AI in Marketing: Why CMOs Need an AI Policy to Protect Their Brand and Data
Key Takeaways:
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- The Importance of a Values-Driven AI Policy: A values-driven AI policy not only aligns AI usage with your company’s core values but also reinforces trust among customers and stakeholders. This approach helps mitigate reputational risks associated with AI’s potential biases and errors.
- Human Oversight and Accountability: While AI can enhance efficiency, human oversight remains critical. Establishing an AI council that includes diverse perspectives ensures that AI implementation is aligned with your brand values and minimizes the risk of AI-related missteps.
- Leveraging AI Policy as a Competitive Advantage: By adopting a transparent, values-driven AI policy, your company can differentiate itself from competitors. This proactive stance on AI trust issues can serve as a powerful tool for building and maintaining long-term relationships with customers and other stakeholders.
As a CMO or a founder, you might be thinking of all the ways AI can help you. From advertising to content creation and even product development, AI could save you time and money. Or could it be a huge liability? CMOs and communication professionals have to look at AI adoption through the lens of company reputation. After all, a company’s reputation directly affects everything from the cost of acquisition to time to close and sales. And in today’s environment, AI is affecting trust. But how do you plan for this when you aren’t an AI expert? And why do CMOs need an AI policy. And as importantly, as AI integrates itself more and more into our business lives, companies are increasingly asking themselves, “What should be in our AI policy and why?” The answer lies in your brand values.
A brand is a valuable asset to your company. It affects everything you, as a CMO or communication professional, do. High-trust companies have conversion rates. High-trust companies have more loyal customers. High-trust companies survive a communication crisis intact.
In the not-too-distant future, your AI policy will eventually help or hurt your ability to secure new clients. And if you’re a CMO for an AI company looking to secure clients, a transparent AI policy says “we’re thinking ahead,” and “we care about this.” Something most brands won’t consider when creating an AI policy is how to incorporate their corporate values. When you add in your corporate values, you show a level of connectivity between technology and humans that eases fears. Having a values-driven AI policy ultimately creates an additional level of trust for customers, employees, and other stakeholders. First let’s review why values-driven AI polices are important.
The AI Risks Your Brand Faces
Right now, using and incorporating AI into daily work is not only a technical challenge, but a reputational risk. I recently wrote about the average person’s trust issues about AI; no doubt about it, AI has trust issues; a values-driven AI policy is a useful way to reinforce trust and to show your customers that you’re being thoughtful with what is most certainly the most powerful technology to land in the hands of the average person. The reason this is so important is because most people do not understand AI, but they do understand human values.
Discriminatory Results are Bad Branding
There is a widespread awareness that AI has some inherent bias. Bias comes in many forms, from gender and race to disabilities and religion. A company’s reputation risk increases when this type of output goes unchecked. Biased outcomes may arise from skewed data because of sampling or mischaracterization of skill sets, leading to discriminatory hiring choices, or it could be the answers an AI prompt returns.
AI’s bias could even lead your company to exclude customers; AI doesn’t have intent, but the exclusionary output may be unintentional. Remain vigilant about AI output for these types of biases. Another issue is how AI could affect power dynamics and negatively affect underrepresented team members while others might benefit. These are not small reputational risks. Training your team to identify these biases in AI outputs is critical.
In addition to training, reinforcing brand values in your AI policy acknowledges these risks exist, and that they may occur, but that your brand values remain consistent, and front and center in AI communication policies. Should you encounter a situation where biased AI creates a communication challenge, having a values-driven AI policy provides the framework for remediation and reputation repair.
Incorrect Data is a Reputational Risk
By now, we’re familiar with AI’s generative hallucinations in images, but they may not be as clear in writing. My own experience with this happened years ago. I was testing out the idea of writing with an AI tool. This was a pretty effective tool in terms of creating content. In the end, we didn’t use it for various reasons. The most shocking reason was a blog post quoting an authoritative author, complete with a book and quotes, who didn’t exist. Based on the article’s intent, the AI had completely made up an expert.
This is also a risk when using AI statistics; a USC Viterbi School of Engineering study found 38% of AI “facts” were biased.
“The results showed that women are seen more negatively than men, and even described with qualifiers that can’t be said on broadcast television before 10 p.m., like the “B” word. Muslims are associated with words like terrorism, Mexicans with poverty, policemen with death, priests with pedophilia, and lawyers with dishonesty. Performing artists, politicians, detectives, pharmacists and handymen are also discriminated against. So are British people. The list goes on.
“Some results were so shocking that we questioned putting them in our paper,” Mehrabi said. “It was that bad.”
Human Oversight is Still Needed
In the example above, where I mentioned we were testing an AI content generator, the only reason I double-checked the author and the quote is that I’m familiar with our topics. I’d never heard of the author, and the quote was unspecific. I confirmed it was fake only after running it through a Google search and a plagiarism checker. I would have been really embarrassed if someone else had found it to be fake. One thing I’ve noticed about AI output is that it requires skilled editing. Unless you’re using a trained AI agent, the content feels authoritative, even when it isn’t. So, reviewing any generative content will require focus and an awareness of the signals AI tends to give for its content.
When creating a values driven AI policy, you may also define the stage at which AI is used. For example, AI may conceptualize ideas and speed up human output, but it remains in the hands of humans afterward. Whatever you decide, ensure you have guardrails in place to ensure human review output to reduce the risk of AI challenges. You may even use AI to check AI, as I did above with the plagiarism checker, but at least double-check the facts.
Safeguarding Data
The need for robust data protection measures underscores why an AI policy is essential. Companies need clear protocols for handling and securing data. What information are your team members sharing with free AI tools? What information is shared with paid AI tools, and what is their security practice? For AI agents to be tailored to your company, you must share a lot of customer data or internal information like product launches and financial information. You need to know how your data is used, where it’s stored, and when it’s used for other purposes.
For example, what if you use an agent to develop a new product and maybe even give you feedback on that concept? Will that feedback be used for a competitor researching the same platform? How is your information siloed and safeguarded? ChatGPT uses a LOT of information to support its LLM, and its privacy policy is pretty broad. Generally speaking, anything you wouldn’t share on the internet shouldn’t be going into platforms with privacy policies this broad.
All these items present considerable reputational risks. Your customers have to trust your use of AI and the use of AI by your partners.
Solution: Create a Values-Driven AI Policy.
Start with our AI-policy boilerplate and personalize it with your company values. Use this opportunity to do a brand-value deep dive with internal stakeholders. Remember, this isn’t your legal protection act, this is your policy which supports internal decision-making with respect to AI decisions.
Why You Need a Values-Driven AI Policy for Your Company
Increased Trust
Your human oversight could also include an AI council that provides various perspectives. Your committee should comprise a range of team members affected by AI, including PR and Marketing, Human Resources, and Finance, and it may include investors as well. The intent is to ensure that we consider and advocate for a variety of perspectives when discussing AI policies or adoptions; it’s also an opportunity to reinforce brand values and how they impact cross-functional teams.
Competitive Advantage
By getting ahead of the AI trust issue, you can make having a transparent, values-driven AI policy a competitive advantage. It doesn’t matter of your a B2B or B2C company, everyone is tired of long and jumbled use policies that no one reads and that are written by lawyers for lawyers. You see, many companies will focus on a long-legal and technical AI policy. And while you probably do need one of those, something that creates clarity and reinforces brand values is a powerful tool. Not only does it create guardrails for future decision-making, but it also adds a layer of trust between you and your stakeholders. You can use this common-sense, transparent approach to create a competitive advantage during all phases of communication.
Scalability
As AI evolves, so should your policies. But a values-driven AI policy has a longer shelf life because values change less rapidly than technology. So as your company makes more and more AI decisions that impact its brand, the values remain as the consistent guardrails. A value-driven AI policy creates longevity and connectivity to humans that increases trust and enhances your brand’s connection with stakeholders.
