Jasper launches new marketing AI copilot: ‘No one should have to work alone again’

Following layoffs earlier this year, marketing software platform Jasper is recalibrating.

Today, the company announced its new “end-to-end AI copilot for better marketing outcomes,” according to Timothy Young, the new CEO of Jasper as of two weeks ago, in an exclusive interview with VentureBeat.

The features Jasper announced today include new performance analytics to optimize content, a company intelligence hub to align messaging with brand strategy, and campaign tools to accelerate review cycles. The features will start rolling out in beta in November, with additional capabilities planned for Q1 2024.

By outlining the campaign parameters upfront, Jasper’s new copilot can not only generate customized content for each channel but also schedule, distribute, and track the entire effort. This elevates Jasper from tactical content creation to true strategic campaign management.

Crucially, the copilot also closes the feedback loop by integrating performance analytics. This allows users to demonstrate the real business impact of their campaigns to stakeholders.

Young, a former leader at Dropbox and VMWare, said Jasper is “up leveling the capabilities…from just an individual piece of content to groupings of content that are strategically valuable.”

Tapping into company intelligence

In a product briefing with VentureBeat, Zach Anderson, Jasper’s VP of Product and Customer Success, unveiled new capabilities coming to market that position Jasper as a true AI marketing copilot.

A core focus is deep personalization through “Company Intelligence.” As Anderson described, marketers can now “upload all relevant documents directly into Jasper where it is analyzed and tagged.” When generating content, Jasper will “draw directly from this company data to ensure everything is perfectly on-brand without any hallucinations.” Executives can feel assured their brand voice and strategic knowledge is authentically captured.

Performance optimization is also a major goal of Jasper’s design. As Anderson stated, marketers will closely track each content piece’s metrics within Jasper. The system “provides suggestions on how to iteratively improve underperforming assets directly within the app.” With each new campaign, Jasper aims to learn how to better achieve its customers’ goals by focusing on real business results.

Evolution in layers

Young believes the generative AI space will evolve in layers, much like past technology waves. 

“Over the last couple of decades, if you look inside enterprises, the value where they start is in the application layer, and then it moves down into the network stack and into the infrastructure stack,” said Young. This maturation process means the industry is poised for tremendous growth and specialization as different companies find ways to build targeted applications.

“Individual companies… are just going to find ways to build applications that really speak to end users, that are focused on verticals, that are focused on sectors, and all the specific challenges and value that they require,” Young said.

He sees the potential for thousands of companies addressing unique enterprise needs in specialized ways, just as no single tool has ever been sufficient on its own.

While acknowledging “there’s a lot of value in diversity and competition,” Young doesn’t view tech giants dabbling in the space as a major threat long-term. Their general tools won’t replace the specialization that organizations demand.

AI as critical infrastructure

Young believes LLMs will become critical digital infrastructure underpinning all knowledge work within enterprises. But how organizations interface with and leverage AI will depend greatly on their unique contexts, needs, and regulatory environments. Some may run customized models internally while others access open models through strategic partners.

While Young couldn’t comment on the profitability of Jasper during the interview, an annual recurring revenue (ARR) growth of four times by the enterprise sales team was highlighted in the release. After a summer which saw layoffs and increasing skepticism of the long term valuation of companies which build on top of LLMs (and could eat their lunch), Young says that history has shown even in saturated markets, targeted applications can thrive alongside dominant players. 

Asked about the layoffs directly, Young said: “Jasper was an early leader in generative AI for marketing. As the field evolved, the company also needed to reshape its team and evolve its focus. Unfortunately that did lead to a reduction of staff in July to enable the company to have the right fuel and focus for this next chapter. The company’s customer base has really changed over the last year with larger companies becoming the fastest growing segment. This expansion in our product and the continuous upleveling of our capacity is a sign of that focus.”

Examples like Zoom moving into areas like word processing does not faze Young, as he believes organizations will continue demanding specialized, best-of-breed tools tailored to their unique needs. Just as Dropbox has endured against giants, Young is confident Jasper’s verticalized, outcomes-driven approach will allow it to carve out durable niches even amid growing platform encroachment.

Rather than trying to compete feature-for-feature, Jasper will look to embed its AI seamlessly into customers’ existing workflows on various platforms. By delivering uniquely strategic insights and seamlessly coordinating complex initiatives, the company aims to make its copilot indispensable for optimizing how people work across any environment or application. For Young, strategic partnerships – not direct competition – will be the key to long-term success.

For companies like Jasper to thrive, Young stressed the importance of deeply understanding customers. “Staying close to your customers” and finding specific insights to build specialized value around is key, he said. If software enables customers quickly and earns their trust, durable strategic relationships can emerge where companies help further broader organizational goals.

Securing proprietary knowledge

When discussing protecting and safeguarding sensitive customer data, Anderson said the company employs its proprietary “Jasper AI engine” technology to ensure no customer information is exposed externally.

“Eeverything [customers] upload to Jasper, their prompts, their execution strategy that they’re putting into Jasper stays with Jasper,” Young said.

According to Anderson, some other tools may send direct customer inputs and outputs to large language models. In contrast, the Jasper AI engine allows querying external models for tasks, but does not share or pass along any customer data during this process. All collected intelligence remains internal to Jasper.

For executives wary of competitors accessing strategic assets, the internal data protections of the Jasper AI engine provide confidence. The risk of inadvertently training a rival on a company’s most sensitive plans or innovations due to language model exposure is mitigated. Proprietary knowledge stays fully protected under the customer’s control at all times.

By keeping customer training separate from external AI via its proprietary engine, Jasper establishes an important security standard executives should find reassuring. 

Beyond personalization and insights, marketers can generate entire campaign blueprints directly from high-level briefs using Jasper’s new “Campaign Acceleration” features. The tool actively drives the content creation process from ideation to execution and optimization.

Emotional impact key to standing apart

For Young, one of the most exciting aspects of Jasper’s technology is the profound emotional impacts it can have on knowledge workers. He recounted being moved while witnessing an exuberant reaction after Jasper generated over 100 product descriptions for her e-commerce site in minutes.

“Those moments where technology really invokes someone deeply at an emotional level, I just think, are incredibly rare,” Young said.

By helping eliminate the friction and loneliness of the creative process, Young believes AI assistants can rekindle that sense of childlike wonder people feel when discovering profoundly useful new tools. 

“No one should have to work alone again,” said Young. By serving as a conversational companion that sparks new ideas and surfaces actionable insights from company data, Jasper aims to get people firmly “in the flow of work” through natural dialogue. Young hopes this makes the workday feel less solitary and allows employees to consistently achieve their peak performance.

If Jasper and other AI tools can help more workers feel like “heroes” both on the job and at home, Young believes it will not only boost productivity but profoundly impact peoples’ overall well-being and job satisfaction for the better. For him, technologies that forge deep emotional connections by empowering users are uniquely positioned for long-term success.