Paul Roetzer (@paulroetzer), founder of the Marketing AI Institute, joined HubSpot Academy for a Facebook Live chat on “Marketing in the Machine Age.” Over the past year, HubSpot has made multiple AI acquisitions (see Kemvi and Motion AI) and integrated artificial intelligence technologies like chatbots, predictive lead scoring and email send time optimization, paving the way for AI-powered marketing automation.
The conversation focuses on how marketers who want to advance their companies and careers are turning to AI as a way to plan, produce, personalize, promote, and perform at scale like never before—a framework we call the 5Ps of Marketing Artificial Intelligence.
The video of the whole chat is embedded below. We’ve also included some highlights and resources from the chat below. You can also read a transcript of the chat here.
Why Artificial Intelligence in Marketing? Why Now?
In the chat, Roetzer details how he started thinking through the implications of artificial intelligence in 2012.
Artificial intelligence is the science of making machines smart. AI technologies take large amounts of data and use it to surface insights and predictions faster and better than humans. Given that modern marketing is data-driven, says Roetzer, it stood to reason that AI could play a major role in transforming the marketing industry.
At the time, Roetzer was reading the book Automate This, about how AI intelligent algorithms were disrupting industries from finance to healthcare. In it, the author, Christopher Steiner, proposes a simple equation to assess an industry’s potential to be disrupted by AI: the potential to disrupt plus the reward for disruption.
Back in 2012, AI was being applied to industries like financial services and healthcare. Roetzer surmised that marketing wouldn’t be far behind. As human marketers, we pull from limited knowledge and capabilities to strategize, create, and execute campaigns. Artificial intelligence technologies, however, have the ability to perform some cognitive tasks that humans do, but much better, faster, and cheaper.
Consider how much time marketing teams spend doing things like: planning, creating, and promoting content; managing digital ad campaigns; predicting opens, clicks, and conversions; and writing performance reports, among other daily repetitive tasks. AI has the ability to do all of these, as well as a potentially unlimited capacity to learn and improve using the data available to it.
This has profound implications for marketers. It means their primary role moving forward may be to enhance rather than create. This was the core insight that led Roetzer to experiment with AI tools and create the Marketing AI Institute as a resource to connect marketers with actionable information on how to understand and implement AI.
How to Get Started with Marketing AI
Roetzer recommends that marketers begin to experiment with AI technologies to better understand what’s possible. A number of marketing AI technologies exist today that can accelerate performance. A few mentioned by Roetzer during the chat include:
Our post on 5 Ways to Get Started with AI Today offers some additional guidance.
Resources Mentioned in the Chat
A number of resources were mentioned by Roetzer, HubSpot, and the Marketing AI Institute during the chat and in the comments. We’ve listed them here for easy access:
For more expert advice on how to implement AI in your marketing organization, subscribe to the Marketing AI Institute.