AI can create and drive innovation but lacks empathy, hope, imagination, and purpose: MMA Impact 2024 Summit

Mumbai: While AI can generate creative, drive innovation it cannot generate empathy, hope, imagination, purpose. Empathy and purpose is what makes brands relevant and so marketers need to see what role they can play in this area. At the same time they should not get carried away with AI as a tool. The danger is that social media will increasingly become an echo chamber as more machine generated content gets regurgitated through ML and AI. Marketers have a role to play here as well. These points were made at a panel discussion during MMA India’s Impact India 2024 Summit. The discussion was called ‘Crafting Smarter Experiences: Going beyond Speed and Scale With AI.’ The speakers were Marico head media, digital marketing and brand PR India Ankit Desai, Interactive Avenues executive VP media and investment Harish Iyer and DSP Mutual Fund head of B2C Growth Pawan Gurnani. The moderator was Inmobi India VP, GM Devika Sharma who is also an MMA board member. Desai said that when one looks at history when the Internet started out it was populated by content that humans created that got uploaded. Today that content is being supplemented by machine generated content that is overlaid by human bias. His fear is that the third step is on the way where the same machine generated content gets regurgitated. There may be a risk of echo chambers being created on social media and so you feel that the world view is your view. A larger echo chamber might be created that can threaten to engulf humanity. Marketing has its own little small part to play. The one thing that differentiates humanity is around imagination. The other two things are empathy and hope. They are human traits that AI today cannot generate. It cannot build on them he explains. Brands are built around empathy and hope. It is a space that exists in a consumers mind and so marketers have a role to see what they can drive in these spaces. AI can be a tool that helps one generate stuff faster. But at the same time one should not get carried away with AI as a tool per se instead of what the tool can help you with. He also said that while there is experimentation in B2C AI like weather reports there is scope for AI in B2B. That is a more interesting piece for him. While B2C front facing AI is glamorous there is a lot beneath the surface. This is what he calls B2B AI like sales analytics, sales trends etc. “There is a lot of meat there. Please keep that in mind. Please look at AI as not just about B2C. It has got both facets” He gave the example of an insight to concept being created for one of the company’s brands. Typically this work tends to take a couple of weeks. But a young brand manager started working on this using a free AI tool and it took three hours. This happened because he was able to draw on a lot of knowledge in a refined manner. There is a lot to explore here. Iyer said that humans need to educate themselves on AI tools so that data can be uncomplicated. He noted that people are at the core and technology then comes in. Technology keeps changing and it is important to keep coming up with processes. He spoke about the importance of personalisation being done at scale. Gurnani noted that it is not only important to hold consumers attention. It is important to make consumers remember why they approach brands and vice versa. What technology has done is to give flexibility of switching between topics, genres that you want to read about, watch. It is important for marketers that consumers remember what it is that the brands stand for. He also noted that his company has used AI to work on small data. While people generally talk about big data his company focusses on small data. This is behavioural data. The aim is to understand what are the pain points in a consumer’s journey and how do you resolve them. One see things like where the maximum drop offs are happening. One sees the time of the day that consumers come to the platform and then one can check as to whether at that time can a relevant communication happen. The aim is not push a product but to give the relevant information so that the consumer can take a call. The session noted that there are new platforms and publishers coming up that use AI innovatively. It is the age of experimentation. For brands it is about partnerships and seeing what strength a platform brings to a table, what is it experimenting with. Then have some fun together and see if the business objectives can be met. That Desai explains is the broad approach that Marico has taken. For one platform it could be about using AI to boost the level of content engagement and then that is passed back onto brands. For another platform it could be about displaying a very high quality of personalisation where you can still get that engagement. There are different ways in which different publishers are trying to access this space and Marico is pretty much experimenting with them as it goes along. He added that it is good to experiment as long as one has set up clear KPIs. Then one can experiment and scale up. He also send that one should no take oneself too seriously. Iyer noted that brands set aside a budget for experimentation when a media plan is being devised. It is not important that you get it right the first time. See what is being done incorrectly. Also a lot of platforms understand the consumer’s journey on their platforms and so they can come back with solutions that work for brands. Customisation happens. He also mentioned the importance of investing in technology and everyone needs to looks at this. It is about upskilling to do a whole lot of things. Upskilling is important otherwise people will not be able to use technology to deliver the required output. Gurnani spoke about the importance of partners and platforms. Every organisation has their own tech head. If the ecosystem of partners gets developed over time and evolves then this would incentivise brands to do better. At the same time investing is not easy. It is about creating a consumer’s journey and bringing that communication to the right set of people. Partners enable his company to do more. If partners have technologically evolved and have adopted AI and have a great use case and cam help his company deliver objectives then that is something to look forward to. His advice for marketers is to use AI to do less, do different and do good. Marketers also need to be responsible, ethical. Companies need to make the right set of investments in people. “While technology is there my personal belief is that we need to invest in people by helping them to reskill, upskill, by giving them the opportunity to do better, do different and reinvent the whole strategy. My last point is to embrace the change and live in the grey”.