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Go back in time one year, and you’ll find yourself in the so-called “summer of AI.” By mid-2023, everyone from media outlets to business leaders had the topic on the tip of their tongues. Aruna Ravichandran, SVP and chief marketing and customer officer for Webex by Cisco, points to a slightly earlier date as the reason behind all this buzz.

“I would say that on November 30th, 2022, the whole world changed quite a bit. That is when Chat GPT was announced, and since then AI has taken the world by storm.”

Since that time, Ravichandran, who earned her MBA at the Leavey School of Business and a masters in computer engineering at Santa Clara University, says she rarely has a conversation where AI doesn’t come up in some form. Beyond the general public’s interest in the topic, businesses in particular want to know how to effectively harness what’s available to them. And sometimes, they simply need to know what’s available to them.
“While AI comes with a lot of advantages, with respect to automation in terms of improving your productivity, it’s a net new topic as well,” Ravichandran says. “You don’t know what you don’t know.”

AI for Troubleshooting and Collaboration

When asked about the most promising advantages of AI for businesses, Ravichandran points to two particular areas: security and collaboration.

“One is around troubleshooting and automating — particularly for multiple IT audiences.”People who work in the worlds of security operations or network operations are seeing AI-based tools advance rapidly, particularly in the realm of threat mitigation via automation.

“When I talk about automation, it’s no longer about being able to identify issues as soon as they occur,” she says. “Now it’s about being able to predict issues and solve the issues even before they actually become a problem. That’s where we see a lot of use cases of AI actually being implemented across networks.” In other words, instead of using technology to simply spot a security breach or network crash after it happens, tools are emerging with the capability to predict them and ensure they don’t happen in the first place.

The second most promising area to Ravichandran is in workplace collaboration, an area firmly in her wheelhouse given her time working at Webex. Perhaps it’s unsurprising in an era when video chats seem as common as phone calls, but Cisco and other companies are heavily invested in using AI to improve collaborative tools, both for in-person work and for hybrid workforces.

If you’ve used any of the prominent video software in the past year or two, you’ve likely noticed the ability to generate transcripts on the fly. Those tools use AI. But now providers are going much further than simple transcripts.

Ravichandran offers an example. On a typically busy day, you’re bouncing from meeting to meeting. You find yourself 15 minutes late to a video conference call. In the past, you may have needed to have a colleague catch you up on what you missed — or you may have needed to quickly scan the transcript to try and catch up on your own. But Webex and others have developed tools that offer automatic meeting summaries to people who join late, to catch them up without needing to interrupt the flow of a meeting.

The language emphasis of certain types of AI offers other surprising opportunities, too, Ravichandran says. As an example, she points to a feature within Cisco’s AI assistant called “change the tone.” Imagine at the end of that same day of endless meetings you’re feeling a bit irritable. You don’t want that irritability to shine through in your text messages, chats and emails. Language-based AI actually can help filter and change your language to be more friendly and professional.

It starts with the question, “How do you continue to bring your best self every single day?” And Ravichandran says people are surprised by the idea that AI can help in such personal ways.

The Changing Role of Marketing

In addition to changes in business more broadly, Ravichandran also sees a major shift in the way marketing leaders must operate, particularly with new tools at their disposal.

Creating flashy, attention-grabbing ads is no longer enough on its own. “A CMO has now become a revenue generator,” she notes. “You have a seat at the table in order to partner with your sales counterpart so that both of you are equally responsible for pipeline generation.”

AI tools and other related martech have multiple parts to play in generating that pipeline. Tech can help a company identify and target the right groups of people in the first place, but increasingly, it can also identify which messages and message delivery platforms work best for each of those groups. With the right inputs, AI can even help generate those marketing messages. The “tech stack” will vary for any given company, but the basic idea is the same.

“You have to basically put out the right messages in the right channels addressing the product based upon the right target audience,” Ravichandran says. “AI can help address each part of that.” She adds that automation is also extremely useful for “scoring” leads to determine who is mildly interested versus who is a verified sales target.

If all of this sounds daunting, Ravichandran says to remember that people remain at the core of any new technological changes. To use AI effectively, a business needs to hire and train employees willing to learn, adapt and evolve. Ultimately, implementing AI has a lot in common with implementing other technology or change across the full scope of a business. It relies on up-front strategy, proper education and intentional human resources.

In the end, diving into this world is worthwhile to Ravichandran: “I would say that if businesses are not embracing AI, they'll become irrelevant. I think that AI is one of the biggest trends we have all faced in the industry, and I think it's going to help everyone out, but people need to have an open mind.”