Aprimo launches first ChatGPT within Azure OpenAI DAM integration, giving marketers enhanced, scalable automation

Enhancing smart workflows and automation

Aprimo has been at the forefront of innovative marketing resource management for more than two decades. The company develops marketing automation software and digital asset management (DAM) technology to help enterprise teams manage the behind-the-scenes activities involved in marketing and customer experience. The company is dedicated to delivering helpful, cutting-edge SaaS (software as a service) solutions to help brands create impactful, omnichannel customer experiences, at scale.  

Aprimo is also on a mission to provide continuous product innovation through AI and machine learning. With the power of AI, Kevin Souers, CPO at Aprimo says the company imagines a world where the entire content lifecycle is fully orchestrated through a centralized SaaS platform. “We’ve always been focused on supporting smart workflows, clear content oversight, and ease in both creating marketing elements and moving them through process from inception to final approval and distribution.” explains Souers. “The difference now is that we can apply breakthroughs in artificial intelligence and machine learning to enhance automation at all levels.”

Releasing an AI assistant

The company’s content operations platform is 100 percent on Microsoft Azure and provides organizations with “a single source of truth” to optimize the way they plan, develop, govern, and deliver exceptional brand experiences.  Users create and review marketing content using the Aprimo platform's content creation and annotation tools. “Supported by Azure, the platform itself can be delivered via microservices to project management only or digital asset management only or spend and performance management only,” says Erik Huddleston, CEO at Aprimo. “But it is a singular solution, with a sophisticated backend and seamless user experience that ideally we sell together as a single SaaS platform.”

With the Aprimo platform already on Azure and AI as fundamental part of the company’s product strategy, the company became an early preview user of Azure OpenAI Service with its content operations platform to deliver even higher levels of productivity and performance. Aprimo validated the viability of integrating OpenAI’s ChatGPT technology through Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service with the Aprimo platform and decided that as they explore innovations across the board, they also wanted to bring a new solution to market quickly. tested different generative AI features to address specific use cases and focused in on an embedded generative AI assistant designed to create better efficiencies across teams, drive time to market, and scale on-brand asset creation and distribution across all channels. 

The company launched a customer preview in May 2023. “What we’re seeing is that the ChatGPT editor is helping users create content that is more relevant, personalized, even more creative,” says Souers. “Sure, it can correct mistakes and reduce wordiness, but it also suggests additional talking points and helps increase readability—which translate to better brand alignment and customer engagement.” The AI assistant can also alter the tone for context and metadata and make marketing copy more concise with a single click. 

Gaining search—and brainstorming—assistance

In addition, Azure OpenAI Service automates asset tagging and cataloging, and enhances search making it easy for marketers to find the right assets for their projects. “Asset libraries for enterprise companies are immense. We know companies who don't have Aprimo—yet—that have entire offshore teams just tagging assets, developing metadata for assets, transcribing videos,” says Souers. “Our platform can change all of that, helping these companies save time, money, and better utilize their people.”

Souers adds, “The findability of assets within Aprimo's DAM solution is unmatched. The AI and meta-tagging capabilities make it so easy for any team to quickly locate the files needed for projects.

The solution also clearly flags all content that is AI-influenced and routes AI-influenced content through specific policies and approvals to ensure governance and protect brands from unnecessary risk. “This is not about AI replacing human creators or marketers,” says Souers. “It is a tool that can support efficiency and quality—and propose different perspectives or variations. It frees up the human talent, the creative mind, but requires the ingenuity and laser focus of the human hand to guide it.” Huddelston agrees, “With the integration of OpenAI’s ChatGPT technology through Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service, marketers get a scalable AI brainstorming partner.” 

Realizing the vision

Customer feedback for the embedded generative AI assistant has been overwhelmingly positive, and Souers anticipates a 95 percent adoption rate for the enhanced platform. And, as the first ChatGPT in Azure OpenAI Service integration in the DAM category, it has opened the door for more innovations and features releases on the Aprimo AI-powered platform in the coming months, such as the company’s most recent release, the AI Content Coach. 

The AI Content Coach is an interactive assistant that can be automatically trained on your text content in the Aprimo DAM, leveraging OpenAI’s ChatGPT technology. This provides users with a text ideation and creation coach that is always in line with a customer’s brand voice. "It's the imperative next step towards our broader vision of providing our customers with a holistic view of their content operations and a path to achieving omnichannel personalization at scale,” says Souers. 

“We’ve always seen a world that could be orchestrated, that didn't have to be dependent on a monolithic platform to do everything, that you could take and compose your own capabilities and do what's perfect for your specific company,” Souers adds. “With Azure OpenAI Service and its support for ChatGPT, we are closer to building that I could have ever imagined.”

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