When artificial intelligence (AI) is discussed in popular media, one of the common topics is how the technology will make humans obsolete via automation. While software has replaced the human element in a few jobs, it has not completely eaten the world yet. What’s more likely is AI augmenting a human’s productive output, rather than outright replacing it. Chris Lu and Paul Yacoubian are ushering in this era of AI and human collaboration to help the latter build future businesses with Copy.ai. Copy.ai leverages AI to generate high-quality ad and marketing copy, saving individuals time and effort. The remote team has raised $11M in their Series A round led by Wing Venture Capital, with participation from Craft Ventures, Sequoia Capital, Tiger Global and Elad Gil.
Copy.ai cofounders Paul Yacoubian (left) and Chris Lu (right).
Producing ad copy is a free-flowing but revision-heavy process. Usually, individuals from different teams and departments in an organization give their input and guidance on the final marketing product. For the marketer, the ideation stage is crucial to producing something that is high quality and will also make it through a rigorous review process from several parties. Several weeks are typically required for producing acceptable copy that can be deployed as an ad. Marketers tend to focus on color and language as the main parameters for producing ad copy. However, several more design dimensions can be adjusted to produce work that can capture consumers’ attention in our ad-saturated society.
The global advertising market is worth hundreds of billions of dollars. Within the U.S. alone, advertising and marketing is a $230 billion industry. Diving deeper into this market, the major customer groups in need of improved marketing creation software are social media managers, ad copywriters, and small marketing teams. These three key groups individually spend on the order of tens, if not hundreds, of millions of dollars on software to bolster their work. Fortunately, new solutions are leveraging artificial intelligence applications, specifically natural language processing, to aid marketers in their work.
Copy.ai leverages OpenAI’s popular GPT-3 algorithm to produce AI-assisted marketing copy. GPT-3’s model contains 175 billion distinct parameters. That giant model trains over trillions of words and phrases to produce realistic prose that can be adapted for ad copy purposes. Users of Copy.ai can enter ideas or relevant phrases about the language they want for their ad copy, and the startup’s algorithm will produce multiple potential choices for the users to select. The promise of Copy.ai is that AI-driven suggestions can cut down the ideation phase by over 80%, allowing a human marketer to then rely on their creativity and constraints to fill in the remaining 20% till completion. One common misconception of AI is that it will replace human labor creativity, but that couldn’t be farther from the truth. There are few activities where AI outperforms human beings outright, but these tasks are rather low-value. More subjective tasks such as creating advertising copy are too complex for an AI to produce work that is ‘objectively’ better than humans. The two cofounders of Copy.ai have the task of building a superior product in a crowded market and educating their future customers that AI is here to assist and not replace them.
Chris Lu and Paul Yacoubian make a formidable, flexible team to lead Copy.ai. CTO Lu studied computer science at Washington University in St. Louis and worked at the ESO Fund as an investor before starting Copy.ai with Yacoubian. CEO Yacoubian obtained his economics, business administration, and accounting degree from Rhodes College and worked at the ESO Fund, where he met Lu before starting Copy.ai with him. The two’s complementary technical and business skill sets have brought them far, but their ability to convince the world that Copy.ai is here to augment human creativity instead of replacing it will usher in a revolution in how we relate to our algorithmic companions. Copy.ai will usher in a new era of business built and scaled with the help of AI.
