Upcoming AI Marketing Innovations in 2024 to Look Forward To

New year, new you AI Technology! As 2024 kicks off, so do discussions of the new and improved AI innovations available to marketers and consumers alike. Here are three AI innovations sure to take the world by storm in 2024:

ChatGPT-4 Turbo with Vision

OpenAI’s ChatGPT has been the leader of AI since its 2022 release, and the upcoming release of GPT-4 Turbo with Vision won’t be any different. Currently available for public preview through Azure OpenAI, GPT-4 Turbo with Vision allows users to use videos and other visuals in prompts while using only the most relevant frames for an answer. The newest release will also be faster and smarter than previous iterations. Getting AI to produce scripts for podcasts and other audio/visual formats just got that much easier.

This new model can also be used for tagging documents for internal filing, detecting defects in product images, and other tasks that would normally take hours of human time. With GPT-4 Turbo with Vision, marketing companies can revolutionize, optimize, and capitalize on more opportunities.

Anyone can cook (Even AI!)

The biggest trend of innovations to look out for is the new generative AI tools that are being released for businesses, specifically small businesses looking for a helping hand with content generation and operational efficiency. Square, the innovative point-of-sale giant, recently released a litany of new features on their platform that are powered by AI. Menus can be generated instantaneously, kitchen operations optimized, and email marketing completed in a snap. Square released nearly a dozen of these new AI-based tools that can help both small and large businesses streamline their operations.

Tools like this also allow small businesses to better compete with larger companies. Content generation tools aimed towards these small businesses allow them to focus their efforts on branding and customer experience, rather than endless (and expensive) email copy, product photography editing, or website creation.

Square takes the guesswork out of business operations with these features, but they aren’t the only company starting to use AI to help everything run just a little bit smoother. The use of generative AI has taken over the business world. According to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, nearly a quarter of all small business are using AI in some way to improve efficiency and accessibility.  Google searches for “small business AI” have remained popular and relatively steady since their peak in September of last year.

No More Retaking the Photo

“Can you center us in the shot?” “Can you make my baby smile?” Headings like these haunt social media and the tag feeds of popular photoshoppers. New generative AI tools coming standard to phones, however, are changing the photography game. Google’s new Pixel smartphones are coming standard with several AI tools that take the guesswork and the frustration out of all forms of photography. With Best Take, Magic Editor, Audio Magic Eraser, and Zoom Enhance, Google Photos is revolutionizing phone photography by having these features come standard on their new smartphones.

While they are the first to release AI photography features as standard on the phones, however, AI photography is a major up and coming innovation outside of Google as well. Adobe Photoshop has powerful native generative AI tools, Luminar Neo is one of the only photo-editing platforms to be entirely based in AI, and even browser-based apps such as Canva are getting in on the trend.

AI photography is such a fast-growing trend that it is also facing a fair bit of controversy. AI tools can create the ever-dreaded “deep fake” photos, including harmful photos of children or celebrities. There have been several calls for action in regard to the powers and dangers of AI photography and AI-generated “photographs” that may cause harm to society.

That isn’t stopping the growth of AI photography trends, however. Google searches for Generative Fill, the AI editing tool native to Adobe software, majorly spiked in June of last year and have been holding relatively steady since. Searches for “AI photo editor” reached an all-time high at the beginning of October 2023 and are consistently at a relatively high since. Videos about AI photo editing receive hundreds of thousands of views on social media apps like TikTok.

To Innovate, not to replace

Generally speaking, the AI community is moving away from those things that are dangerous to actual humans (like AI writers stealing work from real people) and moving towards using AI for what it is: a tool, not a replacement. All of the up-and-coming innovations in AI are those that are designed to facilitate and streamline existing processes instead of those that take out the human element completely. At Online Optimism, we keep it human. If you want to stay up-to-date AI trends and the fast-paced world of online marketing, subscribe to Online Optimism’s newsletter and check out our blog. We can help make things simple, keep things human, and above all, we are always Optimistic.