Artificial Intelligence (AI) research actually began in 1956 at a workshop in Dartmouth College, Germany, but it wasn’t until the early 2000s that data collection truly boomed. By the end of 2024, close to 310 million people were using AI. It is expected that by 2030 there will be 700 million AI users and by the end of 2025 more than eight billion digital voice assistants.
Clean My Space YouTuber and content creator Melissa Maker has more than 2.1 million followers on YouTube and across social media; one thing she knows is that like it or not, the time to start leaning into AI is now not later.
“It is moving at such breakneck speed that if you don’t become an early adopter, you will be left behind because your competitors will be using it,” she says.
“And it can offer extraordinary levels of efficiency.”
Maker admits that she has not completely thrown herself into AI yet, as she, like most retailers out there, has a full-time job running a business.
“I’m adopting and experimenting with AI, seeing what works for my business,” she says.
“For those who are not social media and marketing experts, you just need to make space for AI in your life. The good news is there are so many tools out there to assist you, that you can gradually integrate elements of AI into your workflows.”
Maker recommends choosing a few basic AI programs to begin with, such as Fireflies.ai.
“This program helps you to transcribe, summarise and analyse meetings,” she says.
“You simply take the notes from the meeting and feed them into Chat GPT. Then you can ask Chat GPT to pull out some great points from the transcription for social media posts and then feed them into social media scheduling programs such as Hoot Suite or Later.”
Maker also uses AI for making research more efficient.
“Use it for trend forecasting. For instance, upload a whitepaper to Chat GPT and ask it to summarise the top five most salient trends in your sector right now. By feeding it the whitepaper, you’re uploading information into a brain [AI being the brain] and then asking to do things with the information. It can summarise, analyse, cull and truncate. It’s a wonderful way to interact with information in ways we have not been able to before and in record time.”
Maker warns that you must prompt AI correctly. “This cannot be undervalued,” she says. “The responses you get are equal to your input. Don’t be vague or broad or you won’t get good output. Do be precise in the information you feed AI.”
Want to read more? Check out the full article in our marketing feature in Giftguide’s winter issue.
Main image: iStock
