Over the past year, we’ve seen an explosion in AI products and discussion, culminating in the recent buzz around Bing’s adoption of GPT and Google’s Bard. It’s hard not to think that we may be on the precipice of a new era.
AI isn’t a new concept, but we’re now at a stage where both the development and processing power advancements have enabled game-changing use cases (you’ll have heard of DALL-E, Midjourney, and ChatGPT over the last 12 months for example). The explosion in development and industry buzz over the past 3 months has been propelled by Microsoft announcing their intention to roll out AI into many of it’s products, including search. This has effectively sparked a race, with Google rushing to respond.
Ultimately, this is great for consumers. Competitiveness fosters innovation, and the search market in particular has been stale for years. But whilst the focus has been on search recently, AI is going to eventually touch every industry in some shape or form (in marketing and beyond).
From a marketing perspective, AI platforms are cropping up all the time, covering everything from content creation to media optimisation. It can help build media models and predictive analytics, as well as help build audience segments, campaigns, ad copy, and content. AI can help process signals and knowledge to make optimisation recommendations. Given enough information and signals, these tools can identify patterns and make “decisions” that only humans could previously do.
Ultimately, we’re at the start of something new, and we’ve only touched the iceberg of what AI can do. Ahead of us, there’s a vast amount of opportunity, but we also have to be conscious of the threats and pitfalls. Many of the AI technologies, particularly with chatbots, are emerging and not complete products.
Regardless, companies need to consider how AI can assist them either now or in the future, and those that embrace new AI technology will be well positioned to reap the rewards, whereas businesses that resist may find themselves falling behind.
