Unilever

Stephen Hawking once said, “Success in creating AI would be the biggest event in human history”. He wasn’t wrong.

We are living through a data explosion; every second, masses of data are being produced. In the time it took you to read this sentence, there have been 3,504 Instagram posts, 32,984 tweets, and 304,360 YouTube views. To process this data, we need power beyond human intelligence.

Through Hollywood, technology has been brought to life. The “flip-phone-like” devices that the StarTrek Crew used to communicate to one another with, inspired Motorola to release its first flip phone in 1996, named StarTAC. Throughout the ages, pop-culture has played a significant role in innovation. More recently, AI has become a go-to theme in all sci-fi films and is used as the basis of creations.

Many jargons are thrown out when people talk about AI, but what do they mean?

Artificial Intelligence (AI): Computers performing tasks that normally require human intelligence.

Algorithm: A process to be followed in calculations or other problem-solving operations, especially by a computer.

Machine Learning (ML): The study of Algorithms and mathematical models that computer systems use to progressively improve their performance on a specific task.

We may not realize it, but AI is all around us. Netflix uses algorithms to determine which movies and shows it thinks you will enjoy and Tinder learns your preferences each time you swipe right (or left).

The world is transforming before our eyes and marketers must keep up with the changes going on around them. Building sustainable brands, persuading consumers, motivating them to buy (and buy more), whilst creating brand love, are all top priorities, but all this must be done while continuing to connect effectively with consumers in fragmenting and fast-moving media environment. As the stakes rise, all this and more must be done, with less.

The speed at which decisions need to be made is drastically increasing. In “near real-time”, marketers must ask the right questions, gather the right data, target the right people with the right message and use the right technology. Fear not though, as AI can be leveraged in a number of agile and cost-effective ways to assist.

1. Compete With Local Brands

AI can help companies to understand local markets, identify local consumer needs and wants, create market-suited products, launch products efficiently and speedily, find agile ways of adapting to changing consumer choices and preferences.

2. Leverage Social Media

AI can listen efficiently while enabling and delivering accurately and quickly. It can get us to a stage where we would be able to say “I have the answers…what is your question?”

3. Make Marketing Dollars Stretch Further

Great marketing is a combination of art and science, and AI can help marketers get more, for less by leveraging metaphors.

Metaphors (short-hand for non-conscious) are the ways humans comprehend the world. AI helps us unearth metaphors in powerful and scalable ways that can inspire and power-product innovation, package elements and communication.

4. Co-Create With The Non- Conscious Mind

AI helps us understand what influences the non-conscious mind, as articulated responses do not always accurately reflect the truth. It uncovers salient but unsaid, fertile fields for product and marketing innovation, making its role increasingly important as the cost of failure can have catastrophic effects on business performance, at a time where 80+% of innovations fail.

If you think about big breakthrough ideas such as Uber and Airbnb, you’ll notice that these didn’t transpire by asking consumers what they wanted. Innovations like these occur when you start deciphering the subconscious mind and this is where ML plays a part.

ML can be used to understand the influence of the non-conscious (the music we listen to, the movies & shows we watch etc.). It can get us directly to the source rather than to the articulated, rationalized responses we get from consumers. Simultaneously, people are exposed to many non-conscious influences, so it’s vital that we choose the relevant target-market mind drivers, relative to the brand architecture, to find the right trends and signals to leverage. Consequently, ML techniques are crucial, as they determine the main themes, changing behaviors, emerging tribes and within them, existing influencers. Relatively, based upon the inputs that shape the non-conscious, it helps to identify metaphors too.

AI is commonly portrayed negatively in the media, feeding into our innate fear of extinction. Truth be told, if we believe that robots will take over the world, they will. Humans created AI, so instead of fearing it, we must harness it to benefit and augment Human Intelligence. We need a mind-shift and think as follows:

Artificial Intelligence + Human Intelligence = Augmented Intelligence

At this pivotal point, Human Intelligence could potentially be stepped up to a completely different level powered by AI. Therefore, do not see AI as a friend or an enemy, it is neither…it is a frenemy. “Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer” (Michael Corleone, the Godfather) rings true in the case of AI. Leveraging its power can benefit us all…if we let it.