The first thing most people associate Artificial Intelligence (AI) with normally revolves around machines taking over the world, the extinction of the human race and Arnold Schwarzenegger's iconic line “I’ll be back”. Despite the hysteria behind AI and all the things that can go wrong with it, today we are seeing AI being applied to more parts of our daily lives than most would think. Let’s explore what AI is, what role it plays in our everyday lives and what the future holds for AI and the human race.

Source: https://www.pinterest.com.au/pin/281897257905596959/

What is AI?

“Artificial intelligence (AI) makes it possible for machines to learn from experience, adjust to new inputs and perform human-like tasks. Most AI examples that you hear about today – from chess-playing computers to self-driving cars – rely heavily on deep learning and natural language processing. Using these technologies, computers can be trained to accomplish specific tasks by processing large amounts of data and recognizing patterns in the data.” (SAS Institute Inc, 2021).

While Hollywood movies and science fiction novels depict AI as human-like robots that take over the world, the current evolution of AI technologies isn’t that scary – or quite that smart. Instead, AI has evolved to provide many specific benefits in every industry. Consider an AI to a child, it is trained on large amounts of data and algorithms – it learns from experience like a child growing into an intelligent adult.  We feed and nurture it with lots of data so it can find relationships, develop understanding and make decisions from the training data it is provided. The more data it gets, the smarter it becomes. (Forbes, 2021)

What has it become good for?

While AI has not reached human performance, it brings valuable solutions to many real-world problems quickly and effectively. From enhanced healthcare, innovations in banking and improved environmental protection to self-driving vehicles (e.g. Telsa), automated transportation, smart homes (e.g Google Home) and chatbots, AI can offer simpler and more intelligent ways of accomplishing many of our daily tasks. (Forbes, 2021) AI has inserted itself into a variety of industries and markets to improve efficiency, especially within digital marketing.

AI & Digital Marketing

In the marketing world, AI has proven that it can assist in streamlining and optimizing marketing campaigns while also eliminating the risk of human error. AI has the potential to be able to generate a report using nothing but data, however, it does not have the ability to comment or tell a story that relies on human input. With that being said, AI has improved our efficiency to execute and report on marketing campaigns in the following ways:

• Content creation & generation: AI has the ability to curate, generate content and then place it in front of the right audience on the right platforms. It is also currently used as a helpful strategy tool to assist marketers to map out end-to-end content strategy, which some marketing tools are already using this feature. (Forbes, 2019)‍
• AI-enhanced digital advertising: As AI systems operate autonomously, they “place the right kind of ads in front of the right kind of people based on complex algorithms and big data. This is what’s known as programmatic advertising”. (Forbes, 2019)  Businesses can now optimize their return on investment by only placing ads in front of relevant viewers. Ads can be bought automatically, then personalized at scale. ‍
• Better customer relationships and response times (Chatbot): Chatbots are already on numerous websites, as they excel at answering customers’ frequently asked questions. It has made an immense impact on the customer experience – as some businesses don’t have the ability to answer every query at all times. Chatbots allow customers to help themselves.‍
• Behaviour analysis & predictive analysis:‍
• A great example of this can be seen within our social media platforms – particularly TikTok, which takes advantage of AI not only for the production of videos but also for their delivery. As opposed to simply delivering content recommendations the AI Algorithms are immediately prompted into interpreting their user’s behavior and delivering content based on these interpretations. (Analytic Steps, 2020)‍
• AI is also being implemented into other platforms such as LinkedIn, which uses AI to assist in matching employees to jobs by performing LinkedIn Analytics, to create better employee-employer matches.

Source: https://www.analyticssteps.com/blogs/how-artificial-intelligence-ai-making-tiktok-tick

AI has solidified itself into the fabric of our everyday lives, from personal usage with social media to professional marketing tools – it will continue to improve current resources and increase efficiency. If you want to learn more about the role AI is playing in our world today, we recommend the resources below.