My Thoughts on AI and Digital Marketing

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the topic of a lot of marketing conversations I've been having recently. My AI-related convos have consisted of some of the following questions:

• Will AI take over marketing?
• How do we compete with AI?
• What's my favorite way to use AI?
• Am I worried about losing work to people using AI?

Most of the time I have these conversations, we talk about mindset; specifically, the "why" behind using AI.

See, as of right now, AI is undergoing a massive marketing push. The good sides of AI are being heavily promoted while the downsides are swept under the rug (accuracy of models, costs, etc.). This creates a public perception of AI being a massive upgrade and leads businesses to follow suit with statements like "AI-Powered" or "AI-Infused".

Now, don't get me wrong, I'm a marketer. So I understand the reasoning behind using AI buzzwords to help sales and leads. However, my thoughts on AI are different than public opinion.

AI assembles more than it creates

Because AI is limited in its ability to create new things, I don't believe it will/can take over marketing any time soon. While AI is amazing at following rules, logic, and models - it struggles to create new things without a previous pattern to learn from.

Humans must still find and create new patterns for AI to learn. This kills the idea of "Human vs. AI" (for the time being) and changes the question of "How do we compete with AI" to "How do we compete against someone using AI".

AI is optimization not implementation

Like I said above, AI is amazing at following rules, logic, and models. This makes it amazing at taking a current system or way of doing something and speeding it up (optimizing). However, if you give it a bad/losing system or model, AI can take that system and lose much faster than you could on your own.

This is why new systems and processes should be implemented by humans.

So, if you're competing with someone using AI and they're winning - it's possible you're losing both the system's battle and the speed battle.

Evaluate why your competition is beating you.

If they're only beating you because they can put out a higher quantity, then you need a way to scale up your execution (Use AI, hire more labor, etc.). But, if their strategy is (also) better, focus on improving your strategy and system before competing with speed.

That's how I compete against other marketers utilizing AI.

My favorite ways to use AI

I don't usually have a reason to use AI but when I do, I prefer using it for:

• Data analysis
• Research

As far as data analysis is concerned, it's convenient to tell an AI to manipulate a large spreadsheet of data in different ways and return the results. While I could manually create the functions and filters necessary to achieve this, an AI can speed this process up.

AI can also speed up the research phase. One of the problems with researching new ideas is that we don't what we don't know. What we can search for and learn is limited by what we currently know.

AI, on the other hand, will likely have access to the information we don't know. So we can ask broad, open-ended questions with the understanding that the AI will probably return a lot of information (some we understand, some we don't) that we'll have to verify (because AI can be wildly inaccurate).

Some of the information received by the AI will leave me saying "oh, I didn't even know that was a thing". And when I make statements like that, I know that I'm expanding my perspective and removing some of the limitations I previously had.

Final Thoughts

AI is a tool. I'm not worried about losing my job to a tool. However, I make sure that my skills, systems, and processes are up-to-par in case I'm competing with someone using AI effectively.

Just like I said earlier, AI is good for optimizing. A good system and skills can always take advantage of AI but an AI can't take advantage of a bad system or skills.

It's a smart idea to learn how AI works and think about what we currently do that could be optimized by AI.

But there's no need to be worried about losing your marketing job to AI, as long as you continue to improve the human elements that make AI effective in the first place.