Beyond cool: What I learned about the future of marketing from Jeff Canada of OpenAI

Jeff Canada is the Marketing Operations Lead at OpenAI.

In the marketing operations world, that makes him a pretty important guy.

And in martech, where marketing meets technology? I can’t think of anyone closer to the cutting edge.

So I was pretty excited to be talking to him recently at the online launch of our new artificial intelligence platform, Knak AI. (You can view our launch, and my conversation with Jeff, by clicking this link.)

Here are three things about the future of marketing that struck me during my conversation with Jeff. We were talking about Knak AI and how it fits into the rapidly evolving marketing world, but I think his insights will resonate with any marketer thinking about AI right now.

For maximum impact, AI needs to be supported

Jeff Canada says AI by itself won’t solve problems.

“AI is not this magical panacea that is going to do everything for you,” he told me, adding that for AI to really deliver, it needs to be supported by good data, good process and good technology.

He’d been using pre-AI Knak and was impressed with what it could do.

But what really sold him on Knak’s approach is that he saw that we were forward-looking about artificial intelligence.

“I brought in Knak (to OpenAI) because I knew you guys were building stuff for the future,” he said. “You guys are really building at the forefront of the future of marketing operations.”

That, as you can imagine, is music to my ears. When the head of marketing ops in literally the fastest-growing company ever is saying you are at the forefront, that’s exciting!

It also tells me that Knak is taking the right approach to AI, which is to support our platform with good data, good processes and good technology.

The result (Knak AI) is pretty darn good, if I do say so myself.

I’m a car nut, so I’m always interested in what’s new in the automotive field.

That’s why, back in 2014, I test-drove one of the early Tesla models. The whole concept of electric vehicles was very new then.

I remember driving the car and thinking, ‘Wow, this is definitely the future!’ There was just no question in my mind.

I had a similar feeling when I personally used Knak AI for the first time. I could feel it was most definitely the future!

It felt good to have Jeff confirm we’re on the right path.

AI can give marketers a very valuable thing: time

Marketers everywhere face a time crunch. They are being asked to do more, with less – and do it faster.

As a result, marketers have to limit the volume of work they can take on. Quality sometimes suffers.

It’s happened to me. I’ve found myself saying, ‘I have too much going on, I simply can’t do a better job of this campaign.’

Or I’ll look at the year ahead and say, ‘Oh, I wish I could do more next year, but there’s just no possible way I can work anything else into my plan.’

Good AI tools and platforms can give marketers something that’s very precious: time.

Jeff explained that he originally brought Knak to OpenAI because he finds building emails tiresome. Even before we launched our AI version, he said Knak took a process that was painful for him (building emails) and made it super easy.

Knak AI takes things to a whole other level.

“One of the most tangible outcomes I have gotten already from Knak, and what this new tool is going to continue to give me, is probably the most valuable asset, which is time,” he said, explaining that Knak AI has cut the email creation process down to just minutes.

The insight for marketers: Look for AI tools and platforms that, like Knak AI, will allow you to scale your operations by giving you more time.

AI will facilitate optimization as marketing shifts towards dialogue

What to do with all that extra time?

Jeff sees marketers using it try different approaches to see what maximizes returns.

“Now that I have time to optimize, I can build more versions of the email super quick,” he said.

Jeff added that that fits in with something he sees happening right now.

“From a campaign ops perspective, there’s a shift that’s happening in how we operate, both as marketing operators and as marketers in general,” he explained.

“I see the future being a shift from this campaign push that we do as marketers – ‘We’ve got this campaign and we’re pushing this messaging out!’ – to almost give-and-take.

“I think AI is giving us the opportunity to really start to meet people where they are at, to really make quick decisions and optimize what we’re sending to people and how we’re communicating with our prospects and our customers.”

As I see it, a good AI tool or platform will allow two things.

First, it will free people from tasks they don’t like or that aren’t a good use of their time. Using Knak AI as an example, I can truthfully say there are some tasks that I, as a marketer, will never have to do again!

And second, Knak AI will allow marketers to do more of what they need to do. In fact, it goes further than that by making campaign creation so easy that marketing itself becomes accessible to everyone.

Knak’s goal was always to democratize creation, to give marketers what they need to build emails quickly.

First it was templates, then codeless creation, and now our prompt-based AI platform. It really does bring campaign creation to a whole other level.

If we thought we were democratizing campaign creation before, well, we definitely are now!

That comes back to what Jeff was saying, which is that the definition of what constitutes a campaign is changing.

It’s going from a one-way push from marketer to audience to a conversation – a conversation that resembles what you see going on in social media, where the content creator posts, the audience responds, and a dialogue ensues.

Instead of just pushing a message, companies will be able to gauge what customers or prospects want to engage with, and approach them on that basis.

Historically, that has been difficult to do.

With AI, it might finally be possible.

Imagine your email inbox sorted not by time and date, but by relevance to you – kind of like your social media feed. An inbox sorted by what you’ve interacted with in the past, your preferences, your likes and dislikes.

Marketing will all be about content people want to engage with.

How Knak AI fits into the future of marketing

What does all of this mean for Knak?

We’ve always been passionate, from Day One, about helping marketers do their job better.

We believe that the very definition of marketing campaigns is changing, for everyone.

We want to lead marketing operations into the future.

And we’re excited to help companies embrace that future through Knak AI.