Is there a place for AI in marketing and business development? Three experts weigh in. | Associated General Contractors of America

Everywhere you turn, people are talking about AI — the good, the bad and the inevitable. As many have noted, it’s not so much that AI is coming for everyone’s job, but those who don’t figure out how to leverage it will get left behind.

The general population is seeing a lot of generative AI (content such as text, images or video that was generated by artificial intelligence). But that’s not the only way to use the tool, so we asked business development and marketing experts from firms of all sizes to tell us how they use AI.

AGC Business Development Committee (AGCBD): When did your organization start using AI, and in what way?

Angela Crawford (VP, Membership &Marketing, The Builders): I work for The Builders, a chapter of the AGC, which is a nonprofit trade association. We have a small staff of 26 people, and as a nonprofit, we’re always trying to figure out how to stretch our resources and do more with the limited resources we have. For a lot of our staff, AI is a time-saving tool, and many of our employees started dipping their toes in early to do things like edit social media posts or to re-write personal emails.

Omar Veliz (President, Veliz Construction): I am the President of Veliz Construction, a small family-owned construction firm with offices in El Paso and Austin, TX. A few years back, we started using some of the most popular AI-powered productivity tools. Then, with the release and subsequent popularity of ChatGPT, we saw an explosion of AI tools focused on specific industries and tasks within those industries.

Bob Myer (SVP, Business Development, Skanska): We are one of the first companies in the industry to introduce our own secure AI tools such as Skanska Sidekick. By using Skanska Sidekick we’re able to use the advanced language capabilities of generative AI while prioritizing the security of our proprietary information. We have been implementing internally developed AI tools for the last 18 months, but this work was preceded by more than five years developing our data infrastructure. Some of our other data science use cases have included predicting safety risk on projects, developing conceptual cost models, and internal knowledge sharing. These AI tools will not only help us streamline processes – they will help us harness vast knowledge across the company and provide value-added services for our customers. As we continue to refine and expand the capabilities of our internal AI tools, we envision a future where our employees have unprecedented access to project-specific insights and enterprise knowledge, driving innovation and value for our customers. We are using generative AI currently with a variety of internally curated data sources to aid in knowledge sharing supporting the development of content for RFP responses.

AGCBD: How has your organization’s use of AI for BD evolved? Where do you see the evolution going five years from now? (Or where would you like to see it go?)

Crawford: Now we use AI more strategically. Our organization’s leaders have emphasized that team members need to use care not to put anything proprietary into AI tools and not to claim AI work as anything else. Earlier in my career, I oversaw my organization’s social media presence when social media was a new tool for brands. Nobody really knew what they were doing, including the social media platforms themselves, and I learned by being an active social media user myself to understand what was working, what the tone of each platform was, and by trial and error. I’m taking the same approach with AI. It’s here, it’s not going anywhere, and pretending it doesn’t exist is a really fast way to fail at it.

Veliz: The entire BD process is currently being impacted from content creation and idea generation to identifying and qualifying leads. Some of the new AI tools will be short-lived while others will continue to evolve and become more user-friendly with much wider adoption.

Myer: Our use of and approach to AI has evolved as we’ve learned more about the capabilities of the technology and how to best apply it to our data and potential use cases. This has also informed our strategies around what data we collect for future use. We believe this has incredible potential to improve knowledge sharing across the business and enhance how we manage risk and develop value-add solutions for customers in a way that truly leverages the unique power and insights of Skanska across the globe.

AGCBD: What do you see as challenges in adopting AI for an organization of your size? What about advantages?

Crawford: Some of our leadership have a lot of (understandable) apprehension about using AI for business, but we will always fear what we don’t understand. To that end, I’m encouraging my teams to (cautiously and intelligently) dive in and get acquainted with the tools and their capabilities, even if only for personal use. The more we understand the tools, the more we’ll understand how to use them for business. Another challenge we have as a small organization is our reliance on outside contractors and freelancers using AI in ways we may not have approved. We have drafted policies for outside contractors creating work for our marketing efforts to try to get in front of this, but we also use tools like https://gptzero.me/ to help. That site lets you check how much of something was generated by AI, and at what confidence level. I highly recommend this tool for other small organizations to help protect your firm.

Veliz: There is a constant influx of new products from big technology firms and new players entering the AI market. To stay current with the latest AI tools and developments sometimes requires a full-time person and, in some cases, an entire team. Large companies can afford this investment. Small to medium-sized companies need to be more selective in allocating their resources in this rapidly evolving new field.

Myer: AI offers tremendous potential in terms of improved efficiency on certain tasks and in enhancing knowledge sharing across a large organization. Conversely, careful thought must be put into the underlying data in order to ensure AI tools are able to deliver meaningful value to the organization.

AGCBD: What is the most useful function AI serves for BD in your organization?

Crawford: Three of the most useful functions of AI for our organization’s marketing and business development:

Idea generation: Our event team uses AI to help them brainstorm themes, fun sponsorship package names and more. It’s a big time saver for them.
Audio editing: Our video editor used to spend a lot of time cleaning up audio for videos we produce. He now uses Adobe’s AI tool to save time on this task.
Rewriting emails: Our membership (sales) team uses AI to help them rewrite emails with stronger, more persuasive language when prospecting.

Veliz: The BD research and pursuit effort can sometimes be lengthy. Currently, there are platforms that can shorten and make this effort more efficient, like www.Mercator.ai. With these tools, you can shorten the BD effort to qualified leads and obtain real-time data insight into upcoming opportunities earlier than before.

Myer: Currently, our most useful AI tool for BD allows users to quickly access a wealth of documented knowledge from our past project experience. The tool allows users to understand the top challenges and mitigation strategies for certain project types, systems or materials, find out where those were implemented on past projects, and connect with specific individuals who worked on those projects – providing information in seconds which could have taken days to gather in the past.

AGCBD: What advice do you have for an organization similar to yours that is interested in leveraging AI to help their business development efforts?

Crawford: For small organizations, if you aren’t sure where to start, dive into AI tools for personal use to get familiar with them. As you become more comfortable with the tools, you’ll understand where to plug them in to help save time or maximize business results, and where not to. Make sure you have a staff use policy, and train your staff on how to use AI and how not to use it. Don’t leave it up to chance.

Veliz: Start experimenting and find which AI tool and platform are right for your organization. Most of the AI tools offer a trial period. Take advantage of the trial period.

Myer: Start by understanding the capabilities of the technology – what it can and cannot do – and then identify the use cases you’d like to target based on organizational impact, technical feasibility and speed to value, making sure you consider that AI tools are only as good as the data on which they are built. If you haven’t invested in foundational data infrastructure, that will be a pre-requisite before developing customized internal AI tools.