If You Want to Succeed with Marketing AI, Invest in People
Marketing won’t deliver on artificial intelligence’s (AI) promise unless the human side of the equation is given equal attention. Because business value increasingly depends on human factors including agility, innovation, and customer experience those companies that best cultivate human potential will be the most successful.
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The world has become increasingly what the U.S. Army called VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous). While businesses will always need efficiency, CEOs realize that tomorrow’s gains will come from creative responses to the unexpected. For example, BCG found that 75% of companies say that innovation has become a top three priority. VUCA reality is especially obvious where businesses directly interact with customers and causes many persistent marketing challenges.
AI offers many benefits for VUCA environments. Even complex markets are semi-predictable, but due to lack of data previous generations of marketers were largely blind to the patterns. AI excels at combing through mountains of data to see them. AI can also help ameliorate human challenges such as spotting mental biases and can tirelessly perform irritating repetitive tasks.
Humans, on the other hand, excel at tasks where AI is weak. AI’s are extremely literal and fail miserably at interpreting nuance and ambiguity. Popular culture fantasizes about AI as becoming nearly human. The 2014 movie Her features Scarlett Johansson as brilliant virtual assistant. In real life, AI algorithms flop when generalizing tasks into broader contexts. They perform well only if trained in narrow, focused tasks. Humans excel at creativity, problem-solving, and interpersonal skills. We grasp context. For example, we can sense what is behind a customer’s inflection change and evaluate subtle trade-offs such as giving a money-losing service today to increase future loyalty.
Three tasks for the AI-Human partnership
A human and AI partnership offers opportunities for an agile, innovative response to marketing’s VUCA world. Here are three tasks to improve this partnership.
Develop hybrid processes that integrate AI and human capability
Customers enjoy digital, self-directed online services and these can be aided by AI. But when customers get stuck, they need a human problem solver to investigate, discern emotions, match unique situations to appropriate solutions, persuade and build consensus.
Become competent stewards of AI
The use of AI can result in some serious unintended consequences. A Harvard Business Review article, “Why You Aren’t Getting More from Your Marketing AI” describes how a consumer products firm lost money despite reducing the error rate in their sales forecast. The AI successfully improved forecast quality but was ignorant of the underlying intent to increase profits. While reducing errors, the AI inadvertently underestimated demand for the company’s most profitable products. Working successfully with AI requires human stewards to master a long list of new capabilities including managing, troubleshooting, governance, and ethics.
Prepare workers for the AI-infused world
Throughout history, technology has displaced outmoded jobs. In addition to the jobs needed to steward AI, businesses will also need workers with excellent uniquely human skills. For marketing, these jobs include problem-solving, creative skills, and those requiring emotional and social intelligence.
The VUCA customer world has produced many persistent challenges for marketing. AI can break through many of these barriers to new levels of value, but only if leaders also cultivate human potential.