AI for Marketers: Pessimism & Optimism, Realism & Opportunities

Generative AI is the topic of a lot of fevered speculation, but it can do more right now than you might realize.   

There are many unanswered questions about how AI will change our lives. As we have those important discussions, it’s already possible to use today’s technology positively and effectively. We know this because we’re doing it.    

AI is excellent at accelerating the medical, legal and regulatory review process. It’s adept at helping to create easily modifiable video content. It can help healthcare professionals to diagnose disease, as with our award-winning Lyme Bomb Detector app. And AI, of course, is wonderful at analyzing and summarizing enormous amounts of data to uncover insights.   

We’re using AI to do all of these things at EVERSANA INTOUCH every day.   

We’re also using it in parallel with market research, advisory boards and focus groups in order to create what we call “synthetic data,” which can accompany those efforts and bolster our creative and qualitative exploration and evaluation.    

AI is great with large data sets, static environments, well-defined rules and consistent inputs, as well as highly structured and repetitive tasks. However, it’s very important to know when, where and how these new tools can help your work, as well as where they might get in the way. We have found synthetic data to be unreliable for supplementing quantitative data efforts. And in some simulations, we have found it to be noisy or even misleading.    

It’s absolutely vital that we nurture the uniquely human gifts in our teams and in our companies, continuing to improve how we do the things that AI can’t do as we offload the more rote tasks. As Kevin Roose put it, humans are comfortable with rapidly changing environments with poorly defined rules and incomplete information. Humans thrive in novel and high-stakes situations. Humans understand how to talk to other humans, not like isolated geniuses, but more like therapists.   

While GenAI won’t replace quantitative data anytime soon – and won’t ever replace the above-mentioned human gifts – it does offer us an unparalleled opportunity to make qualitative research and exploration a 24/7 resource, exploring through prompts how potential audiences may respond, challenging us to think more broadly and ultimately making our market predictions more robust and patient-centric.   

I’ll end with an extended metaphor, comparing AI with aviation – a technological breakthrough that changed our world forever.   

AI has the potential to work for marketers like a flight simulator – to let us train on challenging scenarios in a vivid, all-encompassing way so we’ll know how best to respond when we face difficulties in real life.   

It has the potential to be a co-pilot, a perspective that we can compare against our own to check for blind spots.   

And in limited situations, it has the potential, like a drone, to fly on its own.    

Just as we don’t live in a world in which aviation is unmanned and AI controlled, we also don’t live in a world where AI can “do” marketing. But it can do a great deal to help us in specific ways, and when we make the most of it, we’ll – if you excuse the tortured aviation metaphor – soar.