How Will AI Save Time For Partnership Marketers? A Human Has A Few Thoughts

There’s a great deal of cynicism about the quality of generative AI content, and rightly so. Chat interfaces such as ChatGPT and Claude are remarkable, of course. But so is a talking parrot, and you wouldn’t ask them to write you a novel or give you life advice. So maybe that type of content generation isn’t the best application for AI, either.

In fact, perhaps the real problem for AI right now is that its most high-profile testing ground – as a chat-driven content machine – is not the one where it truly shines. AI, at its current stage of evolution, may be an inadequate substitute for a thinking human, but it is astonishingly effective as a tool for thinking humans, particularly those in need of speed, automation, optimisation and analysis.

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As discussions at our recent iPX London event made very clear, generative AI is already playing a pivotal role in enhancing partnership programmes. Used properly, AI-driven tools can enhance efficiency, streamline content creation, boost brand messaging, find and assess potential partners, issue dynamic contracts, make campaigns more impactful and transform the customer experience.

This is where we clearly see AI’s role emerging in partnership marketing: automating, supercharging and friction-busting, leaving creators, affiliates, brands and others with more time to spend on the work that really drives results. AI is not here to out-think us (yet!); it’s here to give us back the time we would once have spent on admin work and inefficient toil.

So how can gen AI save partnership marketers time? Let’s count a few of the ways.

Cutting out the technical side

AI doesn’t have a sense of humour, and is capable of many absurd conversations, but what it can certainly do is turn natural language into structured action. If I ask it to send a voucher code out to a partner, and I’ve taught it how to do just that, then that’s a previously manual job boiled down to a single command. The same applies to numerous other tasks, from shortlisting potential partners, to the complicated yet crucial process of contracting the ones you select.

Taking this one step further, agentic AI will allow AI systems to take on goal-driven action, planning and decision-making to achieve objectives – either on request, or with no human intervention at all. Don’t fear that; instead, rejoice in the time it saves you.

High-speed content assistance

Entrusting the machines with credible, original content generation might be a task too far. But as a speedy, iterative tool that allows creators to put something on a page, smarten up whatever they’ve already got, or execute creative tasks based on human-generated prompts, gen AI has a serious role to play. For brands, it can simplify tasks such as email writing and personalising briefs for partners. It can offer new perspectives and iterations, sparking ideas that humans might not have considered. Done carefully and mindfully, that will all lead to improved productivity, better creativity and more engaging collaborations.

Balancing human and automated involvement

AI is about efficiency and scalability; humans, meanwhile, bring nuance, perspective and judgement. But how do we decide who does what? AI can help us understand. By assessing the effectiveness of human and AI-generated content against each other, through analytical tools and audience feedback, brands and partners can refine strategies and ensure that both elements work together to elevate partnership programmes.

Chewing through the numbers for audiences and insights

AI can analyse data to identify user behaviour, social media trends and competitor strategies to help us all understand audiences better. Its capabilities are already proving transformative for those optimising affiliate programmes, for example. By analysing vast amounts of data for more precise targeting and segmentation – and allowing brands to create dynamic content that adapts in real time based on audience engagement – AI lets marketers achieve unprecedented precision and flexibility in ways that an all-human team, however skilled, frankly never could.

Linking the content we consume to the products we buy

The scale at which we can now process data allows us to surface connections between the interests and information we pursue online and the goods we buy. Interest demographics are far more meaningful than blunt demographic facts, and machine learning allows us to determine those links. Next, the Gen AI layer on top of that allows us to map that data to programme goals for brands and partners. Tell us what you want to do and who you want to reach, and we can tell you how that programme looks, and who to work with to achieve it.

Changing the face of online discovery

AI is changing the game for search and referral traffic, which is a double-edged sword for the time-poor partner marketer. On the one hand, AI platforms are dramatically increasing referral traffic to online content publishers. But that increase is not sufficient to offset the almost 80% decline in search traffic some websites are seeing from being buried below AI summaries in the SERPs. AI is helping consumers get the information they need to make buying decisions faster.

But partner marketers are having to adapt on the fly, re-learning where consumers are when they engage and make decisions about the brands they want to buy from. It’s a moving target, but what we do know is that a great strength of partnership marketing is its flexibility and the insights it provides, and by continuing to evaluate our partners in the way we always have, we will all learn the nuances of the road ahead.

Reshaping the consumer journey

As our CEO David A. Yovanno put it at this year’s event, “if the last 25 years were all about digital giving consumers access to information, shifting power away from brands in the process, the next 25 will see gen AI taking the same process even further, only faster still”.

Already, consumers have smoothly incorporated AI search into their own processes, drawing on massive amounts of community-generated data and content to narrow down their options, feed in recommendations and bypass traditional advertising. “It’s helping people cut through the noise and make smarter choices faster. Consumers have moved on. Brands don’t control the message anymore – communities do. And AI is just making it easier for consumers to hear them,” said David.

These are profoundly complicated, fast-moving times. Mustafa Suleyman, chief executive of Microsoft’s AI arm, recently published an essay on whether or not AI is becoming conscious. It is a deep read, but its title sums up the principle we believe in: ‘We must build AI for people; not to be a person.’ In marketing, and in the wider world, that’s something we all need to keep in mind.

About The Author Of This Article:

Anthony Clements is Country Manager at impact.com

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