Artificial Intelligence is the Enabler for Future Marketing

Artificial Intelligence is the Enabler for Future Marketing
We are now living in a digital world where consumers are constantly being bombarded by an enormous variety of goods and services from providers across the globe. From traditional advertising to targeted online campaigns, companies are using a plethora of tools and techniques to get themselves in front of customers, in an attempt to secure a greater market share in a borderless economy. This unprecedented level of competition is pushing companies to become more innovative in order to make their marketing strategies more targeted and more effective so that they get more ‘bang for their buck’. 
As the digital world has brought with it new technology platforms, companies are enlisting the expertise of specialist marketing firms in order to target relevant consumers in an intelligent manner. With millions of potential consumers online, effective marketing can only be achieved through the intelligent analysis of consumer behavior and sentiment to display relevant advertisements in front of prospective buyers. This renders traditional methods of marketing redundant, as it was a ‘hit and miss’ approach, through mass marketing, to as large an audience as possible in a bid to secure interest and enhance sales. The future of marketing however is a far more intelligent affair. It largely depends on two elements working in synergy with one another - big data and artificial intelligence (AI). Online platforms have started to use this new marketing approach to deliver better marketing outcomes.
A look into how AI works reveals a technology based on mathematics that recognizes patterns through information fed to it. That information can then be used to perform rapid functions on huge datasets. This is extremely useful in analyzing consumer behavior, which identifies the trends and the patterns that can assist in advising on building targeted marketing campaigns. This however relies on having adequate amounts of big data available for analysis, as well as systems, smart enough, to make sense of both structured and unstructured data. 
A combination of having intelligent AI systems, sufficient amounts of consumer related big data and the computing processing to crunch this information is now putting together the foundation of future marketing. 
The falling costs, availability and maturity of these technologies, have led to greater adoption amongst marketers as the value proposition of them can now be seen. This is a symbiotic relationship between technologies that need each other to exist in a new ecosystem, providing value that otherwise would be nearly impossible to derive using traditional marketing methods as the variables and interactions are far too many for humans to analyze.
Social media platforms, such as Facebook and Google have been quick to secure market share and become leaders in these technologies, establishing huge tech empires as a result of providing rich consumer based information to marketers on habits and trends of their users, allowing for targeted content to be sent to interested audiences. 
As an example of the colossal success of using AI for marketing, the revenues of Google’s AI based AdSense and AdWords programs generated for them over 134.81 billion US dollars in 2019 according the market research company Statista. 
This is a mind blowing amount for a company that develops a software program; a search engine, that has been leveraged as a huge marketing platform to gather information about online consumer habits, their online search history and interests and interactions and help companies build sophisticated marketing campaigns. Marketing is all about getting the right messages to the right audience and there is no doubt that we are at the very beginning of this online AI marketing tsunami. 
With many AI marketing tools and approaches now available, it is clear that companies need to have comprehensive AI marketing strategies in place in order to streamline corporate AI marketing activities, maximize the benefits of technology adoption and ensure that budgets are spent appropriately to deliver maximum Return On Investment (ROI). It is important for companies wanting to adopt AI marketing to understand that there are new technologies, practices, governance and skills that will be needed and that the journey will be an experimental one until companies can use their data to create new value and new experiences for their customers.
The benefits that AI marketing is currently bringing with it is allowing companies to: 
•Engage in enhanced advertising by allowing AI systems to intelligently tweak marketing campaigns. Machine-learning algorithms can find new ways for optimizing layout, copywriting and targeting. This allows advertisers to optimize campaigns and test out more ad-platforms leading to more effective campaigns being developed.

•Allowing end users to receive a personalized website experience by AI intelligently analyzing hundreds of data points about users and displaying personalized offers and content through AI systems such as Google Analytics.

•Allowing companies to develop interactive AI Chat-bots which act as online assistants, enhancing interaction with consumers and providing a level of customer support that would not be otherwise possible. 
I see that for the coming future, trending AI systems include conversational interfaces and proactive AI home assistants, which enable natural language interactions with AI via voice. We are already seeing such systems with tools such as Alexa, Siri, and other AI home devices that provide voice access to the Internet with a level of home automation. 
These systems will be the next target for marketers, as they become a new interface through which consumers interact with the Internet. Such systems will find success not as dumb devices, but as interactive systems that come up with proactive ideas and suggestions that users wouldn’t think of. This will provide rich pickings for marketers as these systems mature and become more useful as consumer adoption increases.
AI is improving marketers abilities to automate analysis, tasks, and communications. They are really good at looking at vast data sets and identifying relationships between all kinds of behaviours that humans wouldn't pick up on. AI however is not so good at innovation yet. 
 As AI matures, I see  that such systems will become more creative and increasingly intelligent, eventually becoming a necessary part of any firm by looking at organization-wide datasets and coming up with new, independent conclusions. This will require a substantial shift in mindset and will inevitably become the next brand of business productivity software. 
Data here is everything without which AI on its own would serve little purpose.
In conclusion, I would say the AI is not just the future of marketing; it will touch and influence every discipline we currently have and it is the future of everything. 
I therefore call upon our youth to focus on becoming knowledge workers to fill such roles and to become experts in AI as this is where the future lies.
I see this as the “survival of the fittest”. Those willing to skill-up will be tomorrow's winners and there is no reason why this region cannot become a leader in AI technology.