Becoming the kings of decision: How artificial intelligence promises a new marketing world

"We move from being kings of process to kings of decisions," Douglas Nicol founder of chatbot service On Message said about the artificial intelligence opportunities for marketers at an IAA and Mumbrella panel discussion this morning. "My criticism of the world of marketing is we have become too obsessed by process so consequently we've lost sight of our jobs as marketers. I think AI is always best in terms of the problems it solves and I think the exciting think in the marketing world is it takes away a lot of the process and allows us to focus on our jobs." Nicol was speaking at the'Artificial intelligence just got real' panel held by the International Advertising Association (IAA) and Mumbrella on how AI promises to change marketing along with almost every other industry. Kirsten Riolo, the director of social exchange at researcher Ipsos, agreed with Nicol on AI's impact on business: "A lot of the grunt work is being assisted by these machine learning tools. It enables us to take on the issues and really tease them out. "For us it means we are able to put our researcher hats on and think more around what are the problems we are working on with our clients," she continued. "We can use machine learning to get through the datasets, to get to the issue and work more around strategic issues at play than spending inordinate amounts of time on data" Asia Pacific technical executive for IBM Watson, Dev Mookerjee, said the changes occurring in marketing have already been seen in consumer behaviour, citing how Uber and AirBnB have been embraced despite initial privacy and safety concerns. "I have just come to a new city, with no idea about the city," Mookerjee said. "I have got into the car of a person I've never before met, I trust this person who takes me to someone else's house – who I've never met before and I'm going to live in that person's house.