Artificial Intelligence and Marketing

Google is one of the leading technological companies that has been investing in artificial intelligence and machine learning. Recently, they have been launching several campaigns to introduce their latest breakthroughs in this field. Certainly, with Tensorflow and Google’s new search algorithms, the entire marketing landscape is heavily influenced. What does this mean for small businesses?

Let’s discuss some general fears and opportunities:

1)  It’ll be a much harder journey for business owners to learn the technology.

Whilst it sounds overwhelming, technology, in this case artificial intelligence, is meant to make people’s lives easier. The general attitude to technology is to use it to assist productivity and not think of it as a hindrance. It’s an opportunity to create a competitive advantage with more advanced technology. It’s an opportunity to experiment on current solutions and rethink old business systems.

2)  It will bring more marketing costs to business.

Short and sweet response to this is: At the end of the day, it’ll improve productivity and reduce long term costs. One practical application is developing chat bots to answer general questions by customers. Think about the time spent answering frequently asked questions. A chat bot can answer in less than 1 second and can talk to multiple users at the same time. Chat bots are powered by artificial intelligence systems. They are self-learning, they never sleep.

3) It will take over the jobs of regular people.

Improving one’s self and up-skilling is a fact of life.  A person’s goal is to be his most productive self. People have this wonderful brain that gives them the ability to develop wisdom that until now can not be replicated by artificial intelligent systems.

Having machines to assist us in doing simple, labour-intensive activities has always been around since the invention of the wheel. The challenge for people is to learn how to use technology to their advantage.