ChatGPT has become the thing that everyone won’t stop talking about. So we wondered how long before local digital marketing players would begin pushing out announcements sharing their plans to add generative AI into their solutions set.
The answer turned out to be “not very long”. Recently we’ve seen announcements from Yext and Soci about new products built on or integrating with ChatGPT creator OpenAI’s technology.
And this doesn’t end with Yext and Soci. We expect AI rollouts from any company that does digital marketing. Or for that matter reviews management, customer experience, location management, localized marketing, local SEO, and so on. For brands or local businesses.
This week we saw significant announcements along these lines from Birdeye and Evocalize. So we assume that more must be on the way.
Helping Local Businesses Gain Efficiency
First, Birdeye. The customer experience platform has, according to the company’s announcement this week, “created a new review and survey response solution based on the ChatGPT model as part of its AI Everywhere initiative. Businesses can now utilize Birdeye’s AI platform to quickly generate personalized, human-like responses to customer reviews and surveys.”
We asked Birdeye to tell us a bit more about its AI plans.
“We see AI helping local businesses gain efficiencies at every stage of their digital customer experience journey.” That’s what Neeraj Gupta, Birdeye’s co-founder and President of R&D, told Localogy Insider this week.
“By creating personalized responses, customer reviews and messages, social content at an efficient cost structure, and minimizing no-shows on appointments,” Gupta continues. “Birdeye’s AI Everywhere initiative deploys AI technologies like ChatGPT, NLP, and Machine Learning to solve these use cases.”
Changing Local Digital Marketing
Meanwhile, the localized marketing tech company Evocalize announced its own ChatGPT-related product move this week.
Yesterday the Seattle-based company announced EVOLVE. The company describes this as “a new artificial intelligence layer applied to its Collaborative Marketing Platform designed for franchises to save time, maximize efficiency, and improve ROI on local digital marketing initiatives.”
Evocalize focuses on helping brands and franchises do local digital marketing.
“At Evocalize, our mission is to give franchisors and enterprises tools to empower their local teams to succeed in the ever-evolving digital landscape,” said Evocalize CEO Matthew Marx.
“With EVOLVE, we’re launching the next evolution of local marketing capabilities with extremely powerful features serving as a sophisticated, personalized co-pilot that will change the way people approach local digital marketing. We’re excited to see how the EVOLVE suite of AI and machine learning-powered capabilities will transform the digital marketing landscape, and fuel the evolution of how we approach local marketing.”
AI is of course a powerful tool. And not to mention a PR juggernaut. So it seems clear that any digital agency or SaaS company will struggle to make it through this year without a major AI announcement. If not several. And PR fluff won’t do the trick. These AI initiatives must solve real customer problems. We expect customers are asking for this. And if they are not, then investors must be. It’s probably both.
