The short answer to that is yes. AI will disrupt everything. That does not mean that Marketing & Communication professionals in any way will be obsolete. But the daily work tasks will change. And most of it to the better.
Having worked with digital workers (RPA robots) the last five and a half year, I have seen a similar transformation up close. When I entered that field case handlers and clerks were terrified that robots would come and take their jobs and many “I-know-everything-kind-of-people” were throwing statements like “In x years everybody in every department will have a digital co-worker” and “we need citizen salaries because humans will be redundant”. Ehh… well… No. We do have many different digital assistants working for us, we have always been working on creating more efficient processes, connecting systems, applications, and people. Nothing new under the sun here. And that will continue. And the work that get automated are boring, repetitive, monotonous tasks that nobody will miss, humans having bridged systems not communicating with each other.
Back to Marketing & Communication. What I see from my horizon is a similar development. Marketing & Communication professionals will use AI as their digital assistant, doing the initial work, brainstorm ideas, iterate scopes and so. Humans have something AI does not have, fingerspitz gefül, and will always be in charge of what idea to go with, do the final touch ups to quality assure the creative height, determine how appropriate it is, and how it will land and be perceived by the target group. What is new is the SPEED on how you can generate new campaigns, how MANY campaign ideas you can evaluate and the INDIVIDUALIZATION of the marketing assets that are generated within the campaign to ensure the effectiveness. Until now when you have pushed a message to large crowd, you have pushed the same message to everyone hoping something will stick with someone. Spray and pray. Within B2B we have always worked with adjusting our messages, ppt and offers to the people we meet. Now we can do the same B2C.
Discussed this evolution with a bunch of highly skilled copy writers and graphical designers that naturally are a little worried on what the future with AI will bring. We quickly landed in that they will be able act more like Rembrand, editing and bringing the final brush strokes to quality assure the masterpiece rather than being replaced. And with hundreds of assets created to target the different segments, there will be hundreds of assets to quality assure. Maybe we will see a new profession emerging, the editors. Or the agencies that have this as their specialty?
Pulled the following statement from Gartner:
· By 2025, 30% of outbound marketing messages from large organizations will be synthetically generated, up from less than 2% in 2022.
To read the whole article: www.gartner.com/en/articles/beyond-chatgpt-the-future-of-generative-ai-for-enterprises
