What really excites marketers about AI? AI has been transformative for those that have or are already practitioners of it. What is AI’s potential? In terms of either cost management or creativity and how does it free up resources for creativity. What really excites up about AI overall?

The macro answer is anything that can be automated will be automated. We are living on the exponential and it feels like things are coming to us like the fast and furious. Definitely there are complexities and the need for certain things to also fall into place before one can press a button and the work is done. 

We are so much farther away than people believe but not holistically. There are certain things that will become so much easier to do than paradigm shifts but eventually they will shift the paradigm. Technology is meaningless unless it changes the way we behave so we are bound to see consumer and business behavior change through any kind of automation. 

 Let us talk about Creativity and Productivity. Productivity is the key driver of economic success it is subjective and measurable. Today you produce 5 apples tomorrow you produce 10 apples one can see or measure the change in relativity in. There are productivity stakes that come with the assistance of the likes of Co-pilot, Gemini or ChatGPT for example, then there is the competitive advantage that each company would need to forge for itself to get an immense return on its investment or its resources. AI is not a skills democratizer, it doesn’t make everybody better, it is a skills amplifier. It makes marketers that are already good at their job to be much more productive. You can only get out of these tools what you bring to them. 

 There is creativity and execution. Hearing something in your head is where creativity is. To execute means to realize what you have in your head and then get it on paper or on film or on video or an any recorded media. Automation will really amplify your ability to do that. It is not a creativity amplifier, but it is a production and execution amplifier. 

If you backup and ask, how many things in the advertising and marketing world are execution based; resizing ads, typography, the aesthetics of comparing 2 or more images to ensure right color pellets or codes are used and so forth that ran through various hands or departments that’s going to get automated. Mind you it is not about losing jobs but to equip ourselves with the knowledge, training and experience to be better executors. Creativity can’t be replaced.  

 Creativity remains AI will be innovating the workflow and its process. If you take a look at say every area across the marketing function and ask What, Where, and How can we innovate the workflow process to take advantage of these new AI productivity tools? For example, if your data is in good shape or is presentable, tools are there to talk to the data. 

Currently or even previously let us say you need to update your dashboard or presentation, for example, you would need to call or email the I.T department to get you updated raw data or the relevant department that holds the data of the customers, which is somehow to raw. One would need to spend a couple of days to adjust or rework it then coordinate with other departments to confirm or adjust for any errors etc. Days or weeks later your report or dashboard is ready and has taken shape. 

 If you opt for the AI tools currently in the market (assuming your data is named and is properly organized) you can talk to the data directly. You can ask for example, what are the sales comparison between say Q1 and Q2 year over year for say the last 5 years. This acts as a north star for everybody. 

Each company is unique in its initialism, acronyms, playbooks, culture, its risk tolerance, its regulatory, its business license, its global footprint, its availability of data and so forth. Everybody is different. Once you get all of these variables into AI you will be able to get to a space that can be understood, and the quality of reasoning can be justified based on the data.

 These tools basically aren’t thinking about yours, mine or your marketing team’s problems, their solving AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) which is their main goal. When these tools are able to reason and conclude based on the data, they would have achieved their goal. AGI learns and it work and process independently. 

You can request it to build a performance marketing campaign with say a specified number of parameters, you can request it to do media mix modelling with this particular wide range of media. I would like to mix my outdoor media on digital signages and hard print with my digital marketing. Let’s see how it can do better by impacting sales as part of the parameters. You can build agents to do that right now and not work that hard to do it, just work smart and elevated. 

 As for us in marketing, we need to sit down and ask, what are the tasks that would really help us if they were super automated? And what workflow process could we augment, redesign or innovate that we could then automate after we have automated the workflow process.