From Metropolis to The Terminator to Ex Machina, Artificial Intelligence has been a regular theme in science fiction throughout the past century, often with a dystopian end.
The legacy left by these depictions of AI means today people regularly perceive it with nervousness. What many don’t realise is that AI is already increasingly playing an important role in our day-to-day lives, and as such exciting opportunities for marketers are beginning to emerge.
New beginnings
As we enter 2016, marketers are sensing the beginning of a new cycle. Social and mobile that lead the first half of the decade have now matured from being untested opportunities to having scale, significance and commercial stability.
With AI potentially set to replace smartphones at the leading edge of technology in five years according to a new study from Ericsson’s ConsumerLab, we are now understanding that AI is the next big thing. Advancements in the likes of wearable tech and driverless cars provide consumers with a vision of the shape of things to come, and of how AI will tangibly impact our daily lives.
Right now the global technology platforms are leading the charge by integrating a suite of technologies associated with AI, such as machine learning, computer vision and natural language processing, into their core services. As these platforms largely rely on advertising as their primary income stream, the marketing use cases of AI will not be far behind.
It’s up to marketers therefore to begin actively scanning for the opportunities AI is bringing to brands, while bridging the gap between tech corporations and consumers. Within this, educating consumers about the benefits of AI while debunking problematic legacies is paramount.
AI for consumers now
While AI is currently narrowly focused on machines learning how to do specific tasks, we are seeing huge breakthroughs, and different approaches are starting to be bundled together to provide wider, more beneficial services for consumers.
Take Facebook M, for instance, an artificial assistant that combines AI with a team of human supervisors. While no launch date has been confirmed, Facebook M will operate within Facebook’s Messenger service, which currently has 700 million users; and unlike other similar AI-based assistants like Apple’s Siri and Microsoft’s Cortana, Facebook M is able to act on its user’s behalf to make a restaurant booking, file a complaint or cancel a utility.
AI is also already being embedded in the products on our shelves. For Christmas, parents could buy presents for their children that are powered by AI. Elemental Path’s CogniToys, for example, are little dinosaur bots that are powered by IBM’s Watson, an artificially intelligent computer system capable of answering questions posed in natural language, which can communicate with children and help them learn.
What it means for marketers
Above all, AI will give marketers exciting new means to communicate with consumers, as well as opportunities to create vastly more complex, meaningful services. This also means that marketers
need to start preparing for a time when they will most likely be dealing with machine-based agents rather than the consumers themselves.
In the mid-term, for instance, as AI evolves we could be able to outsource our diet and shopping lists to various AI-powered apps. The student looking to save money or the time-strapped executive will be able to make optimal decisions they otherwise would not have the resources to make. But what happens when people become parents and AI can guide our diet perhaps even better than us? What are the ethical issues of parents relinquishing their child’s diet, or even education, to a machine?
The structure and skillsets of marketing teams will need to undergo a complete overhaul too. The skills associated with activities as diverse as Search Engine Optimisation, customer service and brand ethics are best-placed to engage with AI and attempt to influence it for marketing effectiveness.
It’s up to marketers to keep up with the latest developments and trends in order to innovate around key ethical questions. Progress, ensuring new technology is adopted into the mainstream, will come from proving AI’s utility while building consumer trust.
By Jean-Paul Edwards, Strategy and Product Development Director at OMD EMEA
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