“AI will not replace marketers, but will replace marketers that don’t leverage AI”

The digital world is rapidly evolving, and the 7th edition of DIGIXX Summit & Awards 2023, organised by Adgully, was aimed at exploring this transformation with the theme – ‘Virtual to Real – The Great Digital Transformation’.

Vartika Verma, Senior Director - Marketing, Gupshup delivered a keynote address on ‘AI thinking in MarketIng’. The address commenced with Vartika Verma briefing about Gupshup. She said, “Gupshup is a conversational engagement platform which helps brands automate marketing commerce and support. We're working with a lot of brands globally you know right from MPL, Citibank, Himalaya, Dabur, Airtel. One very shocking thing that we've been capturing in the last two to three sessions as well is the entire growth in AI Tech,Chat GPT, in large language models.”

Highlighting two industries which will undergo the biggest impact,  “It's not much of a surprise that McKinsey and Gartner have actually talked about the two industries which will over undergo the most impact. One is sales & marketing and the other one is development. There are a lot of ways in which marketers are now looking at deploying AI Tech as well.”

Referring to a famous saying about Ai and marketers Vartika remarked that AI will not replace marketers, but it'll replace marketers that don’t leverage AI.

“I think in advertising just to target audiences or leveraging uh e-commerce we're already using AI” she added.

Explaining why and how marketers should leverage Ai she stated, “One thing to note here is the speed at which is being adopted by our customers.  If you look at Twitter it took about a year to hit 1 million users. If you look at Facebook for 10 months. If you look at Spotify five months.If you look at Instagram two and a half months and for Tik Tok approximately around two and a half months but for ChatGPT it just took just five days to hit its first million users.”

According to Vartika, “What happened here is that the entire space of large language models, ai, ai tech was certainly democratized. Our customers were accessing tools like that and were asking brands to come and talk to me like this. So what really happened was customers started demanding a lot more with the proliferation of these kinds of tech platforms and businesses have been giving in as well.

Further she mentioned three trends, “If you look at the three key trends, the first one is the entire growth of smartphones and the internet. The entire thing about having smartphones and Powerful devices plus the Internet is making the user more powerful. Secondly, current 60-64% of the young population they're actually in a very experienced driven economy . What's happening is that owning things is becoming less important than experiencing things.”

Adding further, “ Thirdly,  the entire emerging tech industry is supporting this. Customers are becoming a lot more vociferous about what they want. Whats brewing up on the side is also a lot of machines learning us, machines aping us to an to the extent that there is actually a problem in GPT 3 which is called hallucination. But with the emerging technologies, internet coming to everybody’s hands and the entire experience economy one thing's become very clear is that it is a consumer's world and if customers are not made to be feel like king it is almost like you're risking your customers.”