By: Elisabeth Horvet
The topic of AI entering the digital market space comes with mixed emotions. Questions of accurate predictions, job security, and personalized content for your target audience are just a few of the things that tend to create skepticism. Let’s talk about some of the pros and cons regarding AI.
As stated in sources such as the Harvard Business Review, “Marketing has perhaps the most to gain from artificial intelligence.” As many firms start to gravitate towards AI, they are recruiting it for almost every sector of their business. For example, AI can streamline sales processes by using extremely detailed data on individuals, geolocation, and highly personalized products. Harvard’s business review also expects AI to take on larger roles in the coming years in light of what it’s done for marketing thus far.
According to Forbes, top-performing companies are more than twice as likely to be using AI for marketing. As tasks for digital marketers continue to grow, using AI to cover the bases can be helpful. Repetitive tasks such as scheduling meetings and appointments, identifying prospective customers, checking campaign metrics, the research or timing for campaigns, and much more can all be streamlined with the proper use of AI. Using AI to create partial inconsequential content, while your core team provides life to it, seems to be the happy medium for most agencies. But with the assistance of data analysis, automation, and its efforts to become more effectively integrated into the workforce, some jobs may become obsolete. This leaves companies the choice of absorbing their employees into other roles or unfortunately having to consider layoffs.
Target audience is a crucial part of any business and vital to a campaign’s success. Finding your target audience is doable with the right statistics and well-rounded people, but AI can provide valuable insights that might have the possibility of falling through the cracks without it. Because humans have a deep understanding of who their target audience is, it’s important to remember that, although helpful, AI should not replace the human experience. When considering this technology, it's vital to recognize that humans enhance what AI can accomplish. Without our wisdom of the business world and how healthy partnerships are formed, AI cannot live up to its full potential. “It’s important to note that AI performs best when it is given the right data and is prompted in the right direction by a human,” according to Forbes.
Many believe that marketers must learn to grow and adapt to the benefits of AI, to improve customer experiences, strengthen brand loyalty, and increase revenues. It’s important to remember amid this consideration, that AI can never truly replace the human experience and the relationships we form with our clients, employees, and even personal friends. While useful for small, tedious, or technical tasks, AI will not and should not replace humans; rather, it should help us move forward in life's everchanging landscapes.