Now, this is kind of unfashionable because AI is the way forward and some companies are mandating the use of AI without any idea of how it could or should be used. AI is absolutely going to change the way we market, hopefully for the better, although the jury is still out. Here are 5 things that I came up with that could make life in an AI-driven world interesting.
Strategic homogeneity
If 5 people ask Google Gemini or ChatGPT the same question, they will get very similar answers. For example, if we are all trying to develop a strategy for an ice cream shop in a Sydney suburb, we will all roughly get the same strategy. Now ,for a small business, that is probably okay because unless all of our shops are in the same strip mall, we only compete on the fringes and our size relative to the total market is small. BUT if I’m a major bank or any business that has a competitive scale with competitors of similar size, inadvertently pursuing the same strategy is clearly a competitive problem…. oooops.
False sense of intellect
AI makes me feel smart. Have you noticed that AI praises even the dumbest ideas? It rarely says your idea is as dumb as a bag of rocks. This leads to intellectual delusion. That delusion is going to come crashing down when your half baked, half good idea gets put into the market and is judged by real, hard minded humans.
Fools rush in
One thing that AI does is it makes us fast. You can produce a marketing campaign almost at the speed of thought…GREAT…we can be responsive and agile with the market. Now, how often have you had an idea you thought was amazing but ,after a few days of mulling over it, you decided it wasn’t so great? Sometimes the passing of time changes our perspective.
Flood of AI marketing slop
Social Media is being flooded with AI slop, audiences are getting better at picking it and suspicious of everything else. AI slop, I think, has the potential to derail digital marketing. As volume and velocity increase and trust declines, consumers might just ignore everything.
Clever verging on creepy
Marketing has always aspired to hyper personalisation, conversational marketing and with AI it’s achievable. The question is, do customers want it? It’s unnerving when a stranger walks up to you and talks to you as if he knows you. It’s unnerving when you have a conversation about buying a new house with a friend and then your Instagram feed starts to show you mortgage ads. AI potentially enables marketers to be creepy at scale.
