Is Artificial intelligence the future of Marketing?

If we look around, Artificial Intelligence is slowly leaving significant footprints in various sectors and easing the job of humans at multiple fronts. Today, the human workload has reduced remarkably with the introduction of Artificial Intelligence. AI deals with creating machines that are enabled with skills through adaptive data to perform tasks with incredible accuracy.

Although AI has been taking the limelight recently, but back in the 1960s, the US Department of Defence took great interest in training the computers to mimic basic human reasoning even long before Siri, Alexa or Google assistant took over. Having evolved with time, now it can be easily seen around us in the form of Voice Search, Programmatic media buying, propensity modelling, predictive analysis, ad targeting, navigation apps, streaming services, ride-sharing, chatbot and in smart home devices.

Now, let’s focus on how invariably AI is impacting marketing? AI simply adds creative intelligence in existing work frame, to improve capabilities of existing products. Also, AI is tailored through progressive learning algorithms, acting as a classifier or a predictor that acquires the skill through the data and continues to update with new additions. It achieves incredible accuracy by deeply analyzing the data using neutral networks and its accuracy keeps increasing by training to learning models with the help of heaps of data. This is exactly why there is a race between Google and Facebook to acquire reservoir of data for their AI enabled applications, to achieve predictive data.

Hence, for each marketer, the key still remains in gaining quality data for insights into differing campaigns which, although, wasn't readily available earlier but now, robust analytics has opened doors for them to understand their customers better. I believe, in this fast-paced development era, in order to succeed in the competitive market, AI would be the top priority for businesses to invest in.

For marketers the importance lies in attaining quality data, mostly for better insights and campaign management, earlier it wasn’t readily available but thanks to robust analytics which has minimized the time taken for data gathering & interpretation. Moreover, according to Adobe, top performing companies are most likely to prefer using this technology for marketing than their counter peers. Notably, the active AI startups in the U.S. have also increased at least 113% from 2015 to 2018.

Though data vulnerability and data privacy stay questionable with the technology, we expect that with time this evolving technology will cover such cons completely. Nevertheless, despite the ‘n’-number of advantages and few shortcomings, AI will continue to spread and be furthermore improvised in the years to come.

By Bhavya Kukreja, Head of marketing at Plaza Premium Group, India