Sterling McKinley thinks AI is stupid.

That might sound a bit cavalier coming from someone who trains corporations on how to use AI through Clarity AI Solutions, but what McKinley means is that AI needs to be told exactly what to do and from what perspective to do it. There’s a lot of power behind it, he said, but it needs a human touch to truly be effective.

During two packed Education Day sessions at ASI Show Orlando – “5 Hot Ways AI Can Help You Get More Clients” and “AI Demystified: The Non-Techie’s Guide To Using AI for Real Business Results” – McKinley broke down how to prompt generative AI tools to get the desired results, how to treat AI like your personal sales assistant and more.

“AI isn’t your replacement,” he said. “It’s your competitive advantage.”

Sterling McKinley spoke to a packed room at ASI Show Orlando Education Day on Jan. 5.

Use cases for AI in promo are far more wide-ranging than just helping with emails, McKinley said.

Generative AI tools can help build targeted outreach campaigns and ads that drill down onto what makes a particular distributor valuable to clients by instructing the AI to act as a promo end-buyer in a select vertical. Or, McKinley offered, use AI to analyze competitors’ pricing, products and strategy to see how they’re differentiating themselves, and how that information can help a distributor stand out.

Other tools, like NotebookLM, allow users to upload links, presentations, catalogs or other company data that can then be used to both train the AI system and prompt deep analysis of the materials in question.

“Use AI,” McKinley encouraged, “to make sure you’re speaking to your target audience the way they want to be spoken to.”

Sterling McKinley of Clarity AI Solutions joined ASI Media’s Sara Lavenduski for a recent episode of the Promo Insiders podcast.

Crafting effective prompts, of course, is an essential piece of the AI puzzle, McKinley says. The best prompts start with a clear task, but it’s also essential to provide additional bits of insight, including a “persona” (the role you want the AI to act as, such as a promotional products distributor or an HR representative buying merch), the format of the results (e.g. text, a table, etc.), and additional context like the motivation behind the ask or previous attempts that were unsuccessful.

You can even, he noted, ask generative AI to create a prompt for itself by inputting a more simplified version of what you’d like it to do and asking it to build the prompt for you.

“The cleaner the input, the better the output,” McKinley says.

It’s important to note, though, that solely copy-pasting output from AI, without editing, fact-checking or making personal tweaks, is how users end up with “robot voice” – almost impersonal-sounding language littered with the tells of AI-generated text.

That’s why, in many cases, he finds it more effective to use AI as a tool for editing, critique or improvement rather than pure generation. Write a first draft of that email or social media post yourself, he suggested – but ask AI for specific feedback regarding your tone, language or the overall goal of the item.

“We treat AI like a microwave or a washing machine – where you put in information, press a button and wait,” McKinley said. “But that’s not AI. It’s not always a magic button. It’s going to help you, but you have to have this back-and-forth.”