Open source AI as a catalyst for business growth: A marketing perspective
AI has revolutionized marketing, transforming how brands connect with consumers and boosting their bottom line. By automating tasks like data analysis and content creation, accelerating insights for informed decisions, and elevating customer experience with chatbots, AI is now a crucial component of modern marketing strategies.
Marketers are leveraging pre-built products like Meta's Language AI and Vision AI tools to streamline content creation and boost creativity, freeing up time for strategic work. However, the true game-changers driving significant impact are the custom solutions built with open-source AI models and tailored to address specific business challenges. Unlike proprietary approaches where access to the underlying AI models is restricted, an open-source approach to AI makes public the foundational AI models, allowing them to be freely downloaded, inspected, fine-tuned, and tailored for an unlimited number of use cases and applications.
To compete effectively in today’s hyperdynamic market, businesses require low-cost, effective and efficient tools to find new customers, drive growth, and improve performance. As the benefits and opportunities of AI become more evident, it is increasingly important to democratize access to this technology. Taking an open approach to AI levels the playing field so that small and medium enterprises can also multiply their economic value by leveraging this technology in ways that best suit them.
As an example, Meta’s Llama models are free and available to all, so that startups, small businesses, and other innovators without deep pockets can use them to innovate and build in a highly customizable, safe and secure environment. Llama has been downloaded over 1 billion times so far, as developers and businesses around the world fine-tune the models to address their specific needs.
BestViewReviews, a platform built by Shorthill AI, uses generative AI to analyze millions of customer reviews and expert blogs, providing unbiased and independent advice on products. Initially powered by Llama 2 7B, they've upgraded to Llama 3 8B, delivering even more precise and insightful information to empower customers in making better-informed buying decisions.
Canadian company Locala integrated Meta’s Llama 3 models into its proprietary Planning platform to power Insights AI, its generative AI Assistant that transforms complex market signals into real-time, actionable advertising strategies. Llama 3’s strength in multilingual understanding, privacy controls, and nuanced reasoning made it the ideal foundation for enterprise deployment. By combining Llama’s generative capabilities with Locala’s proprietary datasets, Insights AI delivers instant answers to planners’ natural language questions - from identifying shifting brand loyalties to pinpointing high-opportunity areas. This enables Locala’s clients, especially brands in competitive sectors like retail or fast food, to execute hyper-targeted, data-driven campaigns with unmatched speed and precision.
These are just two of the many use cases that demonstrate how open source AI is democratizing access and unlocking innovation, driving incredible results for marketers, and powering the growth and competition that builds thriving businesses and a stronger economy.
