"ideas are free, execution is priceless."

If last year the focus was on chatbots, in 2017 we must take a careful look at Artificial Intelligence - AI for short - especially in the field of marketing.

What is AI?

AI is a scientific branch that aims to reproduce human behaviors and cognitive intelligence thanks to computer science. Supposedly, automated tasks would overall improve people's lives and allow them more freedom, since they will not have to deal with the "technical" aspects of their daily "chores".

To give an example, AI is what make Tom Cruise so efficient at his job in Minority Report.

Other (real-life) examples of AI include:

IBM Watson, the (very) smart voice recognition program from IBM's DeepQA research project.

Google's Self-Driving Car, which, even though is not commercialized yet, is making great improvement in terms of AI

Writing-Bots, available for anyone, and especially very useful for news websites, and content marketers.

Overall, from writing skills to driving skills, through vocal recognition and many others, Artificial Intelligence will impact the world more than Internet and robots combined. Why? Because if Big Data and Robots had a child it would be AI.

What is AIM?

Basically, the automation of marketing. Imagine not having to wait for weeks before being able to collect all the necessary data. Oh, right, sorry. This already exists. But now, imagine having someone analyse it for you so fast, so accurately, and without any default. What would you say?

Right?

AI has been created to help people. Businesses provide products and services. Why shouldn't they ally with AI in order to provide the best services and the highest quality products possible?

For marketers, AI represents a fantastic opportunity to make better decision, to automate their jobs, to be better at targeting and reaching customers. But it also represents important threats.

AI is going to disrupt Marketing...

Accessing enormous amounts of data, and enabling computers to take their own decisions regarding strong marketing strategies clearly states that AI will help marketers get their jobs done.

However, since AI, by its very use and data consumption, is becoming more and more intelligent, it is very likely that AI will, at some point, ban some form of marketing.

Imagine an ads program that knows it will encounters 50% of ad blocking on its way to deliver banners and popup. It's pretty sure that the AI will forbid the launch of the campaign, because it will be a waste of money, and the AI will be set up to never be losing money on any operations. Now imagine, you are about to click “send” on a emailing campaigns, but the AI knows that less than 5% of your 100,000 targeted people will open this email... this time it will not even let you send the email.

But AI will also be the best marketers' ally!

Indeed, by knowing exactly what, when, and where people want to buy something, it can deliver the product (or at least its information) at the exact moment where the percentage of conversion is the highest.

Marketing AI will recognize patterns of all users buying on a given store and will be able to predict the next 10, 100, 1000 buying customers. So the AI can go get them, and repeat the operations. The war between companies owning AI and the ones who won’t will be fierce. It can be compared to a brick and mortar store trying to conquer the world without using the Internet.

Same goes for Marketers, the ones who won’t be able to build, train, and master AI tools will be left behind. Because even the smartest strategists or best copywriters in the world will not own 1% of all the data the AI will have and and will use to make its choices.

A second thought on how AI will improve marketing has been raised here. AI not only will help marketers greatly improve their data mining, but may also strengthen their communication skills, and allow easier interactions with potential clients.

Basically, what you search for on the Internet, or any digital information you leave behind you is another demonstration of your interests, and ultimately, your personality. Being able to interpret all of this data is key to successful marketing, and commerce in general.

AI will destroy many jobs in industries that don’t see it coming

Do you feel like making any predictions about AI or marketing? Here is mine: you will not see it coming (unless you are reading this article). Who would have guessed that AI can win a Poker Championship, where the main skill is bluff.

Overall, industries will be strongly disrupted by a sudden change in their employee's daily tools. As the Darwin law states it, some people will adapt, some won't; and eventually, some companies will survive, and others won't.

2017 is already prone to strong changes in AI. It is only a question of time until marketing, and commerce in general, becomes even more dynamic, and productive than ever.

Marketers have always been a category of fast moving individuals. I hope and think it will continue to be the case, because this time being the best one in the room will not be enough. Marketers will need to work with AI and master its use, because it won't be possible to be against it, otherwise...

The headline at CNET said it all: All hail Mark Zuckerberg, king of the bots.

“Zuckerberg,” they wrote, “is betting on chatbots, software powered by artificial intelligence that can perform simple tasks: compose an email, book travel plans or figure out why your cable just went out. Send a text to a chatbot in a messaging app, and the software automatically jumps into gear to serve you.”

Chatbots are not unique to Facebook, though. You’ve probably already encountered a chatbots in the wild either serving you up the latest weather forecast, updating you with details of your flights, reminding you about an upcoming business trip, or keeping you informed about the progress of your delivery pizza.

As mobile personal assistants like Apple’s Siri or Alexa, Amazon’s incredibly popular assistant on the Echo platform, become more popular and ubiquitous, and increasingly able to understand what humans mean rather than what they just say, bots are becoming a part of the daily life of millions. That role is only going to expand further, with Zuckerberg revealing in his most recent keynote address that he’s working on a personal butler bot for his home.

There’s a reason that tech giants like Facebook, Apple, Amazon and Google are embracing chatbots: the public love them. Anything that helps to smooth the communication and lessen the influx of texts, emails, newsletters, reminders, and phone calls needed to get through the normal everyday tasks that everyone faces is a winning idea. What’s more, if the communication can be automated as with a chatbot it can then be scaled so as to solve the small and repetitive problems that millions encounter daily.

And this is where a conversational user experiencer is so important. The real revolution that arrives with chatbots is that all the actions of clicking and navigating on the internet as we have become used to in the last 25 years could be replaced by speaking and writing, which is something we have been accustomed to for thousands of years. Chatbots will help make our technological interactions more human once again.

But while the consumer facing chatbots have attracted much of the press attention, the business facing chatbots that are already emerging and will soon emerge are set to revolutionize the way that business-to-business enterprise is conducted.

Chatbot Consulting

Imagine that you’re a stock trader charged with managing the money of your enterprise clients. You consult charts, data, make calls, read the market, and make your calls. You’re the essential middleman between the numbers and the investors, and you’re irreplaceable.

Or at least you were irreplaceable.

With the continuing advances in both artificial intelligence and the rise of chatbots, the role of the stock trader is going to change significantly, if not be replaced altogether. Consider how a chatbot with access to the same data might deal with a client by simple chat:

INVESTOR:   "Should I shift any positions today?

CHATBOT:    Suggest selling off $10K of Smith Inc. to invest in Jones Inc.

INVESTOR:   Why?

CHATBOT:    Smith Inc. is experiencing management changes. Jones Inc. is reporting stronger East Asian sales. Will you approve the trade?

INVESTOR:   Yes.

CHATBOT:    OK. I will contact you again when the trade is complete."

Simple as that, the trade is progress and the chatbot checks back in when it’s all done.

The morning phone call to the broker? A thing of the past. The daily check in to a portfolio web dashboard? No longer necessary. And the trader? Well, they’re barely needed are they? A smart chatbot with access to the same data, following a specific algorithm, and responding at lightning speed around the clock is far more efficient than a trader trying to communicate with multiple clients across a variety of time zones and using disparate technologies while trying to keep ahead of the market.

The chatbot that replaces the trader is faster, more flexible, and harder working than any human, and the end of the trading middleman is clearly in sight.

But it isn’t just traders who should be worried.

Chatbots and Marketing

The world of marketing remains, for the most part, dominated by marketing agencies. Despite the growing proportion of work completed by freelance teams and outsourced to experts outside of the agency system, the retainer-fueled agency remains the first port of call for many seeking to market their businesses at home and abroad.

Yet technology in general and chatbots in particular are challenging this agency-first instinct. Chatbots connected to a marketplace of freelance marketers will allow business small and large to launch a marketing campaign with nothing more than a few short messages. A marketing chatbot with the access to data and analytical tools of the same caliber as the stock trading chatbot will prove more than capable of launching, tracking, and reporting on a marketing campaign. Consider the following exchange:

BUSINESS: "I want to improve my marketing in the UK. Where should I focus?

CHATBOT: What website would you like to focus on?

BUSINESS: MyBusiness.co.uk

CHATBOT: OK. I’ll analyze the site and get back to you fast."

…

CHATBOT:    The best option is probably a series of articles focused on the keywords alpha, beta, and gamma. The price would be £1500 over 3 months. Should we launch?

BUSINESS:  No. My budget is £1000.

CHATBOT:  The best option at £1000 is a series of articles focused on the keywords alpha and beta. The price would be £1000 over 3 months. Should we launch?

BUSINESS:   Yes.

Simple as that, the marketing campaign is underway.

Like the trading chatbot, the marketing chatbot is smart enough to analyze the relevant data and communicate a plan. What’s more, the chatbot can react to requests like a diminished budget or a narrower focus on the behalf of a business. And best of all, the entire campaign can be planned without having to pay a single dollar as a retainer to an agency: the business pays only for the marketing it wants and it can be delivered on demand.

Betting on the Chatbots

When Mark Zuckerberg talks the world listens, and when the Facebook CEO starts talking up chatbots you can be sure there are going to be many who will be embracing the technology along with him. More than just a friendly voice on a smartphone or a friendly assistant changing your Spotify playlist at home, chatbots and the underlying AI are going to impact the work that we do and even the types of jobs that we have.

I was recently chatting with a good friend of mine, who happens to be a successful entrepreneur in the fashion industry. He called me from work late on a Sunday, and frankly I was surprised he was still working. I wouldn’t have been surprised if it was coming from “a Web Entrepreneur”, since they can work whenever and wherever.

But I wasn’t expecting that from a “real economy” company guy.

So I asked him, “You’re really working on a Sunday evening? And on Easter weekend?”

And with a very wise voice, he answered quoting Confucius:

“Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life .”

I laughed, we chatted, and then I let him get back to his work.

Later, though, I gave this sentence some thought and realized how right he was. No, not my friend and his Easter weekend workday, but Confucius.

It’s true. This what humans have sought forever - never having to work a day in their life.

And what we have built and are building with technology is basically taking work out of our life; or at least making it less painful, more enjoyable, more like a hobby.

More like something we actually love.

What work used to be.

If I ask you to imagine what it was like working 1000 years ago, you could easily picture someone being forced to harvest wheat without ever being paid, maybe only keeping a small portion for his family. Most of the jobs were not “jobs” of choice but rather imposed by where you were born and who your parents were.

Of course, a few blue-blood and privileged people used to have the right to practice arts, sports and other hobbies. If you were a merchant you’d be lucky to be practicing something approaching an entrepreneurial venture, but you would have had to give a huge chunk of revenue to the lord governing your town.

Work was hard, mostly boring, and there was no opportunity for the spirit to flourish.

What work is today

The unemployment rate is a sign of modern society where work is not a necessity anymore but can instead be a choice. Obviously, few people are making the choice to be unemployed, but you can survive without a job.  But 500 years ago, not having a job would mean you were either an artist or dead. Today, many people don’t consider work being something other than actual work, because they learn, they travel, they grow their network, they advance in their career.

You have the choice to become a doctor, a lawyer, a farmer, a truck-driver - indeed there are hundreds of jobs you can choose from. Some require long and costly years of school, some others can be started as soon as the law allows you to.

As an example, many successful entrepreneurs like Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg are drop-outs from college, so who said you need to have a Master’s degree to build a world leading company?

In modern society you can choose the rhythm of your work week. Most people will do 40 to 50 hours in developed countries, maybe less if you are lucky enough to be working in Germany or Norway.

But we have invented great ways to be taking a break from work, too. Paid Time Off, Bank Holidays, and vacation in exchange for overtime. So you can easily manage your week to make it lighter and if you are about to burn-out just take some Non-Paid Time Off for a year to travel around the world.

We have made work more flexible, more enjoyable, and is today the best way to advance socially. Most of these changes have happened in the last 250 years since the French and American Revolutions put the individual citizen back in the central position of power in the nation-state.

What work will be in 2100

1. Everybody will be an artist:

everybody loves what they do and does it perfectly well.

Remember when at school your teacher asked you “what you want to do when you grow up?” All of you wanted to be a fireman, a singer, a vet, or a professional sportsperson. For me, I wanted to be an astronaut (actually I still think I can become one, one day!). We wanted to do these jobs not for the money we’ll make out of them but for the dream it represented. As kids we saw those not as jobs, but as dreams.

But then life came in and we had to make choices. For me, math was too abstract to see me following a scientific track. So instead of being free as an astronaut in space, I found out that maybe being an entrepreneur would be a kind of an astronaut in the job market. Technology, again, is making this a reality, providing the opportunity we have today is to do what we love and be great at it. There are fewer and fewer barriers to be changing career paths overnight in order to pursue happiness.

2. Everybody will be a  freelancer:

people at the center and not the organization.

This is one of the reasons for some of the strongest fights in our society: employees fighting employers, people against companies. This will end. In few years from now everyone will have the capacity to run their very own company with themselves at the center of the value chain. Large corporations have already started to decline in employee numbers and in value. Look at the difference of value per employee of Tesla vs GM, even if both are manufacturing cars. GM creates $240,000 of market value per employee, while Tesla creates $2.9 million. Companies don’t need to be at the center of the society but can be replaced with individuals and talents. “Work” becomes much more fluid, like a service. And, just as we talk about Software as a Service (SaaS) we’ll soon talk about WaaS, or "Work as a Service".

3. Work will have no structure:

from centralized and timed, to everywhere and at anytime.

Technology has made it possible already to be anywhere on Earth and make an impact. A company like Google which was for years hiring thousands of Indian people and flying them to Mountain View, California, is  now growing its workforce directly in India.

Marketplaces of workers can now be used almost as a total replacement of traditional recruitment. How many job listings are now being replaced by a post on Upwork or Freelancer.com?

This is what I see, within DOZ, our very own marketing agency in the cloud. Many of our clients would have, in the past, hired full time employees to manage their marketing. Due to the nature of marketing, its globalization and its speed, our clients and many other companies feel more comfortable managing talents in the cloud. This is the case for marketing, and many other verticals. This is why we’ll soon talk more about the ‘cloud of people’ instead of just ‘cloud computing’.

4. Work will be enabled by Technology:

artificial Intelligence does everything we hate.

Have you seen Boston Robotics robots lifting heavy boxes? Imagine all jobs that require physical effort disappear in less than fifty years. Of course there will be unemployment as a result but humanity as a whole will increase its quality of life and its life expectancy, too. In the past the one has always followed the other, and every time we invent new tools, new energy, new ways to expend less effort to achieve more, our life expectancy has improved.

The more technology is involved in our lives, the less that ‘work’ will seem like ‘work’. We’ll be automating all recurring and boring tasks and removing all physical efforts.

Not only was Confucius right in his time but he was also a visionary. His quote is more than two millennia old and, while it took time, we’ve been never so close to making it a reality for all. Of course, I’m not blind to the reality that the privileged, the wealthy and the better educated will benefit from this evolution first, but I’m optimistic to see technological progress making it accessible to all of the world - and soon.