Before you get mad at Siri and smash your iPhone, read on to find out how 5 common marketing roles might change in the next 5 years.
For the past 100 years technology has been changing how we work and with AI on the horizon we can expect the rate of disruption to increase. Recently Jack Ma (马云) CEO of Alibaba said he thinks eventually even CEOs might be replaced.
Before we worry about the top 1%, you’ve probably already noticed technologies like chat bots and voice recognition entering our daily lives. In the next 25 years many jobs will be completely replaced. This infographic from Futurism gives a great overview, but let’s look specifically at the marketing industry.
Creativity and people skills are essential to the majority of marketing roles which should stop most of your jobs being swept away by AI. Machines are great at handling data and searching for patterns, but have difficulties understanding context, human emotion and the intention behind our behavior. This makes marketing a mostly human job for now, but change will happen, and maybe faster than you think.
Let’s take a look at a few different roles and predict how they will change.
Telemarketers
You must have heard about telemarketing robots, or already picked up some phone calls from them. Chatbots and voice recognition are getting more and more conversational, and AI can understand and solve most of your users’ problems.
Although Futurism gives a 99% probability for telemarketers to be replaced by automation, we think there is still a glimmer of hope. It’s true that big data and machine learning make AI more conversational and better at problem-solving, but AI might be too domain-specific for an open-ended conversation, while a human relationship can potentially make a sale.
Advertisers, media buyers, etc.
With more data available, more powerful audience segmentation is possible, and soon machine learning will optimize user targeting better than you can. Data analysis and segmentation tools can already achieve greater accuracy more quickly than humans. For example, Take a look at Albert, an AI for autonomous targeting and media buy.
Content writers
Your job is creative and relatively safe, but AI is trying very hard to learn and create natural human language.
Although AIs still have difficulties with contextual reasoning, take a look at how products like Wordsmith and Quill create business content in natural language, or how the Hemingway app checks your sentence’s readability or IBM’s Watson analyzes your tone. It may still be a long time before computers write great literature, but AI should soon be good enough to create multiple marketing messages and directly target your users.
Designers
If you thought designers would get a 5/5 safety score, just take a look at the Grid, a web design tool powered by AI. In the near future, designers might work just like editors: the AI produces the basic design and the designer adds a human touch to make it more relatable.
With AI software becoming more available, AI interface design could be a growth area for designers. Here’s an article about how to design visually appealing AI interfaces to make them feel less threatening to humans.
Event coordinator
Congratulations! To coordinate an event is a job exclusively for humans. This requires great interpersonal skills to understand not only what people mean, but also what makes people think the way they do. Machines so far, have trouble comprehending this level of complexity, and we doubt they will any time soon. Perhaps we all need to retrain to be event coordinators!
I’m in shock. What should I do now?
If you’re worried you’ll soon be out of a job, here are 4 tips to survive the rise of the machines…
1) Learn about AI
Better to be designing the AI than be replaced by it.
2) Work on your empathy
It’ll be a long time before machines can really relate to humans so double down on this advantage.
3) Boost your creativity
Make a conscious effort to hone your skills and shift your role to be more creative.
4) Keep learning
Stay on top of the latest developments in your field. The last to change are always the ones who suffer most.
Agree or disagree with our predictions? Leave a comment below to let us know!
