What is narrow AI, and how will it impact your marketing careers? Is Narrow AI coming for your job?
There are two types of artificial intelligence—Strong AI, which can learn new things and adapt and is dramatized in movies, and Narrow AI, which concentrates on the completion of one, specific task. Narrow AI has the potential to both positively impact marketing, while negatively affecting those who work in the industry.
Narrow AI’s Pros
What makes Narrow AI appealing is the ability it has to do focused tasks. In marketing, like many industries, this offers the potential for helping companies be more efficient and save money. For example, AI is helping marketers create more fine-tuned customer segmentation. This is great because consumers are demanding more personalized information. With AI’s help, marketers can narrow down customer groups and really figure out what each segment wants, and then they can work to meet that desire.
AI offers marketers a tremendous advantage in processing data, allowing them to focus on staying up-to-date on what consumers want. AI has and will continue to play a powerful role in digital marketing in particular, thanks to its ability to modify user experience and for its enhanced ROI capabilities.
Narrow AI’s Cons
The downside of all this is that typically cost-savings comes from not paying an employee to do something. So rather than have a person figure out what a particular consumer segment is motivated by, an algorithm will be doing that job.
Coupled with this is the concern that marketers will become disenfranchised as a result of the increase in AI’s influence in their careers. If a consumer can’t tell the difference between work generated by AI and work created by a human, what’s the emotional fallout for the employee?
Does this mean AI will steal your marketing job? Not exactly. Like many industries impacted by technology, some jobs will be lost, but others may be gained. The key in today’s working world seems to be adaptability.
