If you’re a marketer, there’s no doubt you’re thinking about how to promote AI for your brand pretty much every day. It may be the most exciting, powerful technology to show up in a decade. It can produce some amazing results for your customers that your brand can get credit for.
I generally advise marketers to use AI in the names and campaigns of their products. While doing so won’t necessarily lead to brand differentiation, there’s a lot of positive sentiment for AI right now and I expect that to continue.
But like any technology, AI is a bit of a double-edged sword. It opens up potential for all sorts of dangerous possibilities, many of which we don’t yet know about. So what can you do to protect your brand from reputational damage if your company suffers any issues with its own application of AI?
- Govern with transparency: ensure your brand has a clear set of principles that outline how you use AI responsibly. Provide specificity and clarity about use cases that illustrate those principles.
- Market your principles: create stories and content that brings your AI governance principles to life.
There is an interesting role for marketing here, but it’s not necessarily about promoting products. It’s about demonstrating beliefs in action. Marketers don’t often look inside their companies for stories that can protect and grow brand value, but this is one case where it might be worth taking a different approach.
Google does a great job of this. Here’s an example of video about a group of internal “ethical hackers.” The video demonstrates exactly how Google works to defend against misuse of technology and then shares its fixes with the developer community.
