Artificial intelligence is revolutionizing businesses across industries. More than half of the executives surveyed in a 2017 PwC report said that AI solutions were already increasing their companies’ productivity. As usual, marketers are at the forefront, embracing AI at a particularly rapid pace.
But while any new resource can create excitement in some, it can make others feel uncertain—sometimes even worried about their futures. Many marketers fear that onboarding AI will fundamentally change the way they do business, and not completely for the better.
Below, we’ll take a cool-headed, logical look at how an AI-powered industry is an opportunity for all. We’ll dive into each area by exploring the misperceptions at the heart of these anxieties through the anonymous confessions of several marketers.
Marketers’ jobs have become more and more unwieldy. Their customers are spread across a growing array of devices and channels. It can be tough—and monumentally time-consuming—to try and make sense of all that data. AI tools are designed to cut through the muck, swiftly organizing information and surfacing insights into customer behavior.
The real problem is that so many humans are expected to function like computers. Today’s marketers are asked to comb through oceans of data, assembling it into something structured and coherent.
AI’s job is to take on that extra workload and free up marketers’ time to do higher-level thinking—what they do best. AI isn’t going to make marketers’ jobs obsolete; it will make certain aspects of their jobs manageable for the first time.
It’s true that AI can eliminate mountains of rote, mindless tasks. For example, the Associated Press used AI automation tools to speed up the arduous task of filling out earnings reports. That allowed its staffers to invest that time in telling stories instead. That value is anything but “limited.”
But AI can do much more, augmenting our work by making new connections that give us an edge. For instance, AI tools can comb through social media conversations at breakneck speeds, then take that analysis to the next level by closely analyzing tone and sentiment.
AI can provide invaluable insights that inform our decisions; all we’ll have to do is apply those insights to our creative and strategic decisions. And AI lets us do that in real time.
This article was Originally posted on – Digiday
