The age of AI will yield a new customer who marketers must win over

Even as we enter the age of AI in work and business, some functions and industries will be affected more than others. The functions in the immediate cross-hairs of GenAI are contact centres, creative functions, software development and, yes, marketing.

Marketing is a unique function that combines creative with quantitative faculties. A marketer’s right brain needs to create strategies for advertising and positioning to engage the consumer in an ever-dynamic market. The left brain, meanwhile, needs to be on top of media buying and media-response analytics, even as it delves into the innards of the ad-tech algorithms that dictate buying search and social ads.

AI has been all over the latter, with Google, Meta and others building AI into every piece of advertising they sell. The former, the creative part, has been a human domain so far, with advertisers creating unique and evocative messages to support their marketing strategies. While the latter is ‘arithmetic,’ the former is ‘language.’

It is in the language part that marketers now have a competitor—GenAI and its Large Language Models, which are built on language and can spin out creativity at will. Thus, it was not a surprise to see both nervousness and excitement writ large on the faces of the marketing professionals I met last week.

Also read: ‘GenAI, AI agents will be a defining force despite limitations’

GenAI is the best thing that could happen to a marketer, but only if she is willing to grasp it and leverage its power to connect with the new customer emerging in this AI era. Marketers have gone through a wrenching change once before, as the internet, social media and search upended their lives and forced a shift from who could produce the best TV ad or choose the best hoarding in town to who could master the arcane world of AdWords and real-time bidding.

The pre-internet customer, who I call the industrial customer, gave way to the digital customer as Instagram, Google and other apps started dominating their lives. Now the digital customer will give way to the AI customer, as ChatGPT and other AI tools and agents inveigle themselves into our lives.

The industrial customer had limited and standardized choice, while the digital one reckoned with the abundant variety that Amazon threw open. The AI customer’s choice will be infinite and hyper-personalized, as agents scour the internet to find what she wants based on her innate preferences.

Interaction with products was transactional and local for the industrial customer, while it’s social and omnichannel for the digital one; for the AI customer, chatbots will make this interaction conversational (as with another human) and digitally immersive as companies like Meta infuse AI into our visual and tactile environments.

The industrial consumer had minimal technology use, while the digital customer is more reactive and click-oriented as she incessantly clicks on apps; the AI customer will be proactive as a personalized AI assistant anticipates her needs, from the kind of food she’d like to where and how she would like to travel.

Finally, the brand relationship that the industrial customer had was functional, while the digital one has social and emotional loyalty to cult brands; the AI customer will have a collaborative partnership as deeper relationships are developed with brands.

Also read: Mint Primer: Where exactly is GenAI making an impact in biz?

These revolutionary changes that AI will drive mean that marketers will need to change too. They must become literate in AI and use it to anticipate and follow their customers. They will need to learn that AI can be a friend when used right and can enhance both the left- and right-brain aspects of their job. It would not ‘take away’ their creativity, but enhance it.

In both conferences, I showed how Sam Altman teased Sora, OpenAI’s text-to-video technology, by inviting impromptu prompts on X for videos to be generated. Entrepreneur Kunal Shah gave an intriguing one: “A bicycle race on ocean with different animals as athletes riding the bicycles with drone camera view."

Sora produced a stunningly creative video (bit.ly/3ZgGnHD). The question I then pose marketers is who was being creative here: Kunal Shah or Sora? The answer, inevitably, is Kunal. He could not have thought of such a creative prompt without having the right tool to execute it. This is how marketers need to think—of AI as a powerful part of their teams that can help them negotiate this wrenching change in their jobs as they enter the age of the AI customer.

Also read: Can GenAI really craft effective advertising campaigns?