As part of its commitment to continuous engagement with customers, Meltwater hosted its latest ‘PowerUP’ event at its London HQ earlier today. Consisting of a half day, face-to-face, hands-on training focused agenda to showcase the company’s latest use-cases, AI was unsurprisingly the main focus of attention.
After an introduction in which key themes including how to take your digital strategy to the next level, harnessing data in real time to provide customers with competitive edge, and the future of media intelligence were all set up; attendees split into two groups for two interactive workshops.
The first of these was focused on use-cases for Generative AI and how Meltwater is leveraging ChatGPT 4.0 to help customers save time, drive productivity, and increase insight. A particular focus was on how marketers are currently looking to leverage AI – e.g. to scale content personalisation, to automate campaign execution, for content generation, and for idea generation.
We heard that Meltwater’s latest State of Social survey, which sought the views of over 2,000 customers globally, has revealed that despite the unarguable impact of AI across society and business, 42% of respondents said strategic use of AI is currently not at all important to their plans. For those that are utilising it however, nearly half (48%) said this was for generating images, while a similar number (46%) said they are relying on AI for generating text.
In the second workshop focused on the latest developments with use-cases for analytical AI within the Meltwater platform, we learned that 75% of knowledge workers are now using AI at work, according to Microsoft research.
Despite the appetite to gather and utilise data, attendees were also told that 63% of data related time is spent on tasks that could be automated. This is perhaps where ChatGPT can play its most important role – research, brainstorming and reporting – but not content generation.
I think back to what the Writer’s Guild of America previously stated ref Chat GPT and other similar tools: “They regurgitate what they are fed. If they are fed both copyright-protected and public domain content, they cannot distinguish between the two. Their output is not eligible for copyright protection, nor can an AI software program sign a certificate of authorship. To the contrary, plagiarism is a feature of the AI process.”
It’s an area that will undoubtedly evolve and continue to spark debate.