The rapidly evolving generative AI landscape has the potential to allow startups to compete with high-budget rivals in building their online presence. In terms of cost-saving and maximizing efficiency, the opportunities presented by the GenAI boom could truly help to level the digital playing field.
According to McKinsey data, the generative AI boom could add as much as $4.4 trillion annually to the global economy, and use cases are already beginning to emerge in the field of web development and content creation that could help to drive more consumer engagement and earn new leads for startups and SMEs.
Although enterprise businesses can boast large technology budgets and assemble teams of specialists, small businesses have little access to the same talent pools. This is where generative AI can help startups to compete.
Generative AI will continue to disrupt web development and small business marketing in the coming years, helping to drive digital transformation and online growth for startups. With this in mind, let’s look at five ways GenAI is helping to build the online presence of startups and SMEs:
Transforming website creation
We’re already seeing the implementation of generative AI tools when it comes to creating and launching websites for businesses of all scales.
This can help startups evolve from leaning on Yelp to build a presence online and instead create well-crafted boilerplate websites that can automatically extract vital information and use it to create essential pages for visitors to engage with.
One of the biggest challenges startups face stems from the inability to turn to skilled web designers to build their online presence. However, generative AI systems are actively transforming the creation and design processes of websites for many small businesses.
By supplying a set of straightforward data and prompts, using AI to build a website can be a major time-saving practice that helps to build brand awareness and recognition among target audiences online.
Generative AI tools can even match your startup’s tone of voice to ensure a level of consistency between your brand and online presence.
Development through code generation
Generative AI can pick up the slack of web development well beyond the initial creation of your website.
For the many startups that don’t have the budget to hire skilled software developers and programmers, generative AI has the ability to write, complete, and study sets of code to create bespoke website widgets and software to improve operational efficiency.
The code writing tools can also run bug fixes, actively test new code, and deliver comprehensive reports on the architecture it creates.
Generative AI tools will continue to assist non-developers through the creation of code through natural language processing (NLP), helping more startups to build more customized and effective websites at scale.
Additionally, generative AI tools can make intelligent recommendations to support in-house staff by detecting errors and suggesting corrections. This can also help small in-house teams to deliver on their more comprehensive web development ambitions.
Tools like AWS services for generative AI have helped to make code generation more easily accessible for businesses of all sizes. The availability of Amazon CodeWhisperer, for instance, now allows customizations from internal data sources for code completion.
Populating product descriptions
Another time-consuming process that generative AI is helping startups to overcome stems from populating product descriptions for key products or services.
This can help websites boost their marketing and SEO credentials, and for startups with a wide range of goods, generative AI can save significant amounts of time and resources in automatically populating product pages with text.
Using machine learning as a basis to contextually understand the type of content that’s required, generative AI tools can create SEO-friendly copy that can help businesses to become more discoverable online.
With platforms like Amazon Web Services and Anyword representing powerful resources for populating product descriptions, it’s even possible for startups to use generative AI for more multilingual capabilities.
For businesses seeking to embrace digital transformation to grow into international markets, the ability of GenAI models to create conversational levels of copy for customers overseas.
On-site video and image content
According to AI thought leader Nina Schick, as much as 90% of online content could be created by generative AI by 2025.
While this may seem like an astronomical number today, generative AI solutions are becoming increasingly sophisticated to the point where tools like DALL-E, Runway, and Midjourney are able to generate high-quality images from text-based prompts.
When it comes to populating websites with engaging content, text alone simply won’t cut it for startups. On-site content that features images or videos receives 94% more views than those without, and this illustrates the importance of building a visually stimulating online experience with your digital presence.
Once again, this form of generative AI can be largely collaborative with in-house marketers or designers. The technology helps individuals to visualize their content and quickly assess what could drive the best customer experience in terms of engagement.
Web design built on data
Generative AI can craft impactful websites based on a series of user prompts, but this won’t mean much if startups don’t know who they’re designing their pages for.
With the ability of machine learning to analyze significant volumes of structured and unstructured data, generative AI tools can craft in-depth market and customer insights built on assessments of audience sentiment, competitor analysis, and customer behavior.
Unlocking these insights has never been easier. Tools like OpenAI’s Code Interpreter allow startups to ask key questions about sales performance for specific products, drivers of consumer sentiment, or seasonal trends that impact sales and find themselves presented with custom code for data analytics or visualizations in languages like Python or R.
These insights can uncover vast levels of data surrounding your customer profile and their respective demographics. This can help to shape the way your website is developed, and how it caters directly to your target audience.
The power of generative AI to deliver accurate renderings for different demographics can’t be overstated. For instance, one recent study discovered that GPT-4 has the ability to accurately reflect personality trait differences between US and South Korean individuals. When expanded to incorporate a more focused target audience, web development tools can design websites and copy that directly reflects who your leads are most likely to be on a personal level.
Empowering startup success
The beauty of generative AI is that it empowers startups to be as hands-on as they would like when it comes to building a presence online.
Throughout your web development and the crafting of on-site content, your vision and insights can be complemented by artificial intelligence to bring ideas to life faster and cater to your target audience without allocating vast resources and time to improving on your design.
This allows generative AI to be a true leveler when it comes to competing with resource-rich enterprises and helps startups to become legitimately rewarded for innovative products and services.
By accommodating generative AI tools today, your startup could be securing the transformative growth you deserve sooner rather than later.
