‘AI won’t replace marketers – it’ll make them more creative’ says IBM expert
Two of IBM’s top artificial intelligence experts will present a live Mumbrella webinar on how the tech will change customer experience on Wednesday at 12:30pm.
But first, the computer giant’s Antonia Edmunds explains to Mumbrella why marketers have nothing to fear from the new technology.
On Wednesday, we’ll define what artificial intelligence is and explain how it can be used by marketers. But we’ll also look at how it has evolved – from pure ‘machine learning’ that gave pre-packaged answers from huge amounts of data to a technology that can reason and interact like humans.
Fundamentally it’s a technology that lets us make better decisions, which will in turn improve customer experience. At IBM, I work with clients to help them better understand their data so they can gain insights into their consumers’ personalities. Once we’ve done that, we can change the tone or offer or language the business uses to deal with them across its channels.
The tech has improved because there’s been an awful lot of investment. In the past, AI companies gave clients tools and told them to get on with it themselves. Now the artificial intelligence is embedded in the solution, meaning you don’t have to train it from scratch.
It’s still early days in terms of its broad impact. In future, content and consistency will provide a more meaningful experience that companies can extract insights from. For example, the format people most share emotions via is image or video, but that has been hard to analyse. Say you have a 20,000 image library and you’re trying to build a marketing campaign, you want to automatically individualise each message with the correct picture. AI can now improve the efficiency of that. Call that phase one. Soon, you’ll be able to free up people doing basic tasks, which means you’ll end up with more sophisticated customer journeys and therefore better response rates.
In five years, we’ll see more sophistication and get closer to the holy grail of one-to-one marketing. That’s been the goal since I started and we’re getting closer. Because then we can understand who customers are based on what they are watching on social media channels. That will change the face of the marketing team. It will bring back creativity and strategy. There will be less coding, data and analytics. It’s about augmenting what people are doing, not replacing.
It’s not the case that AI will take on 90% of the work and organisations will shrink. In 2018, marketing departments aren’t growing – they’re doing more with less. We’re competing with people’s attention more than ever before. And you’ll need people to check and verify the AI. It will become a partnership.