Are the borgs taking over? Yeah. Maybe. Hell, I don’t know.

I love the 1993 movie Tombstone, starring Kurt Russell. At one point in the movie, Kurt, as Wyatt Earp, is asked “Do you believe in God?”.  His answer? “Yeah. Maybe. Hell, I don’t know.” If someone asks me “Ron, do you know how to perfectly harness AI for marketing and customer experience?” my response is pretty much the same. “Yeah. Maybe. Hell, I don’t know.”

Jeez, I just don’t know.

The truth is none of us really know. We see value, we see drawbacks, we see opportunities, we see pitfalls.  I love the idea of disrupting, changing, challenging conventional wisdom. I see AI tools as being vital in that pursuit. What scares me is we may be reaching the point where machines have more intelligence than humans, where machines act as human as humans. I’ll leave this debate to the ethicists.

As marketers, our job is to solve problems for our customers.

Flashback to Penn State University, Spring 1988, Comm 417 class. Young me was taught that all advertising and marketing should solve problems. Prove that you know your customer, understand the problems they have and present ways for them to solve those problems. Simple as that.  So can AI help solve customer problems? Yep, already is. Can it do more? Sure.

Tech for tech’s sake is no good. Use tech to serve a strategic purpose.

Always start with the end-in-mind. For years and years now, many people come to me with great ideas on how to harness technology. Often times, it’s folks that have tactics in search of strategies. Strategies should drive the tactics.  Strategically, as a marketer:

• I need to understand customer info-gathering and buying behaviors.
• I need to understand how they search on-line contextually.
• I need to understand functional and emotional buying triggers.
• I need to know how they develop their consideration set and various purchase options.
• I need to be able to better serve my customers with speed, certainty and simplicity.

Consider first what you want and need to learn to better sell and serve customers and then you can look for the AI solutions that help you.

How can AI help me, and others like me?

You have to understand: I am so NOT a tech guy. I have really good people around me who make me look smarter and more respectable that I am actually am. But, I may not know how to build a car, but I know how to get behind the wheel and get from one place to another. Though I may not be fully-conversant on all of the latest AI tools available to me, I see a number of ways that AI can help me serve my customers with greater speed, certainty and simplicity along the buying path:

• Information Gathering: I see ways in which AI can help me better understand the words and phrases prospects and customers use with search or with human interactions so I can optimize my demand-gen programs…PPC, social, SEO, automated marketing.  Give me tools that help me gather info real-time and pivot quickly with customer-facing programs and I’m all-in.
• Website Presentation: My website needs to perfectly reflect the interests of each individual visitor. My website needs to instantly convey how we’re relevant, different and better for them. I see AI tools at helping us assemble incredible information on buyer journeys, from their referring source to my website to their path to conversion. Plugging-in tech solutions that learn quickly and dynamically present my website for highly-personal solutions is a big win.
• Closing the Sale: Not everyone buys the same way. Some are impulsive, others deliberative. Some price-driven, others driven by comprehensive value. Some buy on emotions, others purely function.  I see AI integrating into CRM and call center technology platforms to create instant buyer personas based on past interactions, LinkedIn or other publicly-available information to help me improve sales conversion funnels.
• Customer Service: Same principles as closing the sale. Connecting AI tools to CRM and customer service platforms can help us speak the language of our customers on their terms and help defuse situations, calm emotions, solve problems and save revenue.

Don’t ask me to give you a review of the tools available or features and benefits and pricing and integrations into systems. I just don’t know what I should right now. But I do know that there are certainly ways AI can help me engage, acquire, retain and serve customers.

Right now, I’m learning along with others, much like I did in the early 90’s with in-house graphic design software, the late 90’s with internet development and e-commerce, the early 2000’s with the growth of search engine marketing and optimization and lately with the impact of smart devices, apps, social marketing, influencers, voice and contextual search and more.

Advice to marketers is that you don’t need to have to have it all figured out right now. You just need stay restless and curious and constantly looking for ways to better understand and serve your customers, and the tech solutions will follow.

So, maybe I do have it kinda figured out, right? Yeah. Maybe. Hell, I don’t know.