This week, Mindmatrix is attending the Forrester B2B Summit in North America. It’s an event that’s focused on accelerating revenue through marketing, sales, and product development. As a researcher, I’ve been excited for this event because most of the sessions are steeped in research, my life’s passion.
The keynote started out with Forrester CEO – George Colony. He had some extremely specific thoughts on where the businesses in the room should head, and head fast. It’s Generative AI and it was a Forrester “call your shot moment” from the mainstage. His instruction, move forward with Generative AI now, and move forward fast:
1) Don’t wait to implement your Generative AI strategy. If you don’t have one, then develop one. “You might not be interested in Generative AI, but Generative AI is interested in you.”
2) Why should I care about Generative AI now? People have been talking about AI for a long time. Why is now any different? Well, Colony’s view, as they monitor these sorts of things, is that “Big technology change is difficult to predict and typically arrives in ‘thunderstorms’.” The moment is mostly unpredictable, until it’s there. What triggers the change? A substantial change in the user interface evolves access to the technology. It’s made available to a significantly wider set of the population. That’s just happened.
Colony said “Generative AI is the ability to converse in natural language with a big pile of data, and then to create something new and original from that big pile of data. What changes…simply everything.” If you’ve not used Generative AI, then you should do it now. Look at Microsoft Bing, ask it some questions, and see what happens. It’s changing the way that many people are searching for answers. I know it’s changed my approach. 75% of the time I need to look things up, I don’t search for websites through a browser or search engine anymore, I ask Bing for the answer. So, how will Generative AI change the landscape:
1) Search engine optimization in its current form – GONE. Why drive people to a website when Generative AI can simply tell you the answer.
2) Websites in their current form – GONE. The future website is a large language model, made available to Generative AI. The large language model is referenced as the source of ‘answers’ rather than a dump of marketing information onto a set of pages. Data is made available for AI to sort through.
3) B2B sellers – MORE IMPORTANT THEN EVER. Sellers will be more important in the future rather than less important. More of the buying process becomes digital. However, human interaction is still important (sellers). These sellers are ‘fast’ relationship generators. When AI can tell you 90% of whether a product fits, and multiple products fit, the differentiator becomes associated with how fast the seller can build a solid relationship. It’s a distinct set of skills. As things get more automated, and more decisions can be driven through AI, the relationship matters more than ever.
As a final suggestion, Colony suggested that each business should have at least one executive in the business focused on Generative AI. And, his view is that it should be the CMO. The CMO should be able to guide and leverage the data as it heads into this new format and drive the new ‘faster’ relationship. Of the sessions in the Forrester event, 17 of them are about AI. It’s a significant amount.
The next person to make the stage was John Arnold who spoke about Forresters evolution toward what he called their obsessed growth engine. It’s a cross-section of Marketing, Product, Sales, and Technology to become a “Future Fit” business that’s customer obsessed and leverages their business technology to support this obsession. I suspect a sizable portion of the way you do this, the learning, is that you plug AI in to all aspects of your approach to these elements of your business – but ensure that your relationships continue to drive the obsession in a way that doesn’t place the focus on the economics but on the experience.
