Editor’s Note: This post originally appeared in the Answering AI editorial section of our newsletter. Subscribe to the newsletter to get exclusive insights and resources twice weekly (usually Tuesday/Thursday), as well as select promotions.
In the process of making marketing more intelligent, artificial intelligence has the potential to make brands more human by enabling marketers to focus increasing time and energy on listening, relationship building, creativity, culture, and community. AI should make us better people, professionals and brands.
However, this won’t happen without a focus on privacy, ethics, and morals. AI gives us superpowers, which can be used for good or evil.
Think about how the rudimentary marketing technology we have access to today is already used to manipulate opinions, emotions and behaviors. Now imagine that technology is 10x, or even 100x, more powerful.
AI constantly learns, and never forgets. It can be trained to leverage individual behaviors, preferences, fears, beliefs and interests to personalize experiences. It can know where you’ve been, where you’re going, who you’re with, what you’ve written in your emails, what you’ve asked of your voice assistants, what songs you listen to, what mood you’re in, what groups you belong to, what stores you shop at and more. And it can use all of this information to provide the right product at the right time, sometimes before you even know you need it.
Pioneers will consider the ramifications of the AI technology they create and use. I truly believe AI will have a disproportionate net positive impact on the industry and society, but it will alter career paths, displace jobs and continually chip away at our privacy as consumers.
We have to be willing to have the hard conversations as an industry now, to make sure we don’t ruin what will be the most transformative technological shift we experience in our lifetimes.
If you want to prepare yourself, and your brand, for the age of AI, join us at the Marketing Artificial Intelligence Conference (MAICON), July 16 - 18, 2019.
>>> Related Read: What Are the Ethical Concerns of AI in Marketing?
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