Artificial intelligence (AI) has dominated marketing conversations for the last 12 months or so, first with the release of AI-driven image generators like Stable Diffusion, then with the groundbreaking release of ChatGPT in the closing months of 2022. Ever since, we've seen a barrage of articles, podcasts, and videos on how AI will revolutionize the marketing industry. As with most new technologies, the benefits of AI are very real, but so are the risks and drawbacks.

The news in the coming years will feature plenty of coverage on the risks and benefits of AI development — many of which will apply to end users, as well. Navigating those risks and reaping the benefits will require adaptive strategies, innovation, and a healthy helping of good, old-fashioned human common sense. So let's take a deep dive into what AI can do for you right now, and why you'll still want humans handy to make sure everything works as planned.

What is AI Right Now?

As impressive as tools like ChatGPT are, the right now part of that subheading is very important when discussing AI. While ChatGPT is very "smart" compared to all of the chatbots that came before it, it doesn't "think" for itself like the sort of general AI that you might be familiar with from sci-fi movies. Instead, it's a large language model (LLM), which is trained on, essentially, the huge amount of content that you can find online. That makes it great for synthesizing information and even producing some types of content, but not without potential drawbacks.

How to Make the Most of AI

The challenge, of course, is managing the output and correcting failures or inaccuracies while still making the most of platforms like ChatGPT, which is why human intervention is still an essential element of using most present-day AI tech effectively. That said, there are many ways you can benefit from AI right now, as long as you take the right steps to maximize its potential and minimize the downsides. 

Here are six things AI can do to help you boost efficiency and grow your business:

1. Create Blog Posts

This is perhaps the biggest selling point for ChatGPT, and some major content platforms have even started employing AI to write articles. The results have been mixed. CNET, for example, found errors in more than half of its AI-written stories. 

The good news is that with human assistance, AI really can help you produce factual blog posts, especially in terms of creating outlines, looking up information, synthesizing data on local topics of interest, and covering real estate trends. Handing full content creation duties to AI isn't advisable, but it can certainly be a very helpful, efficiency-boosting tool for creating real estate content.

2. Come Up With Social Media Captions

If you post a lot of images and other visual content to social media, coming up with captions for everything can be tedious, time-consuming work. It can be made much easier if you let AI handle some of the heavy lifting. Let AI come up with captions or suggest caption ideas, then rely on a human eye to verify each caption before it goes live.

3. Generate Email Content

We like to develop and integrate the latest real estate tech at Delta, which is why for years we've made AI part of the tech that we offer to you. One example is our My Customer for Life (MCFL) AI-driven newsletters, which feature relevant email newsletters delivered automatically to each segment of your email list. AI doesn't just help with producing content — it also helps ensure that the right content reaches the right people, at the right time.

4. Write Video Scripts

Like blog posts, video scripts can be very time-consuming to create, especially if you're not a big fan of writing yourself. Also just like with your blog, AI can be a valuable tool for generating ideas, sketching out outlines, and creating rough drafts for your scripts. You'll still want to review everything for quality and accuracy before you get in front of the camera, but AI can save tons of time with the earlier steps in the process.

5. Generate New Ideas

In many ways, today's AI platforms like ChatGPT are at their best when used as advanced search assistants online. They're great for helping you to find data, identify sources, create lists, and answer questions. So if you're stuck for ideas on a particular matter or could use a different perspective, it doesn't hurt to ask your friendly neighborhood AI chatbot. You're going to get some laughs alongside the good ideas, but the good ideas that AI produces may provide paths to success that you hadn't considered before.

6. Get Step-by-Step Instructions and "How-Tos"

The "advanced search assistant" theme continues with our final point. Even with the drawbacks of present platforms, AI is already very good at finding information online. If you need step-by-step instructions or a how-to guide on a specific topic, there's a very good chance that AI can help you find what you're looking for quite easily. You'll still want to verify the accuracy, but AI can save you serious time when you're looking for specific information.

Why Humans Remain Essential to Real Estate Marketing With AI

We already touched on the fact that today's AI is great at synthesizing information, but not so adept at thinking for itself. That challenge manifests in multiple ways when it comes to doing research and creating content. The first, most glaring challenge is the potential for inaccuracy.

Given the sheer volume of content that it's trained on and that all of that content is found online, there's going to be misinformation — and ChatGPT isn't always great at separating fact from fiction. So at the very least, you'll want humans like our content specialists, who are adept at checking the facts, improving the quality of the writing, and ensuring that any AI-assisted content is accurate before you publish it.

Of course, it's not just about facts. While ChatGPT can "write" you a blog post or an essay, it's not really trained to write like an expert. That can lead to strange variations in tone, stilted sentences, grammar inconsistencies, and mistakes with syntax. In other words, even if you use AI to write the rough draft, you'll want a trained content specialist to handle the editing and revision process.

For Best Results, Take a Hybrid Approach to AI Integration

In the end, a hybrid approach is necessary to ensure success with AI. Tools like ChatGPT are powerful for taking some of the legwork out of marketing and content creation, but a human touch is still essential to ensure the quality and accuracy of the final product. AI isn't here to take all of our jobs just yet, but it sure can help us do those jobs more efficiently if we use it correctly.

With our team of content specialists, marketing experts, and the AI-driven tools you can find within DeltaNET®, we're here to help you navigate all of the exciting, cutting-edge real estate tech available today. When you combine human creativity and ingenuity with technological efficiency, you truly unlock the best of both worlds.