“The coming era of Artificial Intelligence will not be the era of war, but be the era of deep compassion, non-violence and love.” – Amit Ray, Pioneer of Compassionate AI Movement
Artificial Intelligence (AI) was initially kept aside for only computer scientists as the other sectors thought that it has nothing to do with their domains and it will be extremely complex and dangerous to handle. But soon this notion was changed and people started adopting AI but with a lot of speculation. AI as we all know is shaping today’s world in a completely new mould. The question is. Are we ready to take it up?
According to a recent PwC study, 72% respondents viewed AI as a “business advantage”, however, research shows that 85% of AI projects fail due to risk, confusion and lack of upskilling among marketing teams.
Why is this happening? What are the misconceptions surrounding it?
- The first misconception is ‘AI is dangerous’, machine learning is not inherently dangerous, it is as harmful as any other technology that we are using today. The majority of the existing AI-systems are instruction driven. It helps in solving the problem and providing optimum results.
- Then there is a huge amount of speculation regarding the fact that ‘AI will be taking away human jobs’ This is a huge concern amongst people, they believe with the advent of AI, the unemployment rate will reach its peak. Although this is not the truth in entirety. It is estimated that only 8% of the companies are planning to fill the jobs of humans by AI-based systems. Rather it is more likely to create more jobs than it will take. It will take on repetitive tasks and the human brain will be free to design new products and develop the business further. From the past, we have always seen that with the advent of technology there is an initial slump in employment but it ultimately boosts the employment by enabling new industries and newer sectors emerge.
Not adopting AI in Marketing is like not addressing the elephant in the room. Also, to add that it is not exorbitantly priced but with the amount of research it is available at much affordable prices and hence it can be used by big and small organizations alike. AI in Marketing is a method of leveraging customer data with the help of machine learning to anticipate the customer’s next move so that they can be served better.
Although all the negative speculations surrounding it does not completely stop people from adopting it. As, if you aren’t still your competitor will. In 2019, Gartner reported that 37% of enterprise which includes both small and large have already implemented AI in some form or the other. We all know that this will only rise in the coming years.
If we want to use AI in marketing, we need to use machine learning and see how it can be helpful. In machine learning, it analyses the historical data of the business with the customer on various touchpoints also how the customers have reacted to that. On doing this they can have a fair idea about what has worked in their favour and what didn’t. This will help them in taking the correct and measured decision which will help the business in targeting the right audience for optimum results.
This is known as predictive analytics. This tells you when to target the audience in what way, is it targeting or re-targeting, should it be through emails or push notifications? Predictive analytics average profit margin per customer and customer lifetime value is twice as much. Let us walk through how AI has been serving us.
1. Content Recommendations
Be it the display of the best-fitting offers or sending the most specialised push notifications to your mobile phone it is all a part of AI. They carefully analyze the hundreds of data points when you visit a particular website, which includes the location, device, demographics or the way you interact with the website. These help in increasing the conversion rates which in turn has also improved on the entire customer experience.
This is a tried and tested method as it is taken up by all the big names when we talk about the consumer brands and the publishers. (E.g.: The Wall Street Journal, Pandora and many more) While talking about personalised content we cannot afford to miss out on the famous and most used sites like Amazon and Netflix. When we log into our amazon profile, we have recommendations based on our previous purchases or products we have spent time on and did not buy. This makes the whole process a lot less time consuming as there are millions of products on Amazon but only a handful of them concerns a consumer. Similarly, for Netflix, we get choices of what we have watched previously. The more time we spend in the application the more they start knowing about the customer and that eventually helps them personalise the experience for every customer.
2. Creating Chatbots
Chatbots are AI-powered and it is used by business to answer the FAQs of the customer when they visit a website. It helps in automating a considerable part of customer communication without sacrificing on customer service. As the chatbots leverage machine learning techniques, the software gets better with more and more questions from the customers. Chatbots are helpful when it comes to gathering contact details, information for sales calls or answering general queries of customers.
They help to free up the marketing professionals from doing repetitive tasks and frees their mid so that they can utilise them on providing better customer satisfaction. They can be used for gathering initial information from leads, scheduling a sales call or a customer service call, also quickly greeting the customers who are land on your page.
3. Secures Customer Data
We all agree that digitization has been revolutionary for all the organisation but it cannot be denied that it comes with a fair share of its cyber threats. More the reliability of digital media more is the risks of cyber-crime.
The chart gives a clear picture that the trust factor is really low, people feel that whatever information they put out on the internet is collected and used against them. With more companies embracing digital technologies it becomes important to secure the data. AI has been believed to improve data security to a certain extent.
Some of the data security solutions by AI are:
- User and Entity Behaviour Analytics (UEBA) – This tool learns specific patterns of legitimate access usage and uses it to determine sophisticated attacks like insider threats.
- Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) – This security tool helps the security team deal with various events across the entire organizational environment. With the information delivered by SIEM, one can quickly deal with data security threats in real-time.
- Security, Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR) – This cybersecurity solution alerts on threats. It can detect risks and deal with some of them automatically.
Apart from the ones mentioned above AI is also used for facial, voice and sound recognition for registering the customer’s biometrics which can be used in the future to access facilities securely.
The core elements of AI in Marketing:
- Big Data: It can be explained simply as the ability to aggregate and segment the vast data with minimum manual work. It ensures that the right message is delivered at the right time to the right person.
- Machine Learning: Machine learning platforms come in handy when marketers try to make sense of this huge data repository. They can help identify trends or common occurrences and effectively predict common insights, responses, and reactions so marketers can understand the root cause and likelihood of certain actions repeating.
The core benefits of AI in Marketing:
- Intelligent searches: AI and big data can analyze search patterns and help a marketer identify their focus.
- Smart Ads: The ads become more effective by the help of keyword searches, social profiles.
- Refined Content: AI to both identify potential clients or buyers, and deliver the ideal content that’s most relevant to them
Let me interest you with a topic that we all will find relevant. The banks have globally been the biggest buyers of technology and our country has been no exception. Nowadays with the help of AI, a forged signature is much easier to identify. When one is trying to forge a signature then the minute fissures are well identified by the trained bot which is otherwise almost invisible to the human eye. On the other hand, when an account holder signs in a hurry and there are minute changes from the one in the bank’s system then the bot can understand that it is a genuine signature. Only in certain instances of old age and disabilities which causes an alteration in the signature then they pass the query to a human, although this will also become rare as the AI learns and upgrades with practice.
The ones discussed above are a handful of what AI is and how it can serve an organisation for a better tomorrow. As it can be seen that there are many ways in which we can leverage the benefits of the AI which will result in flourishing businesses but we are unable to do so for the lack of proper knowledge. This is creating a considerable demand-supply gap. Artificial intelligence is the future of marketing.
We have to accept artificial intelligence with open arms and maybe not artificial acceptance to get optimum results.
