Creating specialized AI assistants is a big and extremely relevant topic. The main question is which niche to choose for this, and what functions to endow such an assistant with. In order not to invent anything, you can take a ready-made list of functions of this AI assistant for a marketer. Because it has not yet been launched, but it has already raised 6 million dollars in investments 😉 … Read more
Project essence
Arcane has created an AI assistant for the “modern marketer.” It helps to quickly perform actions that marketers are often forced to perform manually and therefore spend unnecessary time and effort on this routine.
The AI assistant looks like a regular chatbot, with links to additional resources, frequently performed and recent actions added for ease of use.
What can Arcane’s AI assistant do?
- Check the correctness of the design of email newsletters, including their compatibility with different screen sizes and the correct placement of UTM tags, as well as answer questions about the indicators of the conducted mailings (percentage of opens, clicks, etc.).
- You can even not bother yourself with specific indicators, because the AI assistant will notify you if the indicators of the last mailing suddenly deteriorated.
- Similarly, the AI assistant will collect and regularly report statistics on the indicators of the company’s audience activity on social networks.
- It can even instantly and automatically respond to user comments on social networks, while maintaining the company’s communication style and the values it promotes.
- The AI assistant will report on the growth in popularity of keywords from Google Trends and similar sources related to the area in which the company is involved, so that the content of the following posts and mailings can be adapted to them.
- If the content published on a social network has aroused the interest of users, you can ask the AI assistant to repost this content to other social networks – while he adapts it to each social network, including changing the format of the post and the size of the pictures.
- Similarly, you can ask the AI assistant to adapt and launch a marketing campaign that showed good results in one marketing channel in other advertising channels.
- Since companies usually launch many advertising campaigns at once in many places, you can ask the AI assistant to compile a report on advertising (costs and efficiency) in all of these channels or simply highlight the most successful or unsuccessful campaigns – to repeat and strengthen some, and correct or delete others.
- The AI assistant can even find competitor advertising campaigns and assess their effectiveness, so that you can compare the effectiveness of your own advertising with competitor advertising. And also to borrow something useful and creative from someone else’s advertising
The startup has been working on its AI assistant since the end of 2021. It raised its first pre-seed investment of $1 million in January 2022. Even now, not all of the AI assistant’s features mentioned above have been implemented.
The platform is still in early access mode, and it is used by a little more than 500 marketers. Despite this, Arcane has now raised new investments of £3.9 million (approximately $4.94 million USD).
What’s interestnig
500 users and $6 million in investment seem like incomparable numbers However, it’s all about the size of the potential target audience and the importance of the tasks they perform.
In 2021, only in the United States, there were 532,000 people officially employed in marketing positions, and the number of such employees continues to grow. And there are also a lot of people who deal with marketing tasks who are not officially marketers – for example, individual entrepreneurs, bloggers, freelancers, and many others.
The importance of the task is determined by the fact that marketing is what helps to make money. Therefore, people and companies are willing to pay for what allows them to do it more effectively
For example, one of the functions of the AI assistant of today’s Arcane is the reformatting of content and advertising campaigns for other channels. In this regard, we can recall the Abyssale platform, which I wrote about in November – it is specifically designed for the quick and convenient reformatting of graphic banners and videos for different social and advertising networks.
There is only one function, but the startup managed to raise 2.1 million euros in investment for such a platform. So, 6 million dollars of investment in an AI assistant that can do a lot of other things seems like a serious underestimation Although it is certainly related to the fact that the platform today has not yet been released and has not yet begun to be seriously promoted.
By the way, we can also recall other platforms for marketers that use AI and have recently raised investments.
Pimento, which I wrote about in December, raised 3 million euros for an AI assistant to create the style (“mood board”) of a future advertising campaign.
MagicBrief, which I wrote about in July, raised $2 million in investment for a platform where you can save interesting advertising videos from the internet, and then use an AI assistant to create your own videos in their image and likeness.
What all the platforms mentioned above, including today’s Arcane, have in common is that they do not offer to use AI for something new and extraordinary. They only save time on what marketers do anyway – only by hand and longer.
Where to run
There is no doubt that the creation of AI assistants is currently a large and relevant topic that is worth pursuing. The only question is, which AI assistants are more profitable to create.
Many startup founders try to invent something special that helps people do something “even better than before.” But this rarely turns into mass products. Because there are usually not that many people who do something well
That’s why in one of my October reviews, I wrote that the secret to choosing a niche for creating AI assistants is to help make it acceptable for those who do something poorly. Then it can turn into a mass product
That review was dedicated to an AI assistant for employees of companies involved in financial and accounting. The demand for such an assistant is due to the fact that experienced professionals from these companies began to quit, including due to age, and university graduates no longer want to go to work in such companies. As a result, companies have been forced to turn away customers more often due to a lack and inexperience of employees – so a special AI assistant can be a very good help for them.
For similar reasons, AI assistants for salespeople are taking off, as the average tenure of a salesperson in a company is 6-9 months. Thus, sales are mainly handled by people who do not have experience in sales in general or sales of a specific product in particular. And in order for them to do it at least somehow acceptable, they need to be supplied with AI assistants. I wrote about several such platforms in yesterday’s review.
Today’s review reveals to us the second secret of choosing a niche for AI assistants – to help reduce the time spent on performing frequent routine tasks. In which there seems to be nothing special, but people have to spend extra effort and time on it.
Thus, a promising and very relevant direction of movement is the creation of niche AI assistants. But in such niches where there are many people who a) do not cope well with their tasks due to their inexperience and/or b) there are many regular tasks that even qualified people still have to do manually.
So, what niche will you choose for your AI assistant, and what exactly should it be able to do in this area?
About the company
Arcane
Website: tryarcane.com
Last round: £3.9M, December 14, 2023
Total investments: $5.94M, rounds: 2