Marketers can no longer avoid leveraging AI technologies for their daily tasks and processes since success depends highly on competitive advantage, time and efficiency. With the help of AI technologies, marketers can focus their efforts on more strategic activities and eliminate the time spent on repetitive tasks, such as data aggregation, reporting, marketing, personalization and anomaly detection ( a pattern recognition in the marketing data). With the additional help of predictive analytics, marketers get a competitive advantage over their competitors.
Marketers have become more data-driven
Nowadays, the marketing field itself has evolved to become more data-driven than ever before. Relying only on gut feeling or subject-matter expertise alone are no longer go-to strategies because the amount of available data about the target audience and the historical data on all marketing tactics provide much valuable information especially combined with AI. It allows marketers to avoid inefficient marketing strategies and become way more efficient in their execution. Thanks to this, marketing has become more analytical as well as prognostic in the daily work.
Why AI will not dominate and take over marketing
The fear that AI will dominate and take away marketing jobs has been around for a while. Meanwhile, marketers are getting familiar with AI-based marketing tools and solutions. The usage of AI-based tools has offered more practical information about the AI future and the reality that comes with it as well.
It is crucial to understand where we stand at the moment and what role AI plays in the business world today: what it can do and what it cannot.
To better understand the development of AI technology and what it can offer humans, let’s have a look at the three commonly used phases and levels of AI:
Artificial Narrow Intelligence
We are currently in this AI phase, and humans are developing many Artificial Narrow Intelligence solutions to give support in different kinds of processes. This AI technology focuses on one narrow field and the respective solution cannot be ported to other fields. An example of this is content recognition or email spam folder categorization as well as voice recognition such as Siri or Alexa. All these technologies are good for one narrow problem but cannot be used to solve other problems.
Artificial General Intelligence
This is a phase that we have not reached yet. With Artificial General Intelligence, an AI-based machine would be able to learn and function similarly as a human—having broad capabilities to function and learn. As an example, one machine could learn to speak multiple languages as well as cook and paint a painting. Nevertheless, the first steps in this direction have already been taken and some results and successes are already measurable, where AI models and what they learned can be applied to other fields. But, there is still a long way to go and experts believe it will take us at least 20-30 years until this phase of AI is reached.
Artificial Super Intelligence
This is the third phase of AI technology that might be possible in the future. In the Artificial Super Intelligence phase, the machine would be smarter than a human brain and could outperform and beat human intelligence in any field. This is a very abstract topic and, obviously, the development hasn’t reached this stage yet.
As you can see, we are in the first phase of AI technology development right now. We can use AI technology to save time, make processes more efficient as well as eliminate error-proneness. But AI is not yet on the level of a human brain and has a long way to go to get there.
How can marketers benefit from AI today?
With the help of AI, marketers can enhance personalisation with more precise targeting and understand their target demographics better. Moreover, text generation tools already offer advanced solutions for generating quality texts for marketing purposes. When it comes to marketing analysis and optimization, here AI already offers assistance in predictions regarding marketing data, A/B testing and SEO/SEM.
As a marketer today, it is very important that you keep an eye open for new technologies in the field and start to adopt AI technologies early in your daily work. This is the only way to keep track of the fast-evolving environment.
