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This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Scott Leatherman, chief marketing officer of Aviatrix, a multi-cloud networking and security company that reached a $2 billion valuation in its last funding round in 2021. It’s been edited for length and clarity.
I’ve been using the large language models for a long time. Our team fully adopted them in the fall of last year.
On average, we have four or five LLMs dedicated to each marketing team member for various purposes. We have a full AI stack for video production and analytics. The adoption was fast and furious.
The marketing team is seeing that 80% of the work they were doing can be automated.
What they’re getting to do is spend more time on the 20% that we love in our jobs. The 20% is the passion part that fuels everything.
It’s been astonishing. From the non-technical marketer to the deeply technical marketers who are writing code, they are all leaning in and excited about it.
Tackling obsequious LLMs
In our hurry to produce things, sometimes we don’t take them back for review and make sure the human element — the storytelling, the curiosity to ask why — is in there.
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So, we’ve built our own prompts to ensure that when you produce something, it’s one, factually correct, and two, not just giving us the answer that we want inside Aviatrix or that we want as a person.
My ChatGPT is constantly trying to fuel my ego. I use it for my daily journaling in the morning, and so it knows my devils. It also knows my strengths, and it’s constantly playing into those. I have to remind myself to go use Claude because Claude is more of a jerk to me.
Some of the challenges have been in the inspection of our work, because of our eagerness to get things out at speed. We have worked on best practices around that. We have to remind ourselves to ask questions of our own writing as well.
The challenge we face most often is: Is it playing to the ego of Aviatrix, the ego of the owner, and then to the ego of our audience?
AI can’t do empathy
AI typically doesn’t have the empathy that I would like it to.
Being a chief information security officer today is one of the hardest jobs in the world. Imagine spending millions of dollars, working day and night, and then having a human in your organization open up an email that says “I love you” and having it be a virus, and nation states attacking them as well. It’s got to be the hardest job in the world. And then we write, “Oh, why aren’t you doing this? Are you silly? You’re not doing your job.”
The LLMs don’t really grok the complexity of that relationship in our audience. We have to write from an empathetic standpoint. LLMs will also write in fearmongering tones — “well, if you don’t do this, you’re failing” — and that’s not our ethos at Aviatrix. So we’ve had to write around that.
Speeding up production
Sales is iterating faster, and we have to create more tailored content for them. A year ago, we were doing one blog a week. We’re now at six blogs a week. We were at three social media posts. We’re probably at a dozen or more. It’s gone up 4X easily from a year ago. It’s what we have to do to remain relevant in the marketplace because it’s all being generated through AI. A technical blog that used to take us eight hours is now taking us two hours, but we have to produce eight of them versus one.
We’re not sitting back and letting our digital twins run the show. We are very much in control of the output.
There will be a saturation point for use in all areas of content, so it will take creativity to break through that next noise barrier. To me, where I see that going for B2B marketing specifically is into short videos, consumables, and animation.
What would normally take $50,000 to create a two-minute video from an agency is now down to $5,000 or $10,000. We can’t afford to go back to six months to develop a video — it’s got to be six weeks or less. The production side of it’s going to take another three to four weeks to be finished, but we’re producing fully animated, fully AI-generated, really unique videos in a month, a month-and-a-half max. And it’ll get shorter and faster. Midjourney and Higgsfield are the breakthrough for us.
I think it’s the future of B2B marketing.
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