What are Marketers left with to befriend Artificial Intelligence?
If I drop this actor’s name at you, what movie comes to your mind first? Joaquin Phoenix.
Joker! right? The actor made an indelible mark with his 2019 Hollywood hit Joker. But I am reminded of an another movie, narrates an unusual-yet-beautiful love between a writer and an intelligent women Samantha. And, there is a specific reason why I call this love as rather unusual. Samantha was an artificially intelligent virtual assistant with a female voice. This was the plot of the 2013 movie ‘Her’ in which Joaquin starred as the writer.
As much I appreciated the daring (or amusing) script of ‘Her’ when I watched the movie in cinemas, seven years ago, I only understood it as a romantic fantasy flick. A year later, Amazon launched Alexa, a virtual assistant AI technology and five years down the line, 100 million Alexa-enabled devices were sold across the world. Staggering! Alexa is never meant to tug someone’s heart like a lover but the intelligent AI technology has become a living member in many families and helping them in their everyday lives. The rosy rise of Alexa and the rapid proliferation of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in multiple industries piqued my curiosity to analyze and understand what AI would do to marketing in the future. Promptly, I devoured expert articles on AI’s tech blocks, the latest AI breakthroughs in marketing, touchy grey areas as to how AI could dwindle existing jobs and more. Multiple viewpoints are up in the air, but one theory is firmly established — AI will make a colossal impact in the field of marketing.
The two minds of Artificial Intelligence
The Artificial Intelligence (AI) is, scientifically, bifurcated into Narrow AI and Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). The Narrow AI (sometimes referred as weak AI) is the intelligence system developed by scientists to perform a specific set of tasks: the thinking horizon (cognitive abilities) of this computational program is restricted. Some of the AI inventions that we experience today is from this little AI mind — self-driving cars, virtual assistants like Alexa, image recognition software etc. In contrast, AGI presumably mimics human intelligence and can perform any tasks similar to humans. The AGI possess human cognitive abilities (programmed to think and act on its own) to handle any situations, universally. This AGI machine is apt to fit the persona of super-human robots that we had seen in Hollywood sci-fi movies. Even though the advancements made in AGI, until today, is far from having a super-robot contesting for the US presidential election anytime soon, there are stirring debates in all corners as to if AGI’s is a necessary scientific investment to the benefit of mankind.
The new ally in Marketing — AI
Chatbots is the unassuming AI ring leader in marketing. Those trendy, eye-grabbing, far-right pop-ups that suddenly popped up to ease online buying experience (or) answer a pressing shipping query was probably the first experience with AIs, thanks to the early e-commerce adaptors. Pandora’s interactive voice ads leveraging voice recognition technology, GumGum’s contextual analysis — scans for content tone — method to place digital ads in relevant web hotspots, Grammarly’s email tone detector for effective communication are some of the latest advancements of AI in marketing. The AI machine does not stop there. Content generation platforms like Articolo lean on Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Semantic Analysis to dish out fresh articles in less than a minute. Should AI probably be renamed as ‘Atrociously Intimidating’? given the pace with which it is automating (or) poised to automate even the non-so-routine marketing roles. It is also predicted that the current marketing activities such as lead nurturing, content aggregation, SEO, A/B testing, audience targeting, email campaigns would entirely be handled by tools powered by AI. Stay calm and hold your breath, marketers.
Marketer’s plausible ammunition
I did not even remotely imagine that AI has such incredible power to infiltrate into marketing and automate many of the roles that are currently performed by specialists. Assuming that, sooner or later, there will be AI Marketers (interesting machines) who would perform a majority of marketing activities, then what are we, Human Marketers, left with to befriend Artificial Intelligence and continue our beloved profession with gusto? I pondered for a while to understand how a human could outsmart a machine? What are our ultimate brain parameters (unique for each individual) that cannot be universally mimicked?
Empathy & Creativity!
The AGI branch of AI has made some progress in simulating human emotions and creative thinking, but the scientific outcomes are not successful at these two highly human emotions are highly subjective.
“Empathy is patiently and sincerely seeing the world through the other person’s eyes. It is not learned in school; it is cultivated over a lifetime” — Minter Dial, author of Heartificial Empathy.
“It’s easy for AI to come up with something novel just randomly. But it’s very hard to come up with something that is novel and unexpected and useful.” — John Smith, Manager of Multimedia and Vision at IBM Research.
I am neither an AI specialist nor a neuroscience expert. I am a marketer (compassionate human) who believes in the power of empathy and creativity. And my beliefs strongly resonate with the above two quotes by the AI experts. I foresee (with my hunch — obviously not measurable) human marketers will use empathy and creativity to work in tandem with the AI machines.
