As a business owner, it might be tempting to think that many jobs can be redundant due to the growth and evolution of AI, in marketing. Whether it is copywriting, automation for ads, or even developing creatives with text-to-image tools, or text-to-video tools, there are many tools that are evolving each year.
This is a risky idea or fallacy to imagine. Here are 5 reasons why AI tools cannot replace your marketing team or agency.
Everyone has the same idea:
Every business owner will have the same idea, and to some extent using AI to outsource or reduce manpower dependency makes sense. However, AI tools train on certain datasets. Can you imagine your brand sounding like every other brand that’s used the same services? The very definition of a brand is the distinction in everything: touch, feel, experience, and all aspects of the brand. While AI tools are trained on vast pools of data, remember there’s only 1 Coca-Cola and 1 Nike –because they have spent decades using the same tone of communication across a variety of platforms, consistently.
The bias in data:
When you hire a copywriter, or a marketing agency, they learn a lot of unspoken truths about your brand or business. The value of the output AI can get is only governed by the input parameters. This means that the quality of what you receive still depends on the effectiveness of the prompts. You would still need someone with a nuanced understanding of your brand, and able to get the best results.
Lack of creativity and innovation:
The reality of AI is that it’s based on previous data and is not capable of finding innovative solutions at this stage of the timeline in tech. This is largely true for most of the AI tools in marketing currently. AI can certainly operate on unseen data too, but when it comes to language and communication, it evolves at a rate much faster than AI ever can. Relying overtly on AI tools for brand purposes may lead to stagnant, or outdated ideas which aren’t in line with the current market conditions, or customer truths. For a brand looking to develop experiences and touch people’s lives, it’s fallacious to use the same cookie cutter approach.
Inconsistent quality:
While AI tools are great for quick responses, for a more nuanced understanding of a business, product, or workings of technology, nothing can beat a human mind’s ability to draw connections between discrete ideas. They can also give you great copy, or ideas a few times. But getting consistent insightful marketing ideas, or brand narratives is not easy, or recommended. Connecting the dots of many ideas is what leads to brand experiences, and storytelling. You can choose to have a few rules when writing sentences which are true about your brand but the personality a human can bring to it is very different from restrictive AI based tools. For example, Nike’s famous “Just do it” is three words that today represents the brand –but converting these sentences into a memorable multisensory experience is not something AI can currently do.
The machine voice lacks the warmth of human narratives:
For anyone who has ever been moved by brand campaigns –be it Coca Cola, Apple, or other brands, the most salient aspect is the ability to evoke emotion. AI tools are far from being evocative because they’re not designed for this.
While AI evolves, at least for the foreseeable future, many simple tasks can be definitely automated and outsourced. As they must, human intelligence must be used for more evolved and refined tasks. However, creativity, innovation and creation still very much remain bastions of human intelligence.
