Don’t panic, you’re not going to lose your marketing job to a robot
Making that all-important human connection is a key part of every advertiser’s role. As long as marketers can keep up with changing technology, there’s no chance a robo marketer is going to nab your job anytime soon, writes Michael Savanis.
AI is here. Robots or some form of automation is already affecting the livelihoods of professions such as physicians, cashiers and truck drivers. Just this year, a Japanese insurance company replaced 34 of its employees with AI system . And it’s not slowing down. In fact, Gartner estimates that 45% of the fastest-growing companies in the world will ‘employ’ more smart machines and virtual assistants than people by 2018.
The future is now, and it’s no longer a theoretical exercise to wonder if you will quite literally lose your job to a robot. And of course marketers are no exception to this.
Robots have ruled for years in many sectors of industry
But the reality is that the timing of AI couldn’t be better for us. Let’s face it: the demands of modern marketing are fast exceeding human cognitive capacity, and marketers already need to use extensive technology stacks to leverage extraordinary amounts of data in order to guide the choices that drive billions of dollars in consumer spending.
“Fast forward and let’s take a look at the arrival of everyday automation, like self-checkout, ATMs and automated baggage check-in at the airport. When these automated machines entered supermarkets, banks, and airports, jobs were not lost as we expected. They simply evolved, and new types of jobs were created.”
That’s really a ‘citation needed’ kind of comment.
ATMs have led to banks not requiring as many bank staff (or branches). Self-check out at supermarkets has also been used to keep wage costs lower and automated baggage check-in means that fewer staff are needed to manage this process.
Yes, new types of jobs may have been created, but that doesn’t mean that automation wasn’t also associated with staff being managed out of a job (or into underemployment).
AI will definitely bring a change in the way marketers deal with customer engagement and productivity. It is the way forward…the future of marketing.
Oh yes they are! I don’t care what ‘speculation/evidence’ is put forward by accounting firms whose best interests are served by writing expensive reports backing any and every contention, depending on your point of view.
Technology is just in the first phase of eliminating entire workforces at every level. The effects are already visible and noted, but the implications have been papered over by central bank quantitative easing and manipulation of interest rates, making it look like everything is OK. It isn’t.
The last nine years of ludicrously accommodative economic policy, rates at 5000 year lows and even outright negative yields should have been the most inflationary in history, but wages are static at best, job losses are everywhere and whole industries like social media rely on never-ending capital injection, massive debt and non-GAAP reporting. See Twitter.
Creative industries are probably the least easy to automate – for now – but outsourcing and the perfect marketplace is driving even those revenues down to near zero. Look at http://www.fiverr.com
The Industrial Revolution was a minor inconvenience compared with the coming wholesale elimination of all middle-man jobs. Eventually there has to be a reset to real capitalism or something else; the system cannot continue to keep eating itself, and that’s when it’s going to *really* hurt. America’s on the brink already.
You have to be kidding yourself
” marketers already need to use extensive technology stacks to leverage extraordinary amounts of data in order to guide the choices that drive billions of dollars in consumer spending.”
Guess who’s better and faster at doing that than you?
Guess who’s also better and faster at harvesting and evaluating customer sentiment to their output, then just tuning it to what the customer wants
Have a look at how millions of strategies in the recent US election were auto-generated, auto-employed and auto-evaluated.. The fastest turnaround you’ve ever seen to what became a continuously-evolving advertising campaign
Good luck ‘letting’ AI do the mundane tasks. AI and its effects will almost surely subsume or supersede the entire industry – it’s more what scraps will remain for humans to do
The real question is what can you make that’s useful to other people, in the absense of anything else
Marketing is unfortunately a definitively secondary job, dependent on the output of others – it wouldn’t exist without other output
I suggest you go take a welding course.. I know I am 🙂