Artificial Intelligence in Marketing – Something For us all?

According to trendwatching.com, one big trend for 2020 is “Consumer Metamorphic“. Meaning, consumers are constantly changing and a perfect fit means constant adaptation around the changing individual. Basically, we have become so used to technological tools that we expect everything to be hyper-personalised. We want advice and products, depending on the exact situation we are in. And that’s where artificial intelligence comes in.

Can a machine be more intelligent than a human?

How intelligent can these machines be? In October last year I attended a talk by dr. Luc Julia, Co-creator of Siri. In his book “There is no such thing as Artificial Intelligence“, he explains that the machine can never do everything a human can do. E.g. a human child needs to see a cat 3 times before it can be able to say that any animal is a cat or not. A machine needs to see about 2000 pictures to be able to do the same. He claims that today, a machine needs to be preprogrammed ANY situation to be able to react to them. If the human that programs the machines is not capable of coming up with all possible situations, the machine will not be able to cope.

Okay, so what about AlphaGo? The machine that beat the unbeatable world champion of Go in 2016. Was it more intelligent than the human? Well, maybe. The machine just had a goal, to win. It did not matter by how much it won. A human mind will try to win with more than needed, whereas AlphaGo was programmed only to win, making it come up with a strategy to beat the human, just beat him, no more.

So maybe Artificial Intelligence can’t be any smarter than the human who programmed it?

Can Artificial Intelligence Be Good?

Recently, we launched the new branding for Lumitics, an Artificial Intelligence empowered solution that helps track and reduce food waste in the hospitality industry. The Lumitics Insight technology is taking pictures of food being thrown away. Using Artificial Intelligence, it analyses the food and gives statistics and feedback on your food waste.

In addition, a lot of initiatives are popping up across the globe, where Artificial Intelligence is being used to solve global challenges. One example is AI for good. A global summit happening in May in Geneva this year.

So, Artificial Intelligence is not necessarily something evil that is only used supervising us all and make us live in a “Black Mirror” world. We can decide to use the tool for the better of our humanity. This is really good news!

Artificial Intelligence can help us become better marketeers

Yes, I said it, and I really believe it! I do think we can become better marketeers by efficiently adapting Artificial Intellgence into our daily work. What is a good marketeer anyhow? It is someone who is able to detect what the customer wants and when they want it. In this definition, AI is the perfect tool to help us out.

Before, we had face to face knowledge of our customers. Our customers came to our store and we served them. Since we knew them, it was easy to propose different products. Today, the scene has changed. We don’t know our customers personally anymore. We have millions of them, all spread across the globe. With increasing competition, we need to understand our customers. If you doubt it, you can always check why is marketing important. Here is where AI can help us.

AI can help answering intelligently to questions in our chatbots. It can help us to write better newsletters, decide on the most appropriate content and to better optimise our advertising. It can help us make sales forecasting easier since we now have insight to what type of customers actually buys our stuff.

And, if you think about it, this is also what we want as customers. We want to receive a newsletter that is actually fitting to our personal interests. And, we want to be proposed the right product personalised to our need. Further, we don’t want to be bugged with sales emails during work hours, nor do we want to have advertising pushed to our screens just because we “accidentally” had a look at a new lipstick during lunch.

Is AI Marketing Tools For Small Businesses?

Yes, it can be! However, some tools, even though appearing cheap might be a bit overkill for entrepreneurs, startups and SMEs in the beginning. On the other hand, no data = no AI. The very first step is to start collecting data. Set up your Google Analytics, set up your EDM system and your Facebook Pixel, to start getting some data on your customers and their behaviour. Only from there will you start to understand how your marketing affect them. Then, depending on your industry, you can seek to install various AI solutions to help make your business less dependent on people to do everyday, repetitive tasks. This means you can do other, more interesting things. In the end that is what it boils down to right? We all want to have meaning in our day.