In the first week after OpenAI announced ChatGPT in 2022, Anton Pavlovsky, chief executive of the Ukrainian edtech startup NextBe wary of artificial intelligence hype.
He decided that his then-three-year-old company should adopt a defensive strategy, one that allows other companies to take the lead in generative-AI investments and reap the benefits later, if they actually arrive.
But a business trip to Silicon Valley the following April completely changed Pawlowski’s thinking.
“I talked to a lot of smart people with a lot of experience, and those people said this is definitely a paradigm shift,” Pawlowski said. “They said it was like the Internet, the World Wide Web, then the smartphone and then AI.”
Upon his return, he implemented a company-wide, four-month, hardcore focus on AI. The company has also created a separate cross-functional team to help integrate AI-powered features across its various products.
Pawlowski said the use of AI tools has made a profound difference in the company’s marketing performance.
During the first six months of 2024, the company said AI-powered ads reached 3.3 billion impressions. The company said that the use of AI tools increased the return on investment from its video ads by 40% as it helped reduce costs previously spent on production. Headway declined to disclose its marketing budget but said it was “in the millions.”
“The biggest impact is on the opportunity cost for people, it frees up a lot of resources on creative and more value-added efforts to experiment with crazy ideas,” Pawlowski said.
Headway joins a growing number of marketers looking to use AI tools, in part to reduce their advertising costs.
The buy-now-pay-later generation Klarna made socks While it said AI has helped it cut its spend on marketing agencies by 25%. recent Gartner study predicted that 30% of large companies’ outbound marketing messages will be artificially generated by 2025. The rapid adoption of tools has the marketing industry excited about AI’s potential, but few upset About agency jobs and question results Are customers ready? To stream ads using or referring to AI.
Headway is using AI tools like Hagen, Rask and Midjourney
Founded in Ukraine in 2019, Headway operates a portfolio of educational apps that have been collectively downloaded by over 110 million users worldwide. The company remains headquartered in Kyiv, the capital of Ukraine, although most of its users are located in the US. (Company Said earlier After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, it helped most of its employees and families who wanted to leave the country, although some have returned.)
Its flagship app, Headway, offers 15-minute summaries of popular nonfiction books, as well as challenges and daily micro-learning sessions. Other apps in its portfolio include brain-training app Impulse, Admile coaching platform and its latest, Skillsta, a training app for soft skills like critical thinking and empathy. The company makes money through paid subscriptions.
Headway has leaned heavily on advertising on Meta’s Instagram and digital platforms like Facebook, Google and TikTok to grow its user base.
All of Headway’s user-generated-content video ads are now created using some element of AI technology, such as for subtitles or voiceover, the company said. UGC Ads Refer to those that blend in with other content on the app, such as vertical video ads on TikTok and YouTube Shorts, and are often created by creators rather than professional production teams. According to the company, these ads account for 30% to 50% of purchases of Headway subscriptions or signups for its 7-day free trial.
While Headway relied heavily on stock images for its static ads, nearly one in every of its paid downloads or trials is now driven by static ads that use AI-generated images, the company said.
When the company launched the French version of its Headway app, it used AI tools Rask And Hey Generalas well Deep L Translator, using AI voiceover and lipsync features to translate a video ad featuring an English-speaking creator into a believable ad for a French audience.
Elsewhere, HeyGen uses Headway tools including HeyGen D-ID, Animating characters in famous paintings like the Mona Lisa to “speak” in YouTube Shorts ads to encourage users to “stop scrolling” and download its Nibble Knowledge app.
Headway also uses text-to-image tools such as Midjourney And Leonardo A.I. In one instance, it produced a static ad featuring an image of Marie Antoinette biting into a marshmallow to promote the concept of “bite-size learning” for its Nibble app.
Headway is also increasingly introducing AI features into its own products. Headway App is currently testing an AI assistant that uses the OpenAI application programming interface, Google Cloud. Vertex AIand its own vector database to answer user queries based on its library of book summaries in a conversational format.
Unexpectedly, some users are spending “hours a day” interacting with the AI assistant, according to Pawlowski, which speaks to the success of the company’s AI push.
“Maybe some of the legacy players who don’t move quickly won’t have that speed of adoption, but for startups or digital natives, it’s a no-brainer,” Pawlowski said.
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