A proprietary large language model is expected to save the digital bank’s marketers thousands of hours annually.
Ally is the latest brand to offer evidence that the hype around generative AI translates into concrete products impacting marketing functions. The company’s bets on the tech take the form of an LLM, a sophisticated chat interface in the vein of OpenAI’s ChatGPT that can toggle between sharing prompts to guide the creative process and answering user queries.
Ally is focused on building the feature in-house by leveraging its data and cloud-computing infrastructure. This approach executives said will help scale the tool across the enterprise while better monitoring for risk. Investing in proprietary tech could be of greater importance to categories like banking and finance that deal in sensitive personal information consumers wouldn’t want to be scraped by a third-party vendor.
For now, Ally.ai appears most useful in the early stages of marketing initiatives. In one example of Ally.ai in action, a transcript of a podcast featuring an Ally executive was input into the LLM to produce a short article that could be posted on the bank’s blog. The software was specifically asked to call out the most informative and entertaining bits of the discussion for consumers. A first draft materialized in 15 minutes but required a careful edit and human review. Ally said the work overall took an hour when it would usually take four without help from AI.
“We look at Ally.ai as an assistant that will be able to help our teammates with faster and smarter project delivery, which leads to a better experience for our customers,” said Andrea Brimmer, Ally’s marketing chief, in a statement. “In several different instances, our content writers could use thoughtfully crafted prompts to either start the creative process or help extend content distribution to new channels. Anytime we can reduce the time to publish while also letting our creatives do what they do best, that means a lot in our fast-moving, competitive environment.”
Other use cases called out by Ally include generating first drafts of ad copy, video scripts, and social posts, improving search engine optimization, quality control and data analysis. The company said that it is currently evaluating potential applications of the solution in over 100 different areas, though acknowledged that not all of them may pan out. Ally.ai was previously piloted by Ally’s customer service department, helping summarise calls and ease workflows.
The bank views the LLM as a way to familiarise its marketers in a tech field that will likely be of growing importance in 2024. Ally has hosted half-day AI Days sessions to let employees explore the technology and share their findings.
Eighty-seven percent of marketing and communications professionals are dipping their toes into the AI space, according to a recent benchmark survey from The Conference Board, summarising content and aiding with creative ideation some of the most popular applications.
