Marketing AI: Consciousness or Intelligence?
From The Terminator’s “Skynet” to 2001: A Space Odyssey’s “Hal”, Hollywood science fiction films featuring artificial intelligence (AI) often assume that the moment of consciousness is what suddenly makes the machine super-intelligent and able to match (or surpass) human abilities. As marketers, it’s easy to accept this fantasy and imagine some distant future where AI exceeds marketers capabilities. The truth is less romantic, more utilitarian and already driving business value today.
While the dramatic emergence of consciousness in the form of “the singularity” makes for great films, Yuval Noah Harari, an internationally renowned historian, argues that consciousness isn’t required to make a dramatic impact on corporate goals such as revenue growth, customer engagement or profitability. Marketers should take note.
Harari explains, “As long as they went hand in hand [consciousness & intelligence], debating their relative value was just an amusing pastime for philosophers.” Harari goes on to describe what he coins “The Great Decoupling”, where corporations (and their marketers) have elected to ignore the pursuit of consciousness and focus on specific and narrow forms of intelligence to solve their business problems. For these actors, Harari explains, the debate is over: “…it is sobering to realise that…at least for…corporations, the answer is straightforward: intelligence is mandatory and consciousness is optional”.
As marketer, The Great Decoupling means that the time to invest and reap the rewards of AI has arrived, yet uncertainties about which solutions and techniques you should invest in remains a complex decision. Many of the more ambitious AI solutions emerging in the marketplace appear to be motivated by the consciousness (or the appearance of consciousness) half of the decoupling; when we ask Siri, Watson, Sensei or Alexa for assistance, we are left in awe at how closely our everyday has begun to closely resemble our Hollywood fantasies. While there is no denying how impressive these services are, they remain frustratingly just out of reach from pragmatically solving marketer’s most pressing challenges.
A better approach for marketers is a non-consciousness focused approach to AI, where the solution is only adept at identifying and solving a limited precise set of problems within specific industries. Customer churn, cross-sell, up-sell and customer engagement are perpetual challenges that are best served by tailored algorithms that are constrained and adjusted based on the particularities of your business.
Harari reminds us of the superiority of the power of specific intelligence in his colourful example of horses during the industrial revolution:
“An ordinary farm horse can smell, love, recognize faces, jump over fences and a thousand other things far better than a Model T Ford or a million-dollar Lamborghini. But cars nevertheless replaced horses because they were superior in a handful of tasks that the system really needed.” ~ Homo Deus, Yuval Noah Harari (363)
