Emerging TechnologyAI & AutomationWhy all the hype around AI in marketing?

Why all the hype around AI in marketing?

AI can help marketers make experiences so relevant, timely, and consistent, that it's estimated every new piece of software will include it by 2020.

47% of consumers expect brands to use their personal data — and 73% are annoyed with companies that don’t provide the convenience, relevance, and value they expect.

What’s more, 38% of consumers share negative experiences on social media when expectations are not met by a brand. 33% expect brands to anticipate their needs before they arise.

Demand for personalization is sky-high, but the tactic isn’t new. For nearly a decade, marketers have talked about needing to personalize communications to specific consumers. The problem is that everyone is unique, everyone has wildly different tastes and preferences — and each person’s tastes and preferences are changing over time.

AI isn’t new either. People have been building neural networks for forty years. What’s different is the speed at which we can achieve results — which unlocks seemingly limitless potential for AI in business.

Why all the hype around AI?

According to Kat Berman, Head of Global Enablement for Selligent Marketing Cloud, AI has risen to the forefront for three main reasons: explosion of data, increase in computing power and storage, and algorithm advancements.

AI is about gaining knowledge through experiences. Those experiences are generated with two things: data and statistics.

If you know about traditional programming, you know it kind of works like this:

You take some data, tell it what to do, throw it into a computer, and out comes the result.

Machine learning flips that script

With machine learning, you do the inverse. You take some data, you tell it the result you want it to come up with, and the computer tells you how to do that.

AI can make experiences personal, relevant, timely, and consistent

It can make experiences so personal, relevant, timely, consistent, and otherwise quite handy, in fact, that it’s estimated that by 2020, every new piece of software will include AI.

And the AI industry as a whole? Expected to grow to $7.3 billion per year by 2022.

Sounds impressive — but how could we not? AI gives results at scale that humans alone can’t reach. For example, 34% of shoppers spend more when AI is deployed.

AI lets us ask the same questions we’ve been asking:

  • Who is my customer?
  • What does she want?
  • How / when does she want it?

But it lets us solve for those questions with a level of efficiency, accuracy, and thoroughness that we otherwise just don’t have capacity to do manually.

The result? Better campaigns, better content, more timely, more efficient. Or in other words, true personalization at scale.

The job of the marketer is evolving

Giving control of manual work and tactical execution to machines gives us as marketers liberty to be more strategic.

Whether it’s recommending the right product to the right consumer at the right time, segmenting audiences based on the content they want through the channel they use, or communicating at a time and frequency that’s preferred by the customer — AI can handle the grunt tactical execution work. Which leaves marketers free to focus on which goals and results we want to tell the machine to figure out.

Want to learn more?

For more insight into how AI is used for personalization — and how it’s changing the role of the marketer, check out our webinar from Nov 7.

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