AI in Marketing — a double-edged sword?
AI, just like the other technological breakthroughs such as the automated assembly line, agile software development, and virtual reality, is revolutionary but at the same time could be a disruptive force in the status quo of people’s life and work.
It is changing the way people work, and requiring people to adapt fast, especially for those whose work involves digitalization, such as digital marketing.
As a result, instead of carrying out the role of marketing analyst to extract patterns from current trends, marketing professionals now will need to present the outputs of an AI process which do this analysis, and this requires knowledge of the rapidly developing AI systems in addition to knowledge of data analytics. The marketing people will be focused on deriving detailed insight into customer behavior and producing reliable predictive and prescriptive insights based on complex data models and Machine Learning. These models will evolve from historical analysis to real-time applications that transform how product is delivered to customers.
In other words, with the help of AI and big data, a lot of computationally resource-intensive tasks like gathering and sorting information can be greatly facilitated. Also, with the neatly organized data and algorithms, targeting and advertising can become so much more easier and accurate, which save cost greatly. As customers engage with the marketing platform, the customer profile is constantly updating, and AI enables businesses to do real-time engagement, initiate prompt reactions accordingly, and optimize marketing and business strategies.
If used correctly, AI can make work so much more efficient and less time consuming, however, it will not replace human intelligence in the workplace anytime soon. But then here comes the dilemma of keeping the balance of technology and human control.
According to Jason Hall’s repost on Forbes: “AI can streamline and optimize marketing campaigns. It can also eliminate the risk of human error…Empathy, compassion and storytelling are all attributes that machines can’t emulate, at least not yet. At the end of the day, AI is not bound by human limitations.” I strongly agree with this quote, and I think today’s digital marketing as well as so many other industries are growing on the foundation of AI technologies, and it is definitely a double-edged sword for businesses if they involve AI in their core operations.
