By Felicia Li-Gaillard, Chief Marketing Officer, Aboitiz Data Innovation
Today, technological innovations have penetrated every part of our lives. Particularly the changes brought by technology have given rise to marketing technology, martech, that helps optimise efforts in the space.
Opportunities to innovate and apply these advanced technologies are endless, and a McKinsey study shows that Artificial Intelligence applications within the marketing domain will bring the most value in consumer-facing industries such as retail.
Some have argued that the integration of AI is no longer a nice to have but rather a necessity. Artificial Intelligence has demonstrated its value in processing customer data, helping marketers make more informed decisions, and improving efficiency in once-considered tedious tasks. We can only expect that AI integration will be more profound in the future.
Generative AI has entered the chat
AI integration in martech can take many shapes or forms, but it holds the most potential in content creation. We have witnessed the generative AI language model ChatGPT recently take the world by storm, with more than a million users logged into the platform within the first week of its release.
ChatGPT is a perfect example of what Artificial Intelligence can do in a way that is simple and easy to understand. Imagine feeding a creative brief to the system and getting results that are logical and coherent within seconds – Artificial Intelligence has now made this possible. With these tools, businesses can maintain and enhance their digital presence through more effective and engaging social copies for social media content and eDMs.
On the other hand, Artificial Intelligence also has the potential to personalise media types such as images and videos – both of which are powerful tools used to capture a customer’s attention. AI-driven imagery like DALL-E 2 and Stable Diffusion will play a key role as companies aim to increase their content output.
AI-generated voices are also another avenue that can help businesses enhance customer experience through human-sounding AI-generated customer service, audio clips, and podcasts. It is no surprise that AI-powered tools will make it possible for marketing teams to create engaging and effective content in a much shorter time.
An essential part of marketing teams
As Artificial Intelligence takes over repetitive and time-consuming marketing tasks such as content generation and social listening, marketers can better allocate their time and effort to focus on ideation, strategy, planning, and collaborations.
Artificial Intelligence can also provide meaningful recommendations ahead of campaign planning, including processed data and analytics to help marketers make informed decisions on preferred channels and other deployment means.
Leveraging real-time behavioural data and AI plays a critical role in developing highly curated content and providing an overall customer experience. Empowering marketing teams can be achieved by embracing a data-driven strategy and an AI-powered content process.
However, it is important to be aware that these advanced models are trained on the basis of data sets that may include unwanted biases – a fact that is sometimes overlooked by users.
Confronting risks and encouraging responsible use
With AI becoming a go-to tool for many, it has also become clear that deploying AI requires caution regarding biases. Ultimately, it boils down to the intention or its specific application – was AI used to commit misconduct, or was it used to solve high-impact social problems?
At ADI, we are strong advocates for responsible AI. Businesses need to establish guidelines to ensure ethical AI use. Take our Explainable and Responsible AI (XRAI) Guidelines as an example. These guidelines were created to assess our AI models, systems, or data science practices and checked against eight main principles, including transparency, explainability, repeatability, safety & security, robustness, fairness, accountability, and human agency and oversight.
This ensures that all AI models we develop and deploy do not put certain population groups at a disadvantage and can, in fact, treat protected groups fairly.
AI is simply a collaborator, not a replacement for marketing professionals… It lacks emotional and rational elements that are crucial to marketing and storytelling.
Balancing AI and human connection
AI consistently adds value to marketing teams – it can automate repetitive tasks, analyse customer data, and create hyper-personalised content, to name a few. We can all agree that AI has permanently transformed the marketing function. However, to truly connect with customers, businesses will still require the human perspective.
AI is simply a collaborator, not a replacement for marketing professionals. Regardless of how well-programmed AI systems are in their creativity and efficiency, AI is merely a technology with limitations. It lacks emotional and rational elements that are crucial to marketing and storytelling.
With AI increasingly being embedded into marketing technology and platforms, it is important to keep in mind that marketing still hinges on humanity. AI will be a tool that allows for better marketing, but humans are still marketing’s core element.
