Do You Know Who’s Using AI Behind Your Back? MARKETING & MEDIA
The cadence is off. Your empathy, wit, or edge? Gone. Nobody flagged it, and it goes out anyway—flat, forgettable, and off-brand. Brand erosion rarely starts with a rebrand. It starts with small, unnoticeable misfires. Why this matters: Out-of-the box AI tools default to generic. Without brand voice training, they flatten what makes you stand out. Even one off-brand touchpoint can: • Confuse your audience • Cheapen your positioning • Dull hard-earned trust What you can do: Create a lightweight brand voice guide and make it required reading. Include: • Sample copy in your voice • Phrases you use or avoid • Tone guidelines (e.g., no fluff, kind but sharp) • Plain vs. technical language cues Use these to “prime” AI tools, or instruct your team to. If you’re using AI on behalf of your brand, it should sound like your brand. IP contamination: when “inspiration” becomes exposure The marketing expert you hired is trying to scale with AI. To save time, they pull from your original work—those heartfelt captions, your welcome packet, or that custom strategy you paid thousands for. They drop it into ChatGPT to “get a head start.” Once content enters a public AI tool, you lose visibility into how it’s stored, reviewed, or used. Why this matters: Your originality is your brand. Feeding key content into a public tool is like handing your secret sauce to a third-party kitchen—with no way to see who’s remixing it. At best, another vendor
By Christie Osborne A rtificial Intelligence (AI) isn’t coming for the event industry. It’s already here—in proposals, timelines, nurture emails, and social media captions. It’s baked into tools your team already uses: Canva’s Magic Write, Grammarly, and even email apps. Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT and Claude are increasingly used across teams—from marketing to administrative. While that might feel like a productivity win, few rewards exist without some risk. When someone uses AI in your business without your knowledge, you might be exposed to that risk: of brand erosion, IP leaks, and low-level inconsistencies you can’t easily trace. Managing that risk depends on transparency, boundaries, and control—the same principles you apply elsewhere in your business. Brand drift: losing control of what makes you unique Say a team member uses AI to write your newsletter. The copy is clean. The grammar? Flawless. But it doesn’t sound like you.
When sensitive data—like financials, client names, or project history—is pasted into tools like ChatGPT, it’s now in a system you can’t audit, trace, or permanently remove.
8
SPECIAL EVENTS SUMMER 2025
Powered by FlippingBook