Decoding Artificial Intelligence’s big role in the future of Martech

AI is transforming how marketing departments automate their procedures. Marketers can optimise their processes and minimise manual intervention using AI-powered automation technologies, freeing up time and resources for more strategic operations.

Overall, the continuing growth and development of AI technology will be crucial to the success of the martech industry. AI will open up new opportunities for marketers as it develops and becomes more sophisticated, enabling them to develop more effective and individualised campaigns that produce better outcomes.

For a better understanding of the market ecosystem, Agully’s DIGIXX Summit and Awards 2023 hosted a panel discussion on the topic ‘Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Martech’, which was moderated by Vishal Singh, Country Head, India, Xapads Media.

The esteemed panelists included:

Anita Nayyar, COO, Patanjali

Abhimanyu Vyas, Business Head, Pivot Consult

Ashish Tiwari, CMO, Homecredit

Mukesh Ghuraiya, CMO, Modi Naturals

At the outset, Vishal Singh spoke about Xapads Media’s whole stack advertising platform with its AI-enabled programmatic setting. He also noted how, compared to five years ago when the behaviour and requirement of consumers were projected based on assumptions, today AI assists in forecasting the consumers’ behaviour and requirements with the millions and billions of data that we already have.

He opened the dialogue by posing the first query, “If we look at the last 5-6 years, where there are a lot of shining objects for us to play like AR/VR and the Metaverse, the most shining star of all for me is AI. The future of Martech is also in the next 5 years horizon, from the collective experience of 100+ years on the stage, I would like to understand how marketers have used AI in your field and where you think it is going in the next couple of years?”

Ashish Tiwari responded by saying, “I work for a product category, if you need it you won’t get it. I work for a credit company. On one line of our business, we give mobile loans and process more than 15,000 applications a day. There are a lot of back-end activities going on for a single application and we have to get the clarity of 200-300 applications in a single day. Decision-making is done in less than 30 seconds and that’s the power of AI. When I put AI into anything, it sounds so miraculous, but the reality is, it is the power of the entire decision-making engine which is powered by the usage of the right sets of data. The ultimate objective of a business is to make money and make a profit.”

Abhimanyu Vyas added a few insights to this by saying, “I’d like to add one more thing. There’s this joke going around – last year in Silicon Valley or a couple of years back when a Y Combinator went to Silicon Valley and asked all the start-ups, what they are into, most of them were saying we are into crypto. This year when they went and asked, most of them said AI. So, the point is, AI may have been there for quite some time, but is the talk of the town only now. The other point is, if anyone wants to invest in AI, they need to understand what their problem is, its support, acquisition, and customer lifecycle management, and based on that problem, then start working towards the solution using AI.”

Continuing the conversation, Anita Nayyar added, “As far as AI is concerned, not everybody needs to work as these guys work with AI, because it completely depends on what stage your brand is, in terms of digital transformation. Everybody you know is on the top chart of digital transformation and hence, wherever you are as a brand, that defines how you would use AI in terms of managing stuffs. In the world of AI, whichever category of brand you are talking about, human intervention is important for the simple reason that machines also are run by humans.”

“While we are an FMCG company, I’ll say we are a consumer company. FMCG is just a name given to it; the good and bad about FMCG is that we want to operate on a mass scale and given the diversification of India, that is the most challenging aspect. For every marketer, the biggest pain point is targetting the various sets of audiences present in India. If I do the TVC, the production will take one week and the adaption will take another one week. I believe having the generative AI, we have been using it for programmatic buying through our media mixes, but generative AI has transformed the market in the past six months and I’ll not say it is the future, but it is the present as well,” remarked Mukesh Ghuraiya.

These are edited excerpts. For the complete discussion, watch below:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LASQZTLl6Js