Only Marketers Who Don’t Embrace AI Should be Worried About Robots
Unless you are a marketer who plans to retire in the next five years, artificial intelligence will significantly impact your career. This doesn’t mean that you’ll be replaced by evil marketing robots before your 401(k) matures, but AI will likely change the way you work by the time you need a new pair of shoes. You won’t be made obsolete — unless you’re unprepared.
Business leaders increasingly understand that AI represents a golden opportunity; but with this shift comes some uncertainty. MIT Sloan Management Review ran a global survey last year of some 3,000 executives, managers and analysts on artificial intelligence; it found that 85 percent believe AI will give them a competitive advantage.
More than half of marketers, meanwhile, fear AI will lead to job loss. Automation is nothing new to marketing. The buzz, urgency and anxiety that we’re seeing now reflects broader trepidation about how AI will impact the future of work. There’s even a 2020 Democratic presidential hopeful who is pinning his campaign to the message “the robots are coming.”
AI is not replacing marketers — it is automating tasks that practitioners don’t want to (or can’t) perform and unearthing data that would otherwise be unavailable. If marketers embrace AI technology, they’ll make themselves indispensable to their organizations. We are already seeing it happen across categories of brands and marketing campaigns.
Hyundai recently began using social influencers who were selected by artificial intelligence. The AI technology chose the best influencer matches for the car brand from 20,000 online personalities, and early results from the initiative included nearly 100% positive sentiment and 15 million total impressions. On the automotive dealer level, there’s a New York-based Harley-Davidson franchisee named Asaf Jacobi, who has reportedly employed AI-enhanced look-alike modeling to lift leads by 1,465% across his multi-channel operation.
Big brands like Unilever and Campbell Soup are also increasingly adding AI to their marketing efforts. For instance, the brands have each been running ads powered by IBM Watson, which lets viewers “talk” with a brand’s video ad and request additional info. The results are impressive: Unilever and Campbell’s have often averaged between one and two minutes of engagement with the interactive videos.
Eventually, AI-powered data will be smart enough to give marketers more time for capitalizing on trends, so they can spend less time piecing together campaigns and conducting A/B tests. AI is already helping marketers respond to online customer queries via chat and voice bots, more accurately predict future customer behavior and curate and generate content.
Consider the U.S. Postal Service’s new Smart Blue Box, which is a voice-activated mailbox that utilizes AI to reply to questions such as, “How much will it cost to ship this package?” Also, grocery delivery service Instacart now has a machine-learning model that offers the most efficient, aisle-by-aisle route its shoppers can take to find products at a store. Such applications of AI don’t replace people, they better inform our marketing and our lives.
The acceleration of technology has made change — and the fear of it — a cost of doing business. A scene in a “Mad Men” episode called “The Runaways” perfectly depicts the human dread that results from the thought of being replaced by machines. Copywriter Michael Ginsburg is pushed over the edge when an IBM mainframe is installed in the 1960s office of Sterling Cooper & Partners.
Quite similarly, some modern, real-life marketers are also feeling anxious from the emerging capabilities of AI. It’s understandable, but the fear is irrational and it will likely stifle your success.
AI must be embraced as an irreplaceable element to your data strategy. If you employ that mindset, AI can power your company and career for decades to come.
About the Author | Julia Stead
Julia Stead is vice president of marketing at Invoca.
