Only 35% [of consumers surveyed] said they were open to [AI]. Yet when CIO rephrased the question and asked consumers how they felt about AI saving them time and money, acceptance skyrocketed to 75%.
From the article “AI Will Bring Empathy Back To Marketing” on Mumbrella.
The promise of artificial intelligence is a compelling one. Talk to marketers about eliminating repetitive tasks and giving their time back and you’ll find an extremely receptive audience.
But, once the time-consuming, repetitive tasks have been automated; how do you expect to spend your days then? So much of the daily grind performed by marketers these days falls into categories of activities better managed by machines.
In the future, we won’t spend hours looking for good content to share. We won’t need to manually segment our audiences or build ad campaigns by hand -in fact, most of these sorts of activities are well on their way to being managed autonomously.
No, AI represents something much more exciting than an extra pair of hands that helps you grind harder and faster. The real power of AI isn’t replication, but recommendation.
Netflix knows what you want to watch. Spotify knows what you want to listen to. Both simply connect the user to the content they’re interested in, through the lens of the user behaviors, tracked and analyzes by machine learning algorithms.
This means that people don’t have to spend their time hunting for information. In the future (and increasingly the present) viable options are recommended to users automatically, allowing users to spend their time making choices instead.
Likewise, AI eliminates the need to stay vigilantly focused on the little details, empowering human operators to focus on the bigger picture. AI will give us the mental space to focus on the forest, instead of the trees.
The marketing industry has suffered from too much time spent counting trees and not enough time spent planting forests. AI offers us the hope that we can once again look up from our spreadsheets and live in the real world, where business actually happens.
Shifting our focus away from the technical details affords us the time to do things we’ve overlooked for years. Things like making a human connection, building relationships with partners, and enhancing the customer experience.
The real power of AI is bigger than the automation itself…it’s as big as everything you can prioritize in place of the repetitive work you used to do.
Automation will replace some aspects of marketing jobs over the next few years but, if we’re being honest, it’s not the good part anyway.
Before digital, marketing was about people…how to attract them and how to motivate them. As AI disrupts the industry, we can expect marketing to return to its human-to-human roots; supported by intelligent recommendations, optimizations, and automation.
“The successful customer relationship of the future will be built on both the rational (digital perfection) and the emotional (the human touch).”
Read the original article to hear more from Resulticks CEO Redickaa Subrammanian, this year’s Global Female Entrepreneur of the Year.
