Albert founder on the AI apocalypse: ‘We come in peace’
Or Shani, co-founder and CEO of media-buying automation platform Albert, explains why marketers should see artificial intelligence as a friend rather than a foe.
During the 2014 film The Imitation Game, mathematics genius Alan Turing is shown heroically pitted in a race against time to crack the Nazi’s Enigma code.
Over a period of nail-biting sequences, Turing and his team face the insurmountable challenge to crack 159 trillion combinations within 24 hours. Turing saves the day by building a device to do the work for them; and thus the course of World War II is changed – by a machine.
However, as Or Shani, founder and CEO of the Albert digital marketing platform points out, there’s much more to the story.
“Alan Turing is considered to be one of the forefathers of AI or computing powers,” says Shani. “But what most people don’t know is that Turing’s machine did not crack the Enigma. All it did was limit the staggering amount of possibilities, making it possible for a human to solve it. It was a clear, very beautiful and successful combination of human and machine. You let the machine run all the calculations, but at the end of the day, the human solves the last piece of the puzzle.”
For Shani, it is precisely this marriage of man and machine that underpins the future for marketers in a world of rapidly advancing artificial intelligence. As he explained to the audience at Mumbrella360 recently, there is only so much information the human brain is equipped to deal with at any given time.
Just as MI5’s brightest minds could not crack the Enigma code unassisted, it is beyond the reach of even the world’s top tech talent to digest, decipher and reassemble the vast wealth of big data available today using their brain alone. But that does not necessarily mean man is replaced by the machine, according to Shani. Instead, he argues, marketers should see AI in the way the mathematician sees a calculator: as a tool to help solve an unnecessarily long problem in an instant.
“It’s not necessarily, ‘We cannot do it as humans,’” he adds. “It’s just sometimes we don’t want to. The fact of the matter is no one likes doing the heavy manual lifting of marketing campaigns – people want to do the fun creative work. In history, man has never taken the hardest route – look at the motorcar for example. We went from manual transmission, to automatic, to cruise control and now self-driving vehicles are here. Albert is the self driving marketing solution. It’s how we use the technology.
“For marketers, machine learning algorithms can cluster and look at vast amounts of data, vast amounts of audiences, and decide which one is best for your brand. It is very easy for them – while for us humans it’s going to be very difficult. It is doable, but will take time. A machine can do it on the fly.”
Nevertheless, as Tesla tests self-driving cars and the Shangri-la Hotel chain puts robots on room service, it is unsurprising that many associate the rise of AI with the dawn of Terminator-style apocalypse. Even Tesla founder Elon Musk admitted his fears that a Skynet armageddon could be a real possibility. While the majority of AI usage, the type used to find cheaper flights on Skyscanner for example, is barely noticeable to the average eye, headlines like these are hard to forget.
Many marketers believe there is reason to fear the rise of AI and its potential to replace jobs in digital and analytics. Reports abound that over the next 10 years artificial intelligence will replace half of all jobs and the rise of programmatic buying has put the sweat on traditional media buying agencies and their employees.
But as Shani points out, of the numerous Fortune 500 companies Albert works with around the world, not a single job has been lost to the technology in their eight years of operation.
Shani, who has spent the past decade working across Silicon Valley’s advertising technology space, has been at the forefront of that shift from traditional to programmatic buying. Indeed Albert was the first to unveil an automated ad buying platform, built from AI from the ground up.
He contends the rise of automation in the media buying space is far from an occasion to panic. Instead, for those for whom the 9-until-midnight shift has become the norm, the dawn of AI may in fact be a blessing in disguise.
“You should start thinking of AI not as a threat, but as something that’s going to make your work, maybe even your work-life, better. You will start doing things that are more interesting and more fun for you.
“In the past five to 10 years digital marketing has become too much about pushing buttons. That is not marketing. We’ve lost what it means to be a marketer – the brand, the creative, the strategy, the storytelling. Almost counter-intuitively, AI can help us rediscover the true human element of marketing,
“Humans play a huge and irreplaceable role when it comes to the highest value tasks in marketing, and those businesses that embrace the technology with this mindset the early adopters – are set to gain the most. Those who have an appetite for experimentation and change, and who are eager to learn.
“In the next five years AI will rule digital marketing. We’re currently becoming slaves to tech. Our vision for Albert was to turn the tables on this; to create a different type of marketing reality where the people can remove their focus from manual and menial execution, and dedicate their uniquely human brilliance to the storytelling required for truly successful marketing.
“People are brilliant, computers are not. Computers cannot invent, but they can execute – and that’s where the true power of AI lives.
“So, how will different roles change? It’s something we’ve been working on a lot as a company and educating the market. But the number one thing is that we come in peace. It’s not that an AI system can decide to do whatever it wants. It’s not man versus machine. It’s more about how you work together. Man and machine together – and that is how Albert works best with all our clients; where they find the true value.”
He adds: “I think that over time, AI will get commoditised. In 10 years, you’ll have Albert and Sasha and somebody else. And we will all compete for your attention. It will be cheaper and much more natural. That’s where the world is going.
“I say to our clients, if you’re an early adopter you can get a huge head start. You get the performance and the efficiency now, instead of in 10 years. And more importantly, you will get the insights. And you will improve yourself as an organisation, starting now. The only thing that you cannot spare is time. Don’t make the same mistake Blockbuster made when they turned Netflix away. You cannot reverse time and I urge you to act now on AI.”