ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE: A boon or bane for marketers?

SILENCE

Observe the thoughts in your mind for a second. I am sure your mind did not remain silent. It was busy speaking to you, screening sensory inputs that came from several parts of the body, and reallocating weightage to many tasks and priorities that need your attention. All this noise is part of intelligence. Our brains continuously create many models of reality. It tests these models with inputs from the external world - sensory inputs, touch and feel, social acceptance, general economic environment, internal stresses, the story of the movie you saw last week, what your friend told you at the part yesterday etc. Our brains never stop learning and validating ideas. Intelligence is an ever-evolving feature. We are all destined to die far wiser than we were born.

Why should marketers bother about these blips in the customer's head? Because these blips influence each one of the billions of dollars that flow through our markets every minute!

These blips are the world of mind-created meaning to the customer, which is a product of the customer's research. The meanings are hypothetical edifices created from the bits, bricks and mortar gathered by the customer from his research process. The customer uses his own intelligence and prior experience to build this. He believes the opinion of others who make sense to him.

Marketers have been trying to influence this decision-making process for a long time. They try every method to convince and confuse the customer, but ultimately guide the customers to choose from their set of offerings. Marketers use social media, paid media, earned media and owned media to create these impressions and influence the customer's opinions.

All this is now changing. ChatGPT made the phrase AI famous. But Open AI's competitors had invested in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning for a long while. Today, the scale of the largest AI computations is doubling every six months, far outpacing Moore’s Law. At the same time, advanced generative AI and large language models are capturing the imaginations of people around the world. Yes, computers can now speak human languages (many languages, not just English), learn, read and write as normal humans do. Tech companies claim that they have made people's lives easier. But, has it? AI-ML poses three significant challenges.

• AI now will make uninformed decisions for its human cousins. Nobody has validated any opinions that AI engines turn around. Some researchers point out that the results are badly plagiarised, the assumptions wrong and the logic is completely misplaced. The AI engine's capability to read and comprehend deep concepts is not trustable. Customers who depend on these opinions in their research will only have themselves to blame.
• AI and ML will run customer engagements in the future. AI engines serve millions of customers parallelly. A small error in any one input can create a catastrophic output even before anyone will notice. This can be dangerous in the banking and insurance sectors.
• AI engines will be patented and the source codes will remain a heavily guarded secret. It may or may not look at social media or interact with media that marketers can influence. This AI blindness will create new problems for marketers.

The resultant trust deficit that AI will create will be huge. This scenario will result in external information risks as well. Media consumption patterns will undergo a sea change and it would be difficult to sustain conventional media channels which offer a clean draft of information to the public. Once these verified sources stop operations, media channels will be fed with popular content which has not been verified. The same distrust will extend branded content and marketing narratives. AI-mediated and unstructured information flow will create chaos.

Governments across the world should look into this. A deep fake is as serious as a gene-edited human embryo. AI and ML have the capacity to transform the way markets operate. But the downside risks are far higher than what tech companies are willing to admit.

Finally, intelligence boils down to the question 'How intelligent are you?'. AI may get to the point of scoring well (albeit by cheating) in intelligence tests. It may take some more years before AI can accomplish non-scripted tasks and create deep fakes powerful enough to change the world. But the scale and direction cannot be ignored.

Marketers have been fascinated with social media and technology. It makes it easier for them to calculate RoI and justify media spending or predict consumer behaviour. But this physics envy is myopic. Marketing is an art - the art of value creation. Like every art, creativity is the ghost in the machine. It is this creativity that justifies the Chief Marketing Officer's pay and perks. Marketers may not wish to demit the corner office to a giant robot just yet.

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