The rate of technological development occurring in the business world and the continued evolution of Artificial Intelligence in its processes makes one wonder what the future holds for entrepreneurs, and big businesses alike.
Artificially intelligent robots are in the race against human marketers to successfully plan an effective ecommerce digital marketing strategy and from the look of things, they could be winning. How then do we build our business goals for marketing, visibility and ultimately sales around this new phenomenon and can the business processes of sales, marketing, advertising, direct marketing be left to robots.
Who Are These Marketing Robots?
According to the International Organization of Standardization (ISO), the body in charge of setting the standard for what constitutes a robot, marketing robots are “multipurpose manipulators that are auto-controlled and reprogrammable” which are “able to be programmed in at least three axes”. In order to qualify as a robot, two main qualities must be present: a mechanical component and certain levels of intelligence.
Majid Abai, Chief Sherpa of The Abai Group, an IT and robot consulting company says that the operations of a real robot goes beyond simply serving as a replacement for human effort. It includes the ability to analyze tasks assigned to it.
Despite their highly satisfying functions, ATM machines cannot be regarded as robots. They are restricted to the routine performance of complicated and often repetitive tasks, and are quite far from what Abai would term a robot.
Ripple Effects Caused By AI-Assisted Marketing
As a result of the progress being made in computer power and better data collection methods, there have been various projections made about machines overtaking human intelligence. It cannot be denied that the rise of Artificial Intelligence can potentially affect brands and their workers in easy and practical ways.
Automated techniques such as programmed buying are already significantly influencing marketing efficiency and the regular operations of the industry. In addition, marketers at various levels of business may begin to consider how their roles might be affected. However, and we certainly cannot deny that the added intelligence that these machines bring to the table creates a big leap forward for the future of business.
Artificial Intelligence and the Customer
Research shows that excellent customer service is always available, real-time, personalized, and consistent. Customer service operations can be boosted by AI to achieve improved engines in charge of discovery recommendation, prediction and automation.
There are many examples of functions where the customer is directly serviced have been replaced by automated AI-based services . In today’s business market, every successful consumer application is powered by AI and influences customer experience by providing a seamless, smarter and more personalized service.
As today’s customer requires a higher level of customer service, AI technologies need to be fully utilized and deployed in order for companies to stand at the frontiers of customer experience transformation in customer service.
AI and the Future of Marketing
Artificial Intelligence is the definitive technology available for the 21st century. The future of marketing lies in the hands of the customer, where availability, intelligence and personalization are the golden tickets needed to grow as a business. Sustaining growth and earning customer’s trust for businesses requires common sense, care and caution in order not to over-automate all their processes. Empathy is necessary, and any promises made to customers must be delivered on. Artificial Intelligence has been used by certain major companies as augmented intelligence in order to make quick, thoroughly researched decisions.
Marketing and Sales will be accelerated by Artificial Intelligence. Autonomous, self-driving, marketing automation will be available in the next few years. Knowledge about machines will significantly improve sales and marketing software, providing it with the capacity to do things without first being told what needs to be done. This will lead to an improvement in content recommendations, email acquisitions and predictive lead scoring, all tasks that are necessary for marketing success.
Artificial Intelligence will take care of the routine, uninteresting tasks as well as rote and mechanical tasks (updating the CRM, for instance), leaving the marketers to focus on using their creativity to understand the customer, find out the overall positioning necessary, have real conversations with the business clients – all things AI cannot do, yet. Marketers will be tasked with interaction design rather than the mechanics involved in marketing.
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