The Reality of AI Marketing Automation Still Requires A Human Touch
The explosive convergence of content, channel and AI automation is a dream to any marketer. It's truly amazing to think how far we've come in even a year. Looking back, a decade in online time seems like a hundred years ago. Today's tools for AI automation and rapid development hold tremendous promise for new efficiency, finer targeting, and extremely accurate, real time (or near real time) reporting. When you really start to integrate new methods and tools for team collaboration and project development everything takes less time and gets better. Communication gets tightened up, ideas are shared faster, and time gets shredded from non-revenue activities. It's extremely interesting to see what's been developed for mobile AI already and how so much can be done in 5 to 30 minutes with two thumbs on your phone by the pool versus that half day in front of a computer. I'd rather work on my phone, frankly. Somewhere in the sun if possible. And while I haven't coded a website in over 16 years (and I only ever did it for lack of a real programmer at the time), I did create a website this weekend on my phone just for fun. And it probably took me under an hour. I also created a business plan for a client in probably half the time using some AI tools that helped me write at about three to four times speed. It wasn't perfect. But it shaved hours off of data input. This is a good thing for businesses everywhere. And you don't have to go with the giants either. There are niche players everywhere.
AI might fill web developers with fear. I see it as an amazing marketing development that takes the focus off of products and tactics and puts focus on great process, content quality, and the innovative ideas that drive our decisions. The wonderful thing about these kinds of developments, to me, is that they should really reduce some kinds of heavy production costs and let us put more emphasis on meaningful things like strategy, unique content development, customer servicing, and brand.
The caveat I would offer in an age of AI automation and duplication of information, through re-tweets, re-posts, and multiple channel posts of the same information, is that it's easy to be lazy about what you say when writing, procurement and distribution becomes simple. Spend the time and budget you've freed up to think more about how you're going to deliver an amazing customer experience in your unique voice using all the new toys we have. And have fun.
