We may as well learn to fly with it.
Artificial intelligence has been present in our lives for quite a while now. Be it in the shape of facial recognition when we travel through airports around the world or as Netflix’s recommendation feature which serves us on a plate what it thinks will please us most in terms of motion picture entertainment.
Since I first started looking in depth into what the applicability of artificial intelligence was, I understood that, to some extent, it is virtually present into every aspect of our lives. And its promise is that it will become ever more prominent to the point where we may end up having a best friend shaped like a human but programmed like a robot. An emphatic one, scientists hope.
Once you understand how it works, it is very easy to spot AI everywhere. In our area of work, at ABCS World, it became increasingly obvious that there is no way to ignore its presence in our practice. In marketing, journalism and wider communications area, there was a clear pattern of AI systems facilitating our work through ever more complex tools and programs. From building audience profiles, to identifying patterns of behavior that can guide the marketing efforts, to converting the response we were getting from the public into insightful data which informed our decisions for future campaigns, to programs that reveal what questions are mostly asked online, which helps build a content marketing strategy etc.
We saw news being written by a robot reporter during the Rio Olympic Games and now have customized messaging for each user via companies like Persado, who base their generated content on the users’ historical emotional engagement with content online.
It all points to a path of no return. People are getting increasingly anxious about it too. In fact, if we look around, we can spot at least three types of attitudes towards AI- we have the supporters, who believe in putting all out efforts into building machines which will improve our livelihoods; there are the bystanders- those who still have no idea how AI will impact their lives, they are probably using AI without knowing it and they are not thinking much about what the future will look like as AI develops; and there are of course the cautious (about giving AI too much power), as they basically see the future as “robots” taking over the planet. AI is developing at impressive speed regardless on the general sentiment about it (by the way, there is now an AI tool which can pretty much draw a chart on the sentiment on AI around the world and predict how it will evolve in the future).
At ABCS World, we have been adopting the AI tools as they emerged and as suitable for each project. We’ve seen clients wanting to go the safe and known route of human intervention at every step of the project and others willing and excited to try the latest tools, looking to improve their results and save resources.
The path we’ve chosen for all though is to present them with all the options- the traditional ones and the most innovative ones, for marketing and wider communications.
To ensure we offer the best possible understanding of the space and of what AI’s current and potential impact is, after months of research and design, we are now launching the newest format of our strategic communications workshops and trainings, with an AI component across the entire curricula.
AI is here to stay. We may as well get to know the newcomer. This could be the start of a beautiful friendship.
Reach out to us for a free counselling session on how you can integrate AI tools in your practice and get an idea on what to expect from AI adoption in the near future.