AI and Search: What Businesses Need to Know

This is part one of a two-part series on AI and digital marketing. 

Artificial intelligence (AI) is no longer just a buzzword in tech. It’s here, and it’s a powerful tool that’s changing how businesses manage cybersecurity, create content, and power chatbots. Perhaps one of the most known uses for AI is its ability to generate answers when provided with a prompt, which most of us have explored by using Google Gemini or ChatGPT. What EVG Media is most interested in – knowing the AI landscape changes fast and frequently – is how search results are impacted by AI, and what that means for our clients.

Let’s get into demystifying all things AI and explore how it can benefit your business, as well as what you should know about the future of search. 

What’s AI?

Put simply, AI is simulated human intelligence. Through advanced algorithms and codes, AI can process and interpret complex data and produce a nuanced analysis or response like a human being. AI learns differently from a human – AI systems analyze huge amounts of data and, over time, learn to recognize patterns.

Right now, AI can perform tasks that previously required human intelligence – including problem-solving, language processing, and reasoning.

What is machine learning?

Machine learning (sometimes abbreviated to ML) is a subcategory of AI in which created algorithms can analyze data and make predictions based on what it has learned. In other words, a ‘machine’ learns from sets of data. 

What is generative AI?

Much like the name implies, generative AI uses data to generate something. This could be an image, music clip, or even lines of code. Creating new content from scratch has so many applications, from marketing to design – and this is across industries (think: architecture, product design, drug discovery, education, etc.)

How are businesses using AI?

It’s not just big tech integrating AI into internal and customer-facing offerings. Some of the most popular business applications of AI include:

• Supply chains: Inventory management often relies on AI by predicting demand, and logistics can be improved with AI assisted shipping routes and delivery times using historical data. 
• Copywriting or copy idea generation: Many companies are using tools like Gemini and ChatGPT for a variety of creative tasks, including writing their website copy or captions, checking or writing code, and creating emails and data tables. 
• Operations and sales: You’ve probably seen this in CRMs, from segmenting customers to personalizing marketing based on customer preference. Salesforce, for example, uses an AI app called Einstein, which enables prediction capabilities. The most common application right now? Chatbots and virtual assistants to manage top level, routine customer inquiries. 
• Predictions and data analysis: Need to do something useful with lots of data? Machine learning systems can make the process far, far easier. For example, you can boil down 10,000 data points to the main points and predictions based on all that data. Likewise, you can use AI to analyze historical data to forecast financials. 
• Security and fraud detection: By mining massive amounts of data, AI can spot unusual patterns in financial data, which can identify fraudulent transactions. Insurance companies are also using this to analyze claims data. 

By leveraging AI in these areas, you can streamline processes, enhance efficiency, and ultimately improve the quality of products and services.

What’s a LLM?

A large language model (LLM) is a type of generative AI that draws from vast datasets and can then generate human-like written responses. If that sounds familiar, that’s because ChatGPT and Gemini are LLMs! 

How can LLMs be leveraged in business? When you use sentiment analysis or chatbots, you’re using LLMs. They’re also widely used in content generation, including product descriptions and ad copy. But before rolling out a plan to use LLM on a large scale for these things, you’ll want to train it (or at least fine-tune a pre-trained LLM) thoroughly in your business tone and style and be sure it follows all your expectations.

With as many ways as you can utilize AI in your business, it’s also important to remember that your customers are using AI as well. More and more people are turning away from search engines and using LLMs like ChatGPT and Gemini to find information. 

So how do you get your name in front of those customers? How do you signal to AI that you have the information that people are looking for? Next week, we’ll explore just that.