AI: Help or Hinder?

Artificial Intelligence is fast becoming the most talked about topic in the marketing industry. It is by far one of the fastest growing, fascinating, and astonishing creations ever made. The rapid growth in the domain of AI is making it one of the most lucrative industries and looking towards the future there is a huge potential for Artificial Intelligence, as this is just the tip of the iceberg of the ever-growing possibilities for AI. Due to the ever-evolving market this blog will identify the threats and opportunities of AI, and how we can utilise the features to support us.

What is AI?

Artificial Intelligence can be defined as a branch of computer science that can simulate human intelligence, for example, learning reasoning, problem-solving and quick decision making. AI is nothing but algorithms with a specific set of rules that it must follow, however, AI can learn from certain tasks by computer data fed into the system.

Types of AI

There are different types of AI systems that could support you or your clients in your industry. Below are some of the main functions that could support blog writing, content creating, and creative imagery and music.

ChatGPT – ask and answer function
Dall-E 2 – create original, realistic images and art from a text description
Deep Dream Generator – create unique images from scratch by inputting only a handful of keywords
Amper Music – provides content creators with a comprehensive suite of features to help them create original music

Opportunities of AI

AI automates repetitive tasks: allow your workforce to become more productive by focusing their time and energy on other complex activities whilst AI takes care of your data-driven and mundane tasks.

AI reduces human error: humans are historically not very good at consistency and accurately making decisions based on data, as humans exhibit bias and mental blind spots as well as tiredness and distractions. Therefore, AI reduces human error by focusing on the task at hand by following consistent logic, has no feelings or bias regarding analysis and there aren’t attention or distraction issues.

AI helps us make better decisions: AI can recognise patterns in big data, then use those patterns to make predictions, which will allow you to make better decisions for your organisation. For example, Google Maps uses AI to predict which routes are optimal for the user.

AI solves problems in ways that humans can’t: AI can detect patterns in numbers, words, and images better than humans, which can make yours and your employees’ life far easier.

AI makes us richer: AI unlocks benefits that traditional software doesn’t provide because it can improve on its own, producing compounding benefits over time. It is predicted that AI will increase global GDP by 14% by 2030.

AI makes us more productive: AI can generate ROI campaigns, get more actionable insights from marketing data and predict consumer needs and behaviours with greater accuracy. Therefore, AI can make individual businesses and workers more valuable.
AI works 24 hours a day: unlike humans, AI has the capacity to work on problems and learn from their solutions 24 hours a day, every single day.

Threats of AI

AI needs lots of data: AI is only as good as the amount and quality of data it has, therefore, if the system doesn’t have the latest data, it will produce bad results.

AI can make bad decisions: if there is an issue with one AI system then it can make seriously big errors or bad decisions across a large scope. An example of this is self-driving cars, if there is a flaw in the system this could affect thousands or millions of vehicles across the globe.

AI doesn’t always explain its decisions: some AI systems are known as “black box” systems, which means that users have no understanding of how AI makes decisions. Which means that if the AI systems makes a poor prediction which has a damaging impact, it could be near impossible to understand or diagnose what went wrong.

AI can be biased: AI uses data to make decisions and predictions, however, the data used may contain conscious or unconscious bias. For example, if you are using AI to recruit and the system is flawed in a bias way, then you may be discriminating against certain types of people unconsciously.

AI can destroy jobs: It’s difficult to measure the unemployment rate decrease due to the implementation of AI, and equally impossible to measure how many jobs AI will create. However, the more AI becomes effective doing simple tasks, it will cause widespread job loss and long-term employment.

AI doesn’t always deliver on its promise: AI isn’t always the right tool for the job, even though it excels performing narrow tasks extremely well, the level of advancement needed for AI to increase scope into different fields is unknown. For example, language generation has progressed significantly, however, other areas are just scratching the surface. Therefore, AI experts claiming it will change the world still have a long way to go.

AI can be expensive: as a user you can benefit from AI in everyday life, and you rarely need to purchase AI tools to use it for yourself. However, organisations use AI to provide better, more profitable consumer experiences, which means that you need more specific AI tools to do so, this can be very expensive.

Conclusion

AI can be a very useful tool, especially in marketing. With the ability to analyse large pools of data, it highlights key indicators to measure your marketing and advertising efforts. By allowing AI to analyse this data it will free up your workforce to be more productive on other tasks and focus on the outcome of the campaign or advertisements and adapt it to improve the engagement. Furthermore, AI will identify key consumer behaviour and make predictions so you can make better decisions to improve your marketing to your target audience.

However, as demonstrated through research AI is only as good as the data that is inputted into the system, therefore, if the data being used isn’t accurate the results could be flawed, which means that the consumer behaviour intelligence may be inaccurate, which could result in poor decision making, for example, funds being invested in the wrong aspect of marketing. Furthermore, potential bias data could seriously impact negatively on decision making and could lead you making poor decisions. Finally, AI can be very expensive, therefore, users need to be given training and research heavily on how to use AI effectively, so it doesn’t become a wasted investment for your organisation.

In conclusion, AI can be a valuable asset to your organisation, but it shouldn’t be a tool used instead of a human, it should be a tool used to support a human. For example, Chat GPT allows you to ask questions, and it will give you a generic or specific answer depending on what you ask. It can provide a good outline or ideas to start a task, however, it will need a human to proofread and finesse the information given. Moreover, if AI is used to analyse data, it can be a good place to begin when adapting and improving a digital marketing campaign. Therefore, if AI is used correctly, it can be a very useful tool for organisations to increase scope, engagement and be more successful in their endeavours.