The talk of the town is AI and that is no different on the affiliate marketing podcast. Join Lee-Ann as she discusses the effects of the AI tech boom on the affiliate marketing industry, with Rob Berrisford.
Rob is the founder of Affiliate.ai and has 20 years of experience in affiliate marketing. Alongside his team, he is creating generative AI software for the affiliate marketing industry. Listen in as the two discuss AI’s effect on affiliate marketing.
The “open” AI boom
Did you notice that as soon as ChatGPT gained traction online, suddenly everyone from Google to Bill Gates’ mum was releasing an AI alternative? Did you think that was just a bunch of copycats, and perhaps Affiliate.ai was just another take on following a trend? No such thing.
As Rob explains: “While I’ve been kicking the tires on it, like doing deep learning and affiliate marketing, the take rate isn’t there to support that type of business. And so then, what happened was when in early January OpenAI launched their ChatGPT product to the public with APIs, it fired a rocket up the whole industry.”
“So, before that, Google weren’t shipping these products publicly. They were talking about them in journals and scientific reviews. They certainly weren’t shipping APIs. As soon as OpenAI made this technology publicly available, everyone else had to make it publicly available.”
Where does AI pose a threat in affiliate marketing?
However, as the chat around AI keeps reminding us, there is a dark side to AI. And we don’t mean the robot uprising will occur or Hal 3000 is sorry but he can’t do that. No, more likely there will be problems that cause stress closer to home.
As Rob says: “You do have to think about these problems in an intelligent way where a lot of the big financial institutions who do modelling and modelling is their game insurance is effectively a modelling business, most of them are banned access to OpenAI on site because they’re so scared that employees are going to copy and paste sensitive data into OpenAI, you no longer own that data.”
Given this is an industry where data is more valuable than gold, that is a terrifying problem for financial tech businesses to have.
What are businesses doing with AI?
Lee-Ann asked what are the most interesting things businesses are doing with AI that Rob has seen, leading to a very interesting answer.
“True, there are a lot of much older (in timescale) points of view. Companies that are built on machine learning and kind of a subset of AI. So, a lot of the published discovery and even, I think, most big companies will have a version of AI at their core. But in terms of generative, I haven’t seen anyone else.
“A lot of the publisher end is super interesting in terms of content creation. I saw one of the guys that runs one of the big social content publishers and they’ve effectively given all of their content teams paid ChatGPT subscriptions, so they can increase their content output.”
So ultimately, the answer is “not enough”.
If you are interested in more affiliate and social media marketing insights, take a look at our blog for all the latest news and advice. Or for a more personalised approach, book a free call with a member of our team.
Or, for the very best advice from industry peers, register to join us for our ELEVATE Summit in July. Elevate aims to bring you the latest affiliate, performance, and partner marketing insights from across the globe and it’s all available to stream from our website.
Listen to find out more about:
- How Affiliate.ai got ahead of ChatGPT
- The modelling out of fraud
- What is the marketing ecosystem going to look like in 10 years?
Key segments of this podcast and where you can tune into go direct
[15:00] – The importance of tooling for profits
[25:00] – Does ChatGPT mean sacrificing quality content?
[35:00] – Rob’s pitch for integrating ChatGPT into your work
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