Last weekend at the Academy put on by BBN – The World’s B2B Agency, Richard Parsons of True Agency moderated a panel on how AI is affecting marketing agencies, empowering them to work more quickly and efficiently – while also leveraging a broader perspective provided by that AI. A great discussion.

During the session, he did a brief demo of a cool platform I’d not seen before called Springboards. Essentially, it’s an AI-driven planning tool (strategy/branding/creative) that, according to the website, “combines agency intuition & experience with the speed of artificial intelligence.”

And that brings up a critical point regarding Generative AI: The quality of its results is completely reliant on the prompt(s) it’s given. And that’s where the “agency intuition & experience” comes in. In the demo, Richard generated some copy and immediately noted that it was a good first pass, but needed refinement. And it was clear he knew exactly how to do that using the tool. How? The aforementioned intuition & experience to ensure the best possible quality in the output. Quality that not only reflects a brand, but amplifies it. After all, that’s the very livelihood of great agencies like his.

And this brings up the fundamental problem: Generative AI makes it very easy for ANYONE to quickly and easily “generate content”. But most everyone knows that, on its face, it’s a relatively shallow well of quality. Everything starts sounding the same and feels a bit bland. We’ve all seen it. Quantity over quality – the very thing Buyers DON’T want.

The beauty is that these emerging platforms built atop AI are helping to provide the CONTEXT around these prompts, focusing on specific functions in the workflow. In other words they are being built by people who have that intuition & experience from their professional backgrounds to bring that context to bear on the prompting, which immediately improves the output quality. That quality is then multiplied by the informed guidance and refinement of professionals like Richard who use these platforms.

This kind of workflow allows the prompting to become increasingly & logically detailed at each stage of the flow in terms of context, from GTM research, to planning, to execution. And this is critical in that it makes the entire process, and those running it, far smarter – and the resulting output far better.

Below is a sample AI workflow for GTM using Perplexity, Springboards, and Splashmetrics. In this flow, Splashmetrics leverages the research & planning work done in these preceding platforms, but brings the focus directly into execution through hyper-personalized self-serve sales content (the interface with the Buyer). It then measures the efficacy of ALL this work directly against revenue. This not only provides clarity on attribution & predictive revenue – but also provides clear feedback, directly from Buyers, on the strategic & creative work done beforehand.

This is how we can leverage AI to help close the quality loop.