Why AI Is Both Exciting and Scary to Me as a Marketer
The concept of artificial intelligence has been around for generations, but it seems like the term has been inescapable in recent months, especially for marketers.
Recently I’ve noticed the term and its two-letter abbreviation following me between industry events and asserting themselves in the headlines of industry publications, so much so that they were declared “marketing word of the year” (in spite of being two words) by the Association of National Advertisers in December.
Only a couple of years ago I was convinced that AI would remain a more abstract concept, something for other functional areas and large companies to sweat over; nothing a startup marketing team would have to concern themselves with.
More recently, however, I’ve witnessed its rapid evolution from an abstract idea (to me) into accessible products and tools that marketers are rushing to adopt. Like many innovations before it AI is now the “it” term in the industry, the shiny new object that we’re all racing to adopt as widely as we can stretch it.
I believe there is a lot of good that will come from the adoption of more artificial intelligence tools in the marketing industry, and my team is already using AI-powered software on a daily basis.
For the marketers who are still trying to figure all this out, I’m sharing what I think are the most exciting developments, as well as a couple of things we should spend time considering.
What excites me the most
1.We’re finally able to realize the true power of data. Marketing used to be more of an art than a science, but new artificial intelligence tools are propelling campaigns away from a guessing game and towards laser-focused targeting. AI tools can process huge amounts of data to provide new insights, confirm best practices and even predict human behaviour, which ultimately makes our jobs as marketers easier and more effective.
Take website content for example. In the past, if I wanted to figure out which photos were best to put on my website, I’d choose them based on my experience as a marketer, the advice of my visual designer or just whatever “felt” right. Today, CrowdRiff has processed over 500 million images shared on social media worldwide, and through machine learning has determined which visuals are more likely to be shared and engaged with by people viewing them. As a result, marketers no longer have to guess which visuals are best to engage website visitors.
2. Menial tasks will finally be automated out of existence. One of the great promises of AI is that it will take some of those highly manual tasks off the plate of marketing professionals, enabling them to spend more time on high-value work.
For example, not long ago many companies dedicated a portion of their sales staff to manning the website inbox and answering any questions that arrive via its chat window. These staff ended up spending hours answering the same questions over and over again, but today out of the box intelligent chatbot solutions like HubSpot and Drift, can leverage the data from millions of interactions and automatically answer common questions without involving a human.
Shopify Kit is an AI-powered platform for Shopify store owners that does everything from setting up Facebook campaigns to sending personalized thank you emails to customers. It’s essentially an AI assistant for business owners, enabling merchants to generate more sales without having to hire additional staff they may not be able to afford.
Such tools are so realistic they can actually scale personal connections with website visitors without increasing headcount, while freeing up staff members for more meaningful, impactful and frankly interesting work.
3. We’re starting to see democratization of complex tools and algorithms. I wouldn’t be writing about AI if it were still a concept, and not something I have direct access to, which leads me to perhaps the most exciting promise of an AI future.
Until recently, the only companies with the ability to process large amounts of data were large global entities like IBM, SAS and Microsoft, selling products and services out of the reach of small and mid size marketing budgets.
Learning things like which customers are most profitable or which media to buy and at what price required mining through thousands or millions of raw data points. These capabilities, once limited to Fortune 500 companies and major enterprise technology firms are increasingly accessible to startups and smaller companies.
Today, marketers can access tools like Salesforce Einstein which can help surface marketing leads more likely to convert to paying customers or InstaScaler which analyzes your website, finds the best traffic sources for your product and creates dynamic ads to drive traffic and conversions.
While the technology was once prohibitively expensive there are new out of the box solutions that have democratized AI to a point where even our company of 50 can afford to utilize it.
The things about AI that scare me
1.AI can amplify existing biases. Unfortunately all humans have biases, and while we assume machines are built without their own predispositions studies have found that AI is adopting some of humankind’s less desirable traits.
Google’s Head of AI, John Giannandrea recently shared his concerns about the increasing significance of bias in machine learning*. The reason for this is twofold:
- the people who design AI tools are imperfect beings themselves, and generally skewed white and male.
- AI is often gathering data from sources that are inherently human, like social media and search platforms, absorbing those biases into their programming.
For marketers, biases in AI could lead to things like lowering a lead score based on a person’s gender, or not serving marketing job ads to people of certain age groups or educational backgrounds.
The belief that AI would eliminate prejudices isn’t bearing out in reality, yet many still believe that it will remain robotically impartial.
2. Removing the art of marketing. Speaking of biases, I am definitely biased about this one! One of the things I’ve loved most about being a marketer is having the opportunity to exercise creative muscles. Whether it’s crafting the perfect headline or creating an engaging video, I’ve loved the messy, unpredictable and human side of marketing.
But as the industry becomes more automated, even creative tasks are falling to machines.
If AI is able to create new styles of visual arts or company logos, and if algorithms can mimic creativity, will we get to a point where marketing no longer values creative skills?
We’re not quite at the point of offloading all of our creative decision making to computers, but we’re starting to head in that direction, and I fear marketers will be given less opportunities to provide creative input as the technology matures.
3. It will make us less smart. The proliferation of artificial intelligence will allow us to offload mental tasks to the machine, which I fear may inhibit some skills marketers (and people in general!) have historically exercised everyday.
For example, when I was younger my parents wouldn’t let me use a calculator in elementary school because they knew it was the only way I’d learn how to do basic math in my head. So when I worked in retail and the cash register wasn’t working for some reason, I could figure out how to handle cash transactions speedily and effortlessly.
The same can be said for spellcheck, which has widely devalued spelling and grammar skills for generations that were raised with it. It’s a wonderful tool for writers, but it’s also created a new problem, of people not knowing how to spell correctly without a tool at their disposal.
AI has the potential to solve a lot of problems, but as we get more reliant on technology I fear our own abilities will diminish, at least in the increasing number of areas where algorithms can outperform humans.
AI has ushered in a new era of marketing
One thing that’s undeniable is that AI has changed the game for marketers. If you are not using AI directly today, it should at lease be on your radar, it soon will be impacting much of what you do day-to-day as a marketer.
Overall, I’m excited about the promise — and reality — of AI for marketers. Like any technology, it requires thoughtfulness in how it’s developed and deployed.
The years ahead will be interesting for us marketers, and I’m curious to see how AI’s potential plays out and what this new era of marketing will bring.
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Amrita Gurney is the VP Marketing at CrowdRiff, where she leads a team responsible for demand generation, brand, product marketing, and marketing operations. Prior to CrowdRiff, Amrita led marketing at high growth startups including Audiobooks.com and Asigra. Amrita loves digital marketing, visual storytelling, drinking tea and traveling.
