Don’t fear artificial intelligence. Instead, use it to gain a business advantage.

Such was a key theme that Marki Lemons Ryhal emphasized during her keynote speech on the opening day of exhibits at the ASI Show Fort Worth on Tuesday, Jan. 24.

Marki Lemons Ryhal talks AI at ASI Fort Worth.

A fifth-generation entrepreneur, public speaker, best-selling author and social media/tech maven, Lemons Ryhal has more than 25 years of marketing experience and has taught more than 500,000 people how to improve returns on their marketing.

She’s generated that success, in part, by being fearless in her embrace of new media and technologies that can be used to improve efficiencies and help her better connect with more people in target audiences.

Lemons Ryhal said promo products distributors should be doing the same, and they can start today by making the most of what are often free artificial intelligence tools already on the market. These platforms can empower promo pros to do everything from better understand buyers to expediently create powerful online content like blogs and videos with far less effort and expense than traditional means.

“AI tools are here,” Lemons Ryhal said. “You can be fearful of them and run. Or you can train the tool to help you in your business the way you want to be helped.”

Here were some of Lemons Ryhal’s top action items for distributors:

Take Humantic.ai for a Test Run: This buyer intelligence platform uses AI to help you understand the personalities of particular clients/prospects. Lemons Ryhal suggests you use the tech to evaluate the LinkedIn profiles of desired buyers. You get 50 such assessments for free, she said. The information gained will help you tailor an approach and rapport style that best suits each prospect. “We must be like chameleons and adapt to the people we want to do business with,” Lemons Ryhal said. “Use this tool before you reach out to the next prospect.”

Use H-supertools.com for SEO Research: Online content you produce – whether it’s blogs, podcasts, videos or social media posts – should be populated with terms that potential buyers will use to find a company like yours. This free tool can help you identify exactly what those common keywords are and provide other help too, such as enabling you to discover what people are asking on the internet on a particular topic. “When you’re talking online, you want to do so in the way that people are actually searching,” said Lemons Ryhal.

Dig Into OpenAI’s ChatGPT: Take what you learn from Humantic and H-supertools and have it inform how you use ChatGPT, an ingenious platform that implements AI to pull off wizardry like suggesting blog topics and then actually writing blog posts based on prompts you give it. Drawing on AI-backed SEO research, for instance, Lemons Ryal prompted ChatGPT to write a 1,200-word “urgent and inspiring blog post on the value of customized tote bags.” And that’s exactly what the system did for her. 

Still, search engines can potentially detect AI was used and not rank your blog. But there are workarounds. Tools like GPT-2 can help you see if the copy comes off as fake. “It turns the article into something real that doesn’t look like AI,” Lemons Ryhal explained. Of course, you can also take the AI-generated text, put it in Word and spend some minutes modifying it to suit your more personalized tone, before then checking it with Grammarly, Lemons Ryhal said.

There was a long line of attendees waiting to speak with Lemons Ryhal after her keynote. She was happy to answer questions about AI.

Try DALL-E 2: Another offering from OpenAI, this system creates realistic images and art from a description given in natural language. In a highly visual industry like promotional products, it can be a boon to distributors, decorators and suppliers.

Create Videos With Synthesia: This is an AI platform that creates videos from plain text. It can even create an AI avatar of you to feature in the videos. So, take that blog post Lemons Ryhal mentioned on tote bags. You could input the text, and Synthesia would generate a video based on it. You can then embed that video in your text blog and/or have it serve as a standalone piece for posting on social media, including YouTube. Either way, you get more legs out of the content, and AI has done 90% of the work.

Other solutions that Lemons Ryhal suggested distributors check out include Pictory, another video platform, and Descript, a video and audio editing solution. Lately is also a system Lemons Ryhal uses. It’s an AI-powered content generator and social media management platform that repurposes long-form text, video and podcasts, and it features a post scheduling function, she said.

“Right now, I’m working at a speed I never worked at before because of AI,” Lemons Ryhal told keynote attendees. “You have the ability to do the same. You can leave this conference and change how you do business for the better with these tools. You can boost your online visibility and earn higher returns for your efforts.”