Artificial intelligence is starting to influence our day-to-day lives in ways that many of us would never have imagined. It presents us with exciting opportunities and opens up a world of potential for marketers.
Even though we’re hearing more and more about the positive uses of AI, there’s still an almost sinister undercurrent to it. Perhaps this has its roots in science fiction. And what should we make of predictions that by 2022 our personal devices are actually going to understand our emotional state more than our families?
The role of AI
But don’t think for a moment that it’s all doom and gloom, or that your job is at risk. AI implementations have grown 270% in the past four years. Meanwhile, it’s been predicted that by 2022, 133 million new jobs will have been created because of AI. Our jobs might be different in the future, but these figures suggest that the role of humans will still be in demand.
This is highlighted by research that shows only 3% of US customers say that they want full automation, with no interaction with another human. We still want to have those person-to-person interactions. But as our world becomes increasingly digital – where what we care about and what we feel will be communicated by bits and bytes – harnessing AI correctly can help keep you in a position to connect with your customers on an emotional level and build trust.
The fact is, AI makes us smarter and it’s about augmenting humans across every industry, making us all more productive, efficient, and better able to scale the work we’re already doing. This in turn will enable us to create and deliver content and experiences that speak to customers’ needs while also forging lasting relationships.
AI in marketing
AI is a key companion in our mission to understand and deliver experiences that customers want. It’s also great at taking care of mundane tasks and improving productivity. For example, it’s now possible to take text from content and convert that to video. With video content becoming increasingly dominant online, this intelligent automation will save marketers a significant amount of time.
Most importantly, there are lots of vital yet time-consuming tasks – things we should be doing but don’t have time for – that are prime candidates for automation. Things like going through landing pages and ensuring they have the correct tags attached to them. Wouldn’t it be a lot more effective to have a machine that detects the correct tags, based on an assigned criteria, and automatically adds them for you?
This is what makes the promise of AI so exciting: blending a machine’s capability with the emotional and social intelligence and judgement of the human being – a combination which will enable you to be more human with AI.
