Bold Predictions on How AI will Change Marketing Forever
AI is here to stay. Actually, it’s been here for more than 75 years, many of us just didn’t know it. As marketers, there’s a lot to think about: How we use it, how we don’t use it and its impact on jobs. Much has been said about AI today (and much of it has been gloom and doom), but what do the next three to five years look like with AI more engrained in our everyday lives? Here are 5 positive predictions for how AI will change the way we as marketers and creative professionals work forever.
1. Time will speed up
Okay, not literally, but the time it takes us to go from planning to execution will change. What once took months of research and planning will be condensed to days or weeks thanks to AI’s ability to pull and synthesize data from an infinite number of sources.
And once you’re ready to create, AI will help speed this up too. Those who write will become editors and those who design will have a second set of hands—not to mention the plethora of new and novel AI-powered tools to bring ideas to life. More on this in our next article.
Bottom line: AI not only has much more information at its fingertips, it will never forget something. It will never experience writer’s block, never tell you it’s too tired to think of another idea and will never fight you that the last idea was perfect and you don’t need to come up with more. AI is the ultimate teammate that can continue to churn out more ideas when the rest of the team has hit a lull.
2. Continuous improvement will become infinite perfection
We’ve already witnessed AI’s ability to take a series of headlines, promotional offers and images and test them against a variety of audiences and media placements and then optimize to the combinations that work the best. What’s next?
Imagine a world where images, headlines and audiences all shift in real-time, always optimizing every minute detail—the words, images, layouts, audiences and placements to create a thousand different versions for a thousand different audiences, all constantly evolving and changing to deliver better results. Today’s and tomorrow’s AI tools will analyze every possible piece of data—the color of the sky, a person’s hair, a word, every audience characteristic and make real-time changes to all of it. Mind blowing, right?
Bottom line: As AI continues to grow and improve, it will have instantaneous access to billions of data points that can be combined in real-time to capitalize on a particular moment. Combining AI inputs such as audience data, social content and programmatic media will give brands the ability to have their own dedicated, all-knowing AI for their brand. This AI will be trained by marketers to behave as a personification of the brand and communicate with their audience without requiring hundreds of pre-produced ad units.
3. Search engines will become search solvers
Today, search engines and voice assistants are limited in their ability to get it right, or at least get it right the first, second or third time. In the not-to-distant future, these answers will be much easier to find—and more intuitive.
Imagine you walk into a library and ask the librarian, who knows everything about every book there, to help you find books on science. They would naturally ask you some follow up questions—what type of science: biology, chemistry, physics, astronomy, medicine, zoology, earth science? You might say, I’m not sure. The librarian would then ask more follow up questions to help you arrive at exactly what you’re looking for. This is what search will become: a conversation between you and the search assistant, with the goal of delivering exactly what you’re looking for—the first time.
Bottom line: As Google and Microsoft roll out AI-driven search like Bard and Bing, respectively, users may find that chat-based searches increasingly yield better results. Rather than start a new search after an initial miss, users will quickly realize that it’s much easier and more efficient to refine the original search.
4. Consumers will have far more choices than ever before
AI’s ability to generate more content more quickly and push it out into the world is only one aspect of where clutter comes into play for marketers. The other is the AI’s ability to help entrepreneurs move from idea to execution much faster.
Say you have an idea for a company or product. Before AI, you had to put together a business plan, get funding, incorporate your business, create a distribution system and design your logo and website. This would take months, or even years. AI is already making this process easier thanks to intuitive tools that remove barriers and take you through every step, sometimes in as little as a day. This simplification of starting up will create more and more companies, products and service, and of course, choices for consumers. As marketers, this likely means more and more to compete with, but for consumers, it should mean more, better ideas making it to market than ever before.
Bottom line: AI will continue to remove bottlenecks and barriers to entry. Will some startup costs be needed? Certainly, but those costs will be lower than they are today. While that means there will be much more content from many more companies, it also means more and more ideas will be fully realized and brought to market than ever before, some of which will change the world.
5. Where you focus your time will change dramatically
One of the primary concerns with AI is whether it will take away jobs. What we’ve learned from history is that innovation creates opportunity. Consider some of the jobs that were around 100 years ago that no longer exist today—linotype operators, scribes, lamplighters, elevator operators, town criers, switchboard operators. As new innovations came, these people found other ways to use their talents.
Imagine being able to focus 100% of your time on what matters most. That’s what AI will give you—a personal assistant that can schedule all your meetings, get you those documents, send you a first draft of that presentation or article you’re writing, send that email to your team and even order that gift for your spouse’s birthday.
Bottom line: AI is better at performing tasks than replacing entire jobs. But whatever side you end up on, AI will certainly drive efficiencies at work. What we do with those efficiencies is up to us. Some may re-allocate the time AI saves them toward being more productive. Some may opt for more leisure time. Either way, AI is a tool and a teammate designed to help humans.
AI can sound scary, but there’s a lot of good it is doing for us today and will do for us in the near future. The ability to do more and focus on the things that matter most will lead to better planning, unprecedented productivity, new ideas and innovations and bigger and better creative ideas that can help brands stand out and better connect with their audiences. It all starts with embracing AI now. Tomorrow will come soon enough.