Artificial intelligence (AI) continues to be a hot topic and has no signs of disappearing from anyone’s lips anytime soon. Over the past year we have seen many Hollywood movies released, such as CHAPPiE and Ex Machina, which are set in the near future and focus on the reciprocal relationship between humans and AI. This idea may be more of a reality than we think, as technology and AI play a growing role in our everyday lives.
In the past, human minds were responsible for coming up with creative and smart solutions to solve problems and machines would then help by completing manual tasks. Now, we are allowing machines to do the thinking for us. Marketers and advertisers need to realise that without the help of AI, it is incredibly difficult for any business to sort through all the data out there and then make informed decisions and take advantage of opportunities. It also enables more time to be spent making day-to-day strategic decisions, and ensures that the audience is entirely made up of the target market – saving on wastage and most importantly, increasing ROI.
Using AI to look at a customer’s past behaviour online and find out what has previously been of interest to them enables us to predict what they are going to be interested in next. This includes looking at their most visited sites, who they follow on Twitter, what brand pages they like on Facebook and what have they recently purchased. These data attributes are then analysed to ensure advertisements are reaching shoppers at the point of influence on their path to purchase.
Some people might be afraid of all of this data in the hands of machines, but this doom and gloom perspective isn’t necessary. It is very premature to begin limiting the use of AI or focusing on potential impacts of the technology in the hope it will just go away. In the past, that approach has never worked as a safeguard against the relentless march of technological progress, and it won't work now.
Any technology, whether advanced AI or simplistic AI, could be a potential danger if it is wielded or operated by careless, irresponsible, or even malicious individuals. I believe the human operators of an AI system should be held accountable for the effects of its actions, since those operators are in a position to give it access and set those limits.
The main threat from AI is the potential that many of the jobs that require human attention and decision making today may be performed better, faster and even cheaper in the future by robots or AI software systems. One can be either pessimistic or nihilistic about this, or embrace it as an opportunity to think anew about how we can move into and help construct this brave new world together.
Just think about the types of jobs people have these days, a large number of them didn’t even exist a decade or two ago particularly when it comes to the world of marketing. SEO experts, social media managers and mobile and web app developers are just some examples, not to mention data scientists who are employed by advertisers with the sole purpose of driving business decisions and outcomes using data. These jobs have become common place in the last decade thanks to the continued development of technology. It’s hard to say exactly what jobs developments in AI will create in the future, but I think it’s fair to suggest that for every task AI will replace there will definitely be new opportunities created.
When you get it right, the power of Artificial Intelligence has the potential to provide results far beyond anything that a human could ever dream of doing, and I believe these results will only strengthen in the coming years.
By Dominic Trigg, SVP & MD, Europe at Rocket Fuel.
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