Dominique LeBlond leads Bynder's product organization to develop and support new and innovative solutions that inspire brands to thrive through exceptional content experiences.
As Chief Product Officer, he ensures that customer needs are at the forefront of Bynder's product roadmap; especially as more brands embrace AI technology within their content operations.
In this Q&A, Dominique discusses the role of AI in marketing and content management, and Bynder’s latest AI-powered solutions.
What do you believe will be the significant trend within AI and marketing over the next 10 years?
Beyond the generative forms, AI is starting to open opportunities that marketers have long sought; particularly in the areas of personalization and targeted content.
The ability to highly personalize content for individuals has always been appealing, but the cost of creating such engaging, one-to-one marketing content has been a significant barrier up until now — especially when relying on creative teams to produce numerous variants.
AI presents a new possibility; the ability to generate hyper-organized content in the near term, which I believe will help shape the future of marketing over the next decade.
This is critical, because, at Bynder, we’ve seen an overall increase of 40% in the number of assets our customers upload to the Bynder DAM. Brands are producing more content for a larger number of distribution channels, meaning that additional content variations are always required.
On the content management side, AI can automate tasks like content enrichment, discovery, and organization with an ability to categorize high volumes of content — without putting extra strain on teams and individuals.
For example, Bynder's AI-powered searches enhance content management and improve discoverability; all while ensuring compliance with regulations and full control over owned data. This empowers brands to boost productivity and grow their businesses.
What is the one mistake marketers are making with AI?
Seeing AI as a complete replacement for certain roles or functions.
While AI can optimize specific tasks and functions, approaching it with the mindset of, 'We’ll do everything with AI… we’ll generate all our content through AI… we’ll optimize all our campaigns with AI…’ can lead to problems.
For example, you might find that you lose control over your brand’s quality and consistency. This is because AI-generated content can vary; especially when applied to derivatives from previously generated AI content.
This can create a ‘cascading’ effect; leading to a loss of the consistency we’ve learned is crucial for amplifying brands, staying on message, and maintaining a consistent tone of voice.
What is the most important advice you could give to a business about embracing the benefits of AI? What are the benefits and risks?
My key advice to businesses thinking about embracing AI is to start by identifying clear strategic goals behind using it — rather than just adopting it.
Think about what is going to offer value to your business, for your use cases, and your users. Start small and then scale up from there.
One risk related to AI is treating it merely as a ‘feature’ — wanting to use the AI technology today, but without understanding its broader potential.
The real value of AI lies in how it can integrate with and enhance existing use cases, and drive automation. For instance, in content management, AI can automate tasks like classifying and enriching content and managing metadata, which can otherwise be a lengthy process, with large content ecosystems.
This is particularly useful if, for example, you’re dealing with a lot of event-related content; content with a relatively short shelf life, yet the overheads involved in classifying and processing those assets still present a big challenge. But with AI-powered automation helping to classify and process these assets, dealing with 40,000 images suddenly isn’t so time-consuming.
What is Bynder’s approach to developing products and features with AI?
At Bynder, we focus on a responsible approach to AI. We don’t view AI as a ‘black box’ where you have no control. Instead, we provide controls and ensure our AI capabilities are deployed responsibly.
Our capabilities allow marketers to track where assets have been altered by AI and determine at which stage in the workflow they want to continue using AI.
For example, our Content Workflow product includes robust safeguards for additional peace of mind — allowing you to easily identify and manage AI-generated content, and ensure brand consistency and content quality.
Related: Visit the Bynder Labs website
Is Bynder planning to further enhance Content Workflow with additional AI capabilities?
We want to look at generating tone of voice and brand-compliant content. On top of that, we think there’s value in making content reuse even easier — by creating content blocks, for example.
We're evaluating the integration of Content Workflow's AI-powered text authoring engine into CX for User Community. This would not only accelerate text generation and translations in CX User for Community but also allow the system to examine where similar content has been created before and suggest opportunities for content reuse
Generative AI is a large part of what we see emerging in the market, but people should view it as an ‘assistant’ rather than a replacement for human creativity.
We’ve launched Bynder Labs and we’re currently working with a group of customers to see how they use Generative AI — which is closely linked to Bynder’s vision for delivering exceptional content experiences.
We already have the CX for User Community and CX for Omnichannel solutions, but we also want to start looking at dynamic content optimization, where you’ll be able to ‘inject’ alternate content versions — potentially for personalization at scale use cases.
Can you provide a specific example of how AI might be used to tailor marketing content to individual consumers relatively soon?
While AI may not be able to fully generate content for an entire campaign, it can take the base campaign copy and personalize it to the individual; adding layers that resonate with their specific preferences.
A prime example is dynamic website personalization. As you navigate a website, AI can subtly adjust the layout and featured content to align with the user's interests. For instance, a running enthusiast might notice prominent displays of running apparel, while others may see different product categories highlighted.
The DAM space is already making headway with intelligent asset retrieval features and predictable URLs, powered by metadata, and enabling the automatic retrieval and delivery of personalized content to the right customer.
A travel brand promoting a tropical island could use URLs like /destination/island-paradise/adventure/male to target thrill-seeking men with action-packed images, or /destination/island-paradise/relaxation/female to appeal to women seeking a tranquil getaway.
Predictable URLs empower brands to create tailored content experiences that drive business results, without needing to create custom landing pages for each campaign.
Can you provide an example of an AI feature or capability that you decided to build — and explain why you built it?
Generally, I’d say that ‘outcomes’ are always front and center when we’re thinking about developing new AI-powered features at Bynder. That’s why we focused heavily on ‘AI search’ in 2024 — because when we looked at how our customer base was using the Bynder DAM, we could see the highest volumes of repetitive tasks related to content discovery.
We recently added Face Recognition to our AI Search Experience offering. This solution enables admins and content contributors to identify, tag, and find images featuring people; and allows end users to search for images of people using Bynder's spotlight search or smart filters.
It’s a great demonstration of how AI can be integrated into everyday workflows — as this feature is particularly useful for finding images of company employees, such as executives, celebrities, and brand ambassadors used in marketing campaigns.
We decided to build this feature as it not only improves our customers' daily workflows but also advances Bynder's strategic product objectives. It enhances content discovery, reduces admin workload, and improves content management by reducing errors and ensuring consistent tagging across all digital assets.
We want to continue expanding on leveraging AI to handle more repetitive tasks, scheduling, optimizing — and also, connecting to other systems.
Drive more impactful content experiences with Bynder AI
Detecting duplicate assets, text-in-image searching, and AI-assisted content creation are just a few of Bynder DAM’s AI capabilities.
Book a demo today to see how your organization can scale up content creation and distribution, maximize the value of existing assets, and increase marketing ROI. You can also learn more in our complete guide to Bynder’s AI and automation features.
