Foray of Artificial Intelligence into Marketing.

I remember during my first year, my friends showed me an article headlined, “AI to steal 60% engineering jobs by 2022.”

My friends were shell-shocked and some were even contemplating opting out of the course to join B.Com or B.A Degree courses.

We are in 2019 now. Just one year for the eventful decade to end.

Artificial Intelligence has not only stolen(if I may use the word) engineering jobs but has also set its  foot in the marketing industry with the generous help of its comrade, Machine Learning.

Modern marketing is fragmented. With so many disparate tools, data sources, metrics and customers, marketing teams are overwhelmed and finding it impossible to make sense of the volume and complexity of information available.

To simplify all these complexities, AI is slowly being incorporated in the marketing domain.

Since this is the era of the internet, companies cannot afford to lose out customers because their competitors are extracting maximum benefits of the Internet by buying software which guarantees a certain number of ad impressions.

Imagine you’re running a chain of hotels across India and you cater to the upper-middle class and foreign travellers too. There are about 450 airports across India. If we assume, there are roughly 20 people looking for accommodation on their arrival at the airport. This means we have 9000 potential customers. How can we ensure that the ads show up at the right moment for all these people? The solution is to leverage real-time signals like bad weather, flight delays at these 450 airports and other such data, combine that with ML powered algorithms to automate ads and messaging in the proximity of local airports. AI without human-control. Result? 60% increase in booking in targeted areas.

Just imagine you’re in the marketing section of a company and you have to send out an insane number of e-mails to prospective customers. This proves to be of no avail as very few people respond.

Consider the implications of ML on your email marketing program. The dataset you have contains every piece of data about all the people on your mailing list, all the content that has ever gone out, every click they have every interacted with, every product you have, every product’s lifecycle, purchase cycle, attach rates, every outbound click, unsubscribing rates (and on and on) across all of your company history. Can you create the perfect email campaign for every person to maximize their happiness and your profit, always?

We just talked about the hospitality industry and a typical e-mail marketing program. I can’t even fathom the gargantuan profits which companies will stand to gain if they appointed AI and ML specialists in the country.

All of the above is still at least to a degree, human assisted. I expect, looking forward, that the human assisted part will peel off. Sooner rather than later. It is important that you consider this as you plan your career over the next three years.

Humans will still be required for imagining brand copy or coming up with centerfold creatives. But anything that is done often in a repeatable manner is already headed to be sans human.

If your marketing’s foundation is to keep adding more hamsters to run on wheels to achieve scale, you are doomed. Even if you find enough hamsters, it is critical to realize the game has changed.

It needs sometime for old school marketers to accept the fact that marketing will not be done in the old-fashioned way. Marketers won’t be required to press the relevant buttons but to twist the relevant knobs on the machine.

This is in complete contrast to the antediluvian policy of salesmen knocking your door to sell their products. This is not to say salesmen will lose their jobs suddenly. But slowly and steadily? Yes.

-Nitin M