI agent. ChatGPT has been integrated into so many APIs across the Microsoft suite, Canva, and a slew of other programs and services that marketing firms use every day. This ability to scale output without dedicating bodies to these tasks will save on labor costs and free up your employees to work on more human-facilitated tasks like designing logos, taking a client out to lunch, or making calls to new businesses or customers.

Again, we must err on the side of caution here. Allowing a complete overhaul of your system by using ChatGPT’s new Agents can be disruptive to your company’s workflow, it can be difficult to identify a problem if you load up every API you have, and it can turn off potential clients or customers when used too often. Make sure to integrate it into the more basic data-driven tasks first and then begin to assess customer interaction or creative endeavors once you have established a baseline in your workflow.

This innovation is going to need to be used with intention first and foremost. Over-reliance can reduce the amount of quality control you have in your projects and workflows. While it may increase the return on investment, artificial intelligence has been shown to have certain flaws. Make sure to integrate slowly and purposefully. Outputs are not even perfect when done by humans, so spending the extra time and labor to double check your AI agent’s outputs will be particularly important.

Transparency with clients and customers can also be healthy. AI is still highly controversial. It is clearly not going away anytime soon, but there are people across the board who have had a tough time accepting anything and everything done by AI. Make sure your customers and clients know where AI is being used, that their information and sensitive data is protected, and that your brand’s message is upheld by the way you implement AI. Honesty is the best course of action with any innovative technology. Even when the internet was first introduced, it was considered bad to have a website as a source in a book report back in the late 1900’s.

Looking ahead over the next ten years or so, it seems apparent that large language models like ChatGPT are not going anywhere. This AI gold rush has pumped too much money into the AI sector to ever slow in the next decade. We think AI agents will have more customization, and more autonomous tools to fit specific businesses. Imagine an AI that is specifically tailored to your business, personally. It sounds weird to say, but your own agent for your own business would only work for your own brand. Businesses will also have a fleet of AI agents who can autonomously send emails, make calls, order parts, and design a pitch deck for a presentation. As customization improves, these agents will start to act more like team members who are trained on your brand specifically.

The biggest problem will become apparent very quickly. This is a type of tool that will free up enough time and labor that small businesses will have no other choice but to invest in their own AI solutions. Large businesses already use AI in completely comprehensive ways, but a small business will see personal AI for their brand as a necessity to stay in the market. This will undoubtedly lead to monopolization of AI agents, exploitation of smaller businesses and marketing agencies, and will render entire sales funnel useless if an AI service goes down. However, if smaller businesses and marketing agencies get involved in this gold rush now, they can stay ahead of the curb with the advancements in AI.

This is a difficult fact to accept. With technology evolving, large language models improving, and AI being used to create an endless feedback loop of better AI, we will see a large-scale integration of artificial intelligence into every business across every sector. These ChatGPT agents are going to be tailored to marketing agencies and small businesses, though it seems apparent with how they are trying to give you an AI that can function as a worker in front of a computer.

This is a moment to really rethink your workflows, and how to free up employees to do more meaningful, human tasks. A healthy balance of human oversight on these AI agents will lead to exceedingly early success in the market later. There will be a new wave of growth, just as there always is in any technology sector, so it is something to think about with functional AI agents. Experiment now while the landscape is still rapidly changing. Invest into something reasonable and integrate into your workflows. Just like the internet, this is going to be a large part of the future whether we like it or not.

If you ever have any questions on using AI effectively, and ethically, you can always reach out to us here at Acclaim. We will be happy to talk shop, and to explore the future of the markets using AI.