The content marketing industry is witnessing a paradigm shift. The search for the keyword "AI copywriting" is trending upward globally. On Google Trends, between December 2021 and now (August 2022), the search term has maintained an upward trend. Also trending alongside it are more specific keywords, such as Jasper AI (an AI copywriting tool), best AI copywriting tools, and free copywriting generator. According to Ubersuggest, a keyword research tool, it is estimated that the word AI writing is searched 4,400 times each month in the United States alone.

As an experienced Content Strategist at Marketing Essentials, I work with both B2B and B2C companies on website development, chatbots, white papers, blogs, digital marketing strategies and more. The marketing and sales tools powered by Artificial Intelligence (AI) are not something to be feared, but something to embrace. Because this technology can help your company better understand your customers and the individual buyer's journey each customer goes through before making a purchase. AI is essentially a set of algorithms that tells a machine what to do or what to learn. These algorithms can help marketing and sales professionals by reducing time on repetitive yet important tasks such as analyzing data, monitoring social posts, locating opportunities in content, and lots more.

Content strategy is spiced a little differently depending on who you talk to -- goal-setting, creation, publication, governance. Whether a piece of content in question is an article, a single sentence, or an illustration, the words that in or around that piece matter deeply. They can delight or derail someone's interaction with your brand. Whether we're talking or reading, we always dissect more than just the words used in the moment; we also consider context (e.g. For an organization, thinking about this bigger picture in communication is what helps you win the heart of your audience.

Cruce Saunders This is "Towards a Smarter World," and I'm your host Cruce Saunders. Very pleased to be joined today by Elizabeth McGuane, who is the content strategy lead at Intercom where she is part of the product design team, and owns the language of the core product including its messenger app. Elizabeth's been working in UX for 10 years and before that was a journalist. I'm really glad she could be with us today. She recently wrote an amazing article to check out on TechCrunch, called "On Bots, Language, and Making Technology Disappear." Elizabeth, with that article, would you summarize some of your thinking behind how you ended up arriving the conclusion that actually naming a bot is not necessarily the best strategy? We did it through research, but I think where we started was through a really careful and considered approach to testing the language. When I started, this was one of the first projects I worked on at Intercom when I joined just over a year ago, and we were looking at introducing bot-like, very simple bot, into our messenger. We make a B2B messenger, so not to get to complicated in terms of the UX of our product, but we always have to think of our users in terms of two layers: we have our customers and then our customers' customers, and we were really creating a bot that businesses would use to communicate concepts or to get data from their customers. I knew that we need to be really careful about how we express things so that we would marry with the business' tone of voice so that we wouldn't be overstepping the bounds of what we could say on their behalf. I had a feeling, and this was really just my gut instinct, that having a very chatty personality would not necessarily marry with the tone of voice of every single business that wanted to use our messenger. It was a very practical consideration on that front. When we went into testing, we tested with a name and without out a name. We also did testing with different tones of voice because going into this I think the design leads were interested to see whether a more friendly tone of voice or a more functional tone of voice would work. That was the initial consideration of "let's just try different kinds of copy, and see what works." I felt that I wanted to take a more structured approach and try names, no names, functional, more friendly, then we also tried with a pronoun, without a pronoun. Once we realized that names didn't work we also tried removing the first person "I", and removing an introduction so that the bot didn't say, "Hi, I'm so-and-so's digital assistant," or what have you to see what impact that had. That's really where it started was with an actual structured approach to research.

I often speak to college students who want to become professional writers. A lot of professors still preach the old-school route--cutting your teeth as an entry-level reporter writing straightforward news stories. While these assignments can make you a more concise writer, those jobs are going away. If you want to make it in 2018, you need to be able to find unique, human stories, and tell them with an engaging voice. And you need to be able to tell those stories across mediums--text, video, audio, graphics, and everything in between.

While there are plenty of dire-sounding discussions taking place these days around artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning--and their potential to disrupt the world as we know it--this isn't technology of the future. New technologies are promising to upend the traditional ways in which content is conceived, produced, and disseminated. A Copyblogger article from as far back as 2015 noted that both Forbes and the Associated Press were producing machine-generated content. These examples are likely to both thrill and chill content marketers, depending on where they're perched along the content creation continuum--including the need to generate an increasing volume of content and to make a living from creating that content. For now, though, there is fortunately less to fear than there is to cheer, says Natalia Markova, senior web content strategist with Jellyfish, a global digital agency.

If you have seen "careers" and "artificial intelligence" in the same sentence, it's likely because there is yet another article wondering whether certain jobs will soon be done faster and more reliably by an intelligent algorithm. Employers who hire UX professionals needn't worry about their staff being replaced by programmed intelligence any time in the near future. UX jobs are anything but routine, and they involve a high level of creativity. Creativity plus the lack of routine is where UX job security lies. Even if UX jobs aren't disappearing, however, AI will very likely have an impact on UX careers – in fact, employers should expect to soon be adding artificial intelligence (AI) and bot-related skills and experiences to job reqs.