Why the User Interface Matters in Marketing AI Agents

The AI chat interface is the equivalent of the command line pre-graphical user interface. The next leaders in creating AI Agents for marketing challenges, both strategy and execution, will go beyond the Q&A interface, which delivers a single result and puts the onus on the questioner to refine and iterate their questions.   This essentially makes AI behave like a slot machine. Pull the lever and hope for a better result.

Lightspeed Ventures (portfolio: Anthropic, Moveworks, Typeface ) identifies 5 trends to expect in the future, including the growing importance of user interface:

“Knowledge retrieval will kickstart productivity gains, but thoughtful user interface (UI) will send it into overdrive.”

Solve Marketing Use Cases with AI Agent Design

Ask the right prompt, and ChatGPT or Gemini will give you a “pretty good” marketing campaign strategy. Feed the chat iteratively with the details of a great campaign brief – audience, markets, metrics, USP, etc… - and you will get a more relevant and usable strategy for your brand.

Then what? Share the chat with your team?

For marketing AI platforms to earn early adoption (vs. experimentation), they need to solve for real marketing use cases. Rarely is creating a good, actionable strategy the problem. The true challenge is executing and iterating on that strategy. This includes sharing the strategy efficiently across a marketing team so that the media planner can execute their part, different specialisms can coordinate such that the organic social media is executed in sync with paid, or the customer email team is aligned with the content team.

We Need Better User Interfaces for Marketers

Platforms like Ability.ai are improving the UI to provide better utility. When using their platform to create a marketing strategy, the marketer can still use the simple chat input, but the results appear on the left side of the screen in organized and shareable chunks. Now, you can easily hand off campaign details and instructions to your team. You can also keep the AI focused on the Audience or the Channels and ask iterative questions to accrue even more data.

And marketing teams love a simple chart or graphic to describe a content plan, media calendar, sample creative or nearly any part of a marketing plan that can be visually distilled. Multimodal AI is right around the corner. Imagine if your shareable takeaway from your next-gen marketing AI tool was a graph followed by a sample Instagram ad in addition to your plan description. Rupa Chaturvedi, CEO at HCA Institute, describes:

Multimodal AI, which can fuse different types of data like text, images, and audio, is emerging as the new frontier in AI development. This approach brings AI closer to how the human brain perceives reality, integrating various sensory inputs to form a comprehensive understanding.

Still, it’s early days. The value of this type of UI will only increase as AI Agents can integrate with the martech stack. The detailed two-month customer email marketing campaign will automatically assemble a campaign in Salesforce or MailChimp. The AI Agent will draft copy and visual assets in real-time and schedule them in the calendar.

Lightspeed identifies this trend:

“Vertical apps offer the most immediate impact, but the real long-term benefits lie in system integration.”

The Pros and Cons of Incumbent Software

Incumbents like Canva, Adobe, and even the video editing platform Descript weave AI utility within their established interface and workflow. That’s good news if the platforms have a superior interface with wide adoption. Descript does a pretty good job of prompting the marketer with the next right thing. Once you have a video and transcript, you can create a great YouTube description or social post.

Canva, on the other hand, is a chore. AI features like image and copy generation are properly embedded, but the established interface is becoming weighed down in complexity. It’s that old tension between simplicity and power (i.e. complex).

Adobe has taught the world to love, or at least to surrender to, its interface conventions. But the next generation of creatives may not take to it as eagerly as they might for a platform like Typeface.ai, which is founded by ex-Adobes. They seem to have a better idea and prefer to start a blank slate that has a current valuation of $1B.

Marketers: Look for innovations in the UI of AI tools that help fit AI into real-world workflows and help you fulfill the dream of creating the next lean, mean marketing team.