We know that a lot of marketing teams (and other teams) are struggling to think through how they'll use AI... and managers aren't often confident in how they should talk to their teams about it.
We wrote this to help with that!
At Salted Stone, we've spent a lot of time digging into this topic - and we know that our clients have too. We’re excited about teaching the teams we work with how to leverage AI within their own organizations to drive growth and innovation. But if conversations are great, then it's even better to solidify the ideas discussed in those conversations into a structured position statement that can be referenced to drive organizational change and adoption of these new tools (while also establishing some responsible guardrails to guide your team away from improper uses of AI).
So today, we're sharing our own official AI Position Statement that we've had in place for a few months now. By outlining our own approach to using and discussing AI internally, we hope to inspire our clients and other organizations to think critically about AI adoption. Our aim is to contribute to a broader conversation about responsible AI use, empowering more organizations to embrace AI in a way that drives meaningful results.
Below, you can read our AI Position Statement, which outlines how we’re embracing AI as a force for good while ensuring that it aligns with our values and empowers both our team and our clients.
Introduction
At Salted Stone, we embrace the transformative potential of AI to augment our creative & operational processes and enhance efficiency in the same way that we’ve embraced other new technologies & tools throughout our agency’s history. Used properly, we believe that these powerful new tools can expedite initial concepts and drafts, empower our team to focus their unique talents on refining and elevating the creative output. Ultimately, we anticipate that they will extend our reach and open up doors for us to do types of work that were previously impossible… But our position as an agency is that we must use them responsibly, strategically, and in a way that’s aligned with our values.
Here’s the short version of where we stand:
How we DO use AI:
How we do NOT use AI:
History has taught us that groundbreaking technologies happen often enough that we are better off expecting them than we are fearing them. AI, in that regard, is really nothing new or out of the ordinary.
Since our founding in 2008, Salted Stone has always embraced a tradition of leveraging emerging technologies to deliver exceptional results. Just as past innovations transformed marketing and creative work, AI represents the next evolutionary step in the tools that we use to do our work. By thoughtfully combining our team's strategic vision with these powerful tools, we continue upholding our reputation for pioneering solutions that set us apart.
While AI excels at rapidly generating ideas, we believe that true artistry lies in the human ability to strategically mold and perfect those concepts. For that reason, we don’t view AI as something that will displace the role that our team members play in how we create work for our clients - we view it as something that will simply adjust and adapt how we work. Our philosophy centers on leveraging AI as a catalyst for creativity, not a replacement for the indispensable skills of our team. Every AI-assisted deliverable undergoes rigorous human review and refinement to meet our exacting standards of quality and brand excellence.
We actively encourage our employees to explore the boundless possibilities AI offers to streamline workflows and unlock new creative frontiers. This spirit of curiosity fuels continuous learning and a collective drive to push the boundaries of what we can achieve for our clients.
We promote a culture of knowledge sharing and open conversations about AI. Team members are encouraged to discuss and share new ways they find to use AI tools, fostering an environment of continuous learning and collective growth. This collaborative approach helps us stay at the forefront of technological advancements and ensures that we maximize the potential of AI. Teams that share access to specific tools should regularly meet to discuss tool usage and share learnings - and conversations about new and novel use-cases for AI should be celebrated like the curious nerds that we are.
As generative AI and other emerging technologies redefine the business landscape, the value of these innovations is only as powerful as the quality of the data they rely on.
We aim to help our clients unlock the full potential of AI by ensuring that their CRM data is primed for what's next - and we practice what we preach internally in our own HubSpot portal. We seek to future-proof client systems by eliminating data-errors and inefficiencies, improving accuracy, and setting a solid foundation for seamless integration with advanced AI tools both today and in the future.
We don’t just organize data; we strategically prepare it to fuel the insights, automations, and innovations that AI delivers. This proactive approach positions our clients to stay ahead of industry shifts, avoiding the limitations of outdated systems while harnessing AI’s full capacity to drive both innovation and growth.
Transparency, privacy, and the avoidance of bias are absolutely critical to how we integrate AI into our work. We adhere to industry best practices, ensuring responsible deployment that safeguards our clients' interests and their audiences. When relevant, our clients are kept informed about how AI enhances their projects, fostering trust and confidence in our cutting-edge approach.
We exercise responsible caution with new uses of AI - carefully balancing our desire to experiment and play with new use-cases against the need to maintain our integrity and that of our clients. We don’t use unvetted tools that lack sufficient security policies for their use-cases.
We never use AI to process sensitive information or data - which includes the obvious (patient records, financial transactions, etc.). Furthermore, we demonstrate prudence and security best-practices when considering the extent to which our AI tools might process anything that can be reasonably perceived as sensitive or confidential (contact records, business plans, non-public product information, etc.).
We recognize that a person’s ability to learn and master some of these new AI technologies can be critical in the professional world of 2024 and beyond. As such, we are dedicated to enhancing our employees' proficiency with AI tools. We encourage continuous learning and actively seek suggestions for training programs and resources that can help our team better integrate AI into their workflows. Our goal is to empower our staff to use AI effectively, making their work more efficient while maintaining the high-quality outcomes our clients expect.
We adhere to reasonable disclosure rules: When we’ve used AI in the creation process so heavily that it becomes relevant to the final deliverables (meaning, we could not have produced them otherwise and/or the AI created work features prominently), we believe it to be our responsibility to disclose that to our clients. If we use an AI tool to spin up some content for brainstorming and the end-deliverable is not substantially different from what we would have produced otherwise in any other way, we may opt to not disclose that as we deem it simply part of our process - the same way that we might not disclose that we used a search engine to source image inspiration for a logo a decade ago.
We prioritize transparency with our clients regarding our use of AI when they inquire though; We do not shy away from publicly stating that we use AI and we believe the fact that we utilize AI intelligently is a major value-proposition for our agency. When the topic is raised, we clearly communicate how AI enhances their projects, providing them with confidence that we are using the best tools available to achieve outstanding results.
We consider the idea that 1) taking a large resolution image and scaling it down is easy, but 2) scaling from a very small resolution image to a very large one is quite difficult.
We recognize that AI models are great at taking large volumes of content and shrinking them down, summarizing them, or cross-referencing them... but those same AI models are generally bad at taking very small pieces of content and expanding on them because the larger they expand, the more the AI must use it's best "guess" as to how to fill in the gaps - and in that guesswork are the potential for flaws.
In these cases of going from small to big, the output (be it an image, video, text, or data) might appear acceptable at first glance, but the larger the scaling task is, the more likely we are to find "intent drift" where the AI's ability to fill in the gaps accurately will inevitably drift towards it's own hallucinations rather than what we'd have produced had we done it ourselves.
For that reason, we think carefully and take extra diligence when we're using AI to scale small things into big things.
Looking ahead, we eagerly anticipate the advancements in AI technology that will further augment our capabilities - but we also celebrate the good old fashioned ways of doing things too. Our commitment to integrating future innovations ensures we remain at the forefront, delivering cutting-edge solutions that exceed client expectations - just as our commitment to our team-members ensures that we maintain the human dignity of each person on our team.
AI is a valuable ally in our creative arsenal, enabling us to focus on the strategic and innovative aspects that truly elevate our work and open up doors to new possibilities. We will continue to explore new technology tools in the months and years to come just as we have done so for over a decade in the industry.
We hope this was helpful. If you'd like to talk to us about crafting an AI Position Statement for your organization, training an AI Brand Voice for your brand, or to just talk about how we can use HubSpot to help to solve operational problems and drive business growth for your organization - schedule some time with us.