Embracing the Impact of AI in Marketing: Harnessing Analytical Comprehension and Human Ingenuity

Is AI the future? Its impact has already proven its gravitas. Whether artificial technology takes hold as the mainstay in modern-day society, no doubt its existence is already shaping what will come next and how we approach - virtually everything. Indeed, in marketing,?#AI?tools like?#ChatGPT?offer a transformative means of analytical comprehension and speed of understanding; its ability to synthesize hundreds of pages of research and articulate key findings and takeaways in a matter of seconds makes our ability to research, write, and report as marketers, not at risk of extinction, but at culpability for greater "correctness" of future insights.

AI takes away elements of human fallibility and jurisdiction for opinion, setting the groundwork for a more invariant playing field where universal "truth" may exist as it relates to our understanding or interpretation of history.

Suppose AI has high intelligence but no emotional IQ or ability to reason. In that case, one can assert that?AI can only communicate found data and regurgitate relevant findings as facts?ChatGPT responses are, therefore, a conglomeration of data points, with no?relativity of opinion?provided in said response, just swift analysis of information and decided veracity in reporting and synthesis decisions. As such, AI's immediate impact on marketing is that there is now the existence of what we may be able to observe from a collective as "facts" about the past:?not an interpretation of, but a more singular "truth" about what happened, with AI underscoring the way we scrutinize history and decipher past events.

Yet, success in?#marketing?lives in one's ability to shapeshift and cater to the unknown. Marketers nor AI can foretell the future of trends in human consumption with certainty or infallibility. Even with the onset of advanced statistical techniques and data-mining, predictive behavior models are just that - predictive.?Thus, while AI will give back months otherwise spent gathering research and surveying for information, humans will remain critical in marketing and developing innovative strategies. Essential for synthesizing the data and making sense of the details, humans leverage new insights, whereas AI merely mimics wisdom.

And in the meantime, we, as marketers and as consumers of AI, need to be sure not to misinterpret AI's words as "findings" - at least not in the meaning of the word as it relates to "discoveries."

Instead, AI's reports are only "findings" in that they are "conclusions."

It is here we often confuse the meaning of "intelligence" and "intellect" when we think about AI.

"Intelligence," what AI is and does, means it can acquire and apply knowledge; AI, as we use it now, extracts, structures, and organizes information, applying machine learning to mimic human reasoning. Knowledge plays a vital role in intelligence in the real world, as?#intelligence?demonstrates "intelligent behavior" or "intellect." In AI, what may appear as "intellect" - the faculty of reasoning and understanding - is, in reality,?only the regurgitation of information.

So while AI leverages predictive knowledge and "top-down" and "bottom-up" reasoning to assert a case, at its finest, it is only following a trail to the emergence of fact. AI's recognizance includes a deduction of how a human might think, react, or behave. However, what AI is not doing, even at its most advanced, is using?abductive reasoning, meaning it never delivers new information. That is where we humans, specifically we?strategists, are safe.

Artificial Intelligence may take the lead in graphic design and copyediting, but what humans can do, which AI can't - is make an educated guess.

As long as AI remains fixed in deductive and inductive reasoning, strategists will remain irreplaceable in the workplace, the only brain power able to leverage NEW information forward.