If you’re in marketing, AI is a powerful ally,
If you’re in data science, Marketing is a rich problem set.
“Artificial Intelligence Roundup,” eMarketer, February 2017
AI, in a nutshell, is the next logical step in computing the programs that can figure out things for itself. It’s a program that can reprogram itself. The shorthand for remembering what is unique in AI is that it can Detect, Deliberate and Develop i.e. all the three-D on its own. The word ‘Artificial Intelligence’ is the talk of the town in the marketing industry these days. Any dimension of the marketing world where a marketer has to go through the massive data and make decisions based on that data will be affected by AI in one way or the other in the near future.
The term AI can be seen by mortals to propel the fear of God into human beings. Some people think that AI is gonna take away their jobs while some other dramatic people amongst us think that robots are smarter than humans which will take over the world end all human race on Earth. But this is not true at all. What is actually happening today just opposite the thinking of these people that most of the mundane marketing tasks are now being offloaded on AI-powered tools which in turn, help the marketers to refocus their time on other important creative aspects of marketing? Although AI is in an early stage of adoption, it is yet to reach its full potential. There are many uses of AI out of which a few are the following:
- One of the major giant search engines, Google uses AI to predict what people are searching for with great precision with its autocomplete search queries.
- E-commerce sites like Amazon and Myntra use AI to provide product recommendations to their users.
- Newsfeeds that are provided to users by Facebook and Instagram are customized to them via machine- learning algorithms.
- Various AI techniques are used in self- driving cars to avoid mishaps and traffic congestion problems.
There are so many different and confusing definitions of AI but I’ll try my best to give you the definition which is perhaps easier to digest.
So, AI is the concept of using non- human entities like smart computers that use human-level intelligence and perform tasks intelligently and efficiently. So, basically, what a smart computer does, a smart person does with the help of using AI. It makes it possible for machines to adopt new things from past experiences, provide new inputs to the existing data and able to perform human activities in an intelligent way. AI-powered tools need to be continuously fed with large amounts of high- quality data in order to remain precise, efficient and up-to-date. But this does not guarantee that AI is always right because any inaccuracies being fed in the data to such machines will change the results. So, we can say that AI is revolutionizing the marketing arena and other industries, we should also have an eye on its current limitations.
Broad uses of Artificial Intelligence to Marketers:
- AI delivers the right content to the right prospective customer at the right instant of time through the right channel. Thus, AI helps in better segmentation of the customers which is very important from the perspective of marketers.
- AI helps in ensuring the personalization of the content i.e. only that information will be delivered to customers which is relevant and valuable to them.
- As AI helps is making personalization easier for marketers which in turn helps them to convert their marketing budget into more sales. Thus, it provides a better and enriched customer experience. Thereby, AI ensures an increased rate of Return\on Investment (ROI).
- AI helps the marketers to get in-depth insights to analyze the past and present customer behaviors as AI can easily and quickly identify the patterns or trends and identify future outcomes. Thus, AI helps marketers to move away from the generic demographical data to understand the target audience on a much deeper level.
- Sameer Patel, CEO of Kahuna, believes that AI will help the marketers in providing some free time to them so that they can channelize their energy on the creative and strategic aspects of marketing. He also mentioned that 95% of the people who came for marketing did not come from the data-driven world, they came for the green bushy side of marketing as AI can help you to become that level of a creative person that you ever wanted to be. Thus, we can say that AI is a Win: Win situation really.
- AI helps in a better product and content recommendations to the customers, thereby, helps in gaining their attention.
- AI has found a profound impact on the way of searching for anything and it also enhances the quality of search experience by the customers.
- There are other uses of AI too like product categorization, sentiment analysis of customers, defining product pricing, sales forecasting, use of chatbots, speech recognition, provides a clear vision of augmented reality and many more.
A beautiful quote was given by Stephen Hawking:
Intelligence is the ability to adapt to change.
So, Marketers should embrace Artificial Intelligence in their mundane marketing activities to create an exceptional change in the arena of marketing.
Ms. Sarvesh Yadav
Research Scholar, JIMS Rohini
