As machine learning advances what role will humans play in marketing?

Say Hello to your AI marketing guru

A complete revolution in the marketing industry is around the corner.

Dubbed by some as the “fourth industrial revolution,” AI bots will dominate this new marketing landscape in every conceivable way. Equipped with advanced machine learning technology, they will come up with holistic, data driven digital campaigns. From effective copywriting to lead scoring and churn prediction, bots will do it all.

Marketing of the future

So huge are the marketing potential, that tech giants are betting big on this new technology. At the recently held f8 developer conference, Zuckerberg talked about Facebook’s next big bet on smartphone camera augmented reality (AR) platform as the company’s “Act two.” Amazon, Uber, and Google have all big investments into AI as well.

Even smaller companies now want in. The American Genius already covered how Whisper, the anonymous messaging app launched “Perspective,” AI powered bot to provide readers with easy access to additional articles or videos of unique relevance when they are on a certain site.

In other words, bots will guide humans in every aspect of life.

Tesla’s Elon Musk went a step further. Humans must merge with AI machines in the near future, he said, or risk becoming irrelevant in a data-driven world.

Marketing strategies will be the first step in this merging process: future ads would merge many customers with their product experience in an effort to lure them into buying it.

Tech-tonic shifts will destroy employment

Technology will affect 30 percent of all marketing jobs in the next several years. Many jobs will simply dry up. For the few roles that do survive, performing the tasks would require highly specialized skills—in a drastic paradigm shift.

Experts predict increased leverage of two types of candidates —
1- those who are very good at mathematics, i.e., physicists, mathematicians and computer engineers;
or
2- neuroscientists with research work in human psychology or speech & language patterns.

The AI Achilles’ heel

But here are two important things to realize for employees who stand to lose their job to automation.

First, Very few people in the world can come up with sophisticated machine learning algorithms and the process is often inaccurate. The AI system requires constant tweaking of formulas, testing of parameters, and research into better metrics. Those require analytical skills beyond the computational capacity of bots.

Secondly, by no means shall this bot-powered, data driven world be foolproof. The ethical ambiguities and social implications of machines manipulating human emotions remain especially uncertain.

Here is one instance. Facebook researchers carried out a simple psychological test, unannounced. They tweaked their word count software to manipulate the News Feeds of 689,003 users. The goal—to secretly experiment whether simply viewing positive posts vis-à-vis negative posts could alter viewer’s emotional state.

The after-the-fact revelation led to this experiment being highly derided as manipulative, and the company apologized.

It underscored the inherent dangers of machine learning.

According to Carl Schmidt, Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer at Unbounce, “Where we are really going to run into ethical issues is with extreme personalization. We’re going to teach machines how to be the ultimate salespeople, and they’re not going to care about whether you have a compulsive personality… They’re just going to care about success.”

The bot-resistant jobs

That is where the new era of non-technical marketing jobs would mostly be concentrated in—jobs that require strong cognitive and analytical thinking.

Do not freak out about the future if you are not a “math person.”

The industry would still require human emotional input at some level, and judgment calls based on complex sociological considerations and cultural sensibilities. That is where you would show your magic.

Thinking like a human would be the greatest asset for a marketing landscape driven by machine-learned bots.

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