
Lessons Learned from 2 Years Marketing AI Bots - robmay
http://blog.talla.com/14-lessons-learned-from-2-years-of-marketing-enterprise-ai-bots-and-knowledge-bases-for-support-teams
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cryoshon
i guess the lessons i learned from writing marketing content for an "AI" "bot"
company (read: shitty chatbot which nobody would willingly use, yet VCs threw
money at) would be different. pardon the cynicism here.

1\. people don't need education about AI. it bores them. they know what the
potential for AI is. what they do not know is the potential for your company's
product. they need education about what your product is -- and your product is
not "AI". when you brand it as "AI" you immediately start to fight a losing
battle against the hype cycle of AI and also your own marketing, which will
always oversell the product.

2\. specific use cases are all that some of these "AI" products are good for.
they're so weak in comparison to what their marketing is claiming that they
eventually have to rebrand as a tool for the few things they do correctly
because it's cheaper than broadening their strengths.

3\. free trials work excellent for AI, but they work terribly for "AI"
companies, as the author notes. it takes five minutes of demoing to set up a
test case and find out that the "AI" product doesn't work. chatbot companies
know this, and hate this. users can immediately tell that the marketing is
disgustingly oversold and that they will need to invest a lot of time in
getting the product to do what was advertised.

note: i'm not accusing the OP/their company of anything, but we seem to have
taken different lessons from similar experiences.

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robmay
We must have had very different experiences. Our customers who use the product
as it was designed, rather than like a saas product, see great results and
rave about the AI success.

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jaclaz
Without having any experience in marketing, let alone AI or AI marketing, as a
_maybe_ potential client I find the "what buyers get wrong" and the "buyers
asked dumb questions" to be a very adversarial approach to selling a product.

Maybe Talla needs some more lessons on the matter that they haven't yet
learned (not specific to AI).

As I see it, the buyer has a given set of problems and wishes to pay money to
solve them, it is up to the seller to show (patiently and respectfully) how
the product can solve _those_ problems, if the buyer was already an expert in
AI, knew already how AI works and its limitations, probably he/she wouldn't
need the product at all and would have already solved the given set of
problems.

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robmay
My last company was a Saas company, and buyers wanted to discuss maintenance
contracts like they would for packaged software. They dont matter for Saas.
Buyers disnt always understand that and it took time to change their buying
habits. It was goid in those days to challenge customers on that.

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sharemywin
"AI doesn't work very well on unstructured text, for example, but buyers
expect it to. They anticipate magic at times when they shouldn't. Push back on
this."

What's the difference between AI bots and ML?

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scottlegrand2
Elfen magic(tm) or Blue Crystals(tm). Your choice.

