If you work with technology, you couldn’t help but hear daily about ChatGPT back in January and that the “big boys” were going to have to scramble to catch up. Google had held back on Bard, their self-described “Text-based AI,” but now it’s here and we got early access.
We took it for a spin yesterday and wanted to share some early impressions and thoughts on how to use it to accelerate your business.
Certainly, there is potential to use it for go-to-market strategy research as well as many other applications.
We also ran some quick tests to see if its being a Google product means it “knows” secrets to achieving preferential treatment with the big G or has inherent biases against competitors.
Read on to see what we found out about Google’s Bard AI.
Bard doesn’t even have its own logo yet.
Table of Contents
What Is Google’s Bard AI?
Google refers to Bard as “Text-based AI.” Similar to ChatGPT, their artificial intelligence is configured to be interacted with in what amounts to a chat window.
Type your question in and the service returns a grammatically correct, reasonably intelligent response within the chat window.
Past questions and answers are maintained within the conversation thread, similar to your historical text messages with a friend.
Professor’s Note:
You can join the waitlist to get access to Google’s Bard AI here: bard.google.com
So what’s all the fuss about? AI has tons of potential and is also really scary. Google is very careful to emphasize the “Experimental” nature of the software in its “Beta” release.
Dystopian fiction presents a number of possibilities:
In the near term, mainstream media started calling ChatGPT the end of Google’s search monopoly.
- We could end up in a war with machines controlled by an AI called Skynet
- We could end up being plugged into a metaverse called The Matrix while our bodies become mini power generators
- The end of all employment as we know it could arrive
Well, Google’s own text-based AI is on the market.
Why Is AI Frightening in the Near Term?
To put it simply: massive job loss.
With surging global interest rates, we hear about massive layoffs most weeks. Facebook lays off another 10,000, HubSpot lays off 500, etc.
Even Google itself has workers resurfacing their “Don’t Be Evil” catchphrase from the early 2000s as they solicit Sundar Pichai to take a more humanitarian approach to their layoffs.
So ChatGPT coming online and loads of articles suggesting ways to use it to become leaner as a company is scary. What used to take hours of research now doesn’t.
Outside of text-based AI, we have Elon Musk making all kinds of bellicose statements while Tesla is being sued for fall claims about its self-driving car AI.
Ever ready Stephen King’s short story, Trucks? It’s about Semis driving themselves and terrorizing the population.
So there’s a lot fear of the future in this space.
Is the Near-Term AI Fear Warranted?
Back in 2016 I wrote an article on AI replacing accountants that was picked in various trade journals.
My thesis then was that the benefits of AI would come into the accounting market gradually and not cause a massive unemployment event.
I suggested there were similarities to the transportation industry. Back then, lane change technology was helping cars avoid merging into other vehicles.
Fast forward 7 years and we have cars that can somewhat drive themselves, but no driverless taxis nor truckers replaced by robots.
And my accountant doesn’t use AI at all 7 years later.
That said, there are opportunities to use Bard as an enhancement to existing jobs, and it can certainly become a competitive advantage for firms that want to enhance productivity.
Does It Give Away the Secrets to Getting Better Google Placement?
You were probably thinking the same thing many marketers were wondering. Who would know how to get to the top of Google search results better than Google’s own AI?
So I asked and here’s the response:
Notice that on this topic as with others, Bard answers were very generally. The formatting and readability of the answers is great.
The depth of the answers…not so much.
It’s also interesting that under “View other drafts” in the top right, you get 3 answers to consider. The first one had a footnote to a non-Google source. The other two had not footnotes.
Does anyone else smell a new business idea? We may be see firms attempting to get AI to view your content as the best “source” for these types of answers in the future.
So If Not SEO, How Can I Use It to Enhance My Sales Funnels?
Here are some quick ideas that came to mind:
How to Use Bard AI in Account-Based Marketing
If you’re selling high-ticket, complex products/services, you’re doing a lot of relational work.
Our sales funnel audits often uncover bland, delete-without-reading outreach. Want to show a client you’re about cold call or present to that you’ve done your homework?
What would take minutes on LinkedIn or digging around websites takes seconds using Bard:
Relic Tickets is an interesting startup creating a Web3 ticketing platform but certainly not widely known. Bard correctly identified the CEO and gave an accurate, digestible summary.
Professor’s Note:
For firms that uses individual contributors to collect this info and populate it in a CRM, they can go significantly faster with this approach.
Once an API is available, these types of queries will be available en masse.
How to Use Bard AI for Content Creation
We were curious about Bard sentiment about various products, including Google’s.
Let’s say you want to write about a competition between two firms or competing products. Bard does a nice job of creating a quick compare and contrast that you can use to come up with talking points for your articles:
How About to Help You Evaluate Sales & Marketing Technology?
We wanted to know what level of depth Bard could provide to a complex yet vague question.
Here, Bard’s first draft was really quite vague and general.
“Draft 2” actually had some thoughtful (if that word can apply here) answers that SFP would share with a company new marketing technology.
Overall, this was a solid answer. It clearly understood what “marketing stack” means and what tools would fall into that category.
Putting “Integration” at the top of the list made a lot of sense. It would seem that the AI understood that a marketing stack is tools that have to work together.
What About Political Opinions?
I’m sure we’ll see all kinds of articles about Bard giving responses that imply biases of one kind or another.
Early AI projects often were found to have both racist and sexist biases.
Just for fun, we wanted to see what Bard thought about the two major US political parties:
Maybe Google saw this one coming? Again, a very measured answer. Answer 1 gave reasons why both Democrats and Republicans could be better for the future. “Draft 2” didn’t correlate any stances with outcomes at all.
What About Android vs iOS?
Even when asked about Google’s sworn enemy with products, search, and operating systems, Bard gave a measured response (that doesn’t give me new ammo to use in our “divided house”). My wife uses only Apple products. I use Android and Windows.
Yep, Bard actually gives Apple props for having a “consistent user-friendly and consistent operating system.”
Will we see Google competitors using Bard’s opinions in attack ads? Probably not Apple but it seems likely from smaller firms.
Professor’s Note:
We’ll continue to cover the use of AI in sales funnel creation and management.
Are you already or do you plan to use Bard, ChatGPT, or other similar products in your go-to-market?
We’d love to hear from you in the comments or as an interviewee in a future article.
Verdict: Promising
Overall, Bard was promising.
Nothing about it felt buggy. The answers were accurate if somewhat superficial.
Google made it crystal clear that it’s an early product .Of course, we’re interested to see what others have to say about Bard and what Google says about its relationship with Google Search in the future.
All of that said, we’re going to keep testing and see what gains we can get by integrating it into our go-to-market consulting practice.
