9 minute read
The Future of AI & Digital Marketing
Artificial Intelligence (AI) in our lives, particularly in digital marketing and communication, has a special role. In 1997, Garry Kasparov played against Deep Blue, an AI-based computer program that studied all chess moves of grand masters. Grand masters still find it very difficult to play against AI chess programs on a cell phone. Of course, you can play a variety of AI-based games on the net; for instance, Bridge, which demands intelligence in the best of us, can be played on the net.
AI had taken roots many centuries ago. We heard about Artificial Intelligence in the early 15th Century. The bronze robot called Talos of Crete is a possible reference. About 100 years ago, the word ‘robotic’ entered our language when, at the National Theatre in Prague, the Czech playwright Karl Capex performed a beautiful play called “Russoms’s Universal Robots.” It was the first time that the word Robot was used (the Slavic root ‘Robot’ means ‘to work’), and since then robots entered our daily life. They are everywhere now. Artificial Intelligence is here to stay. They say that Artificial Intelligence cannot include human emotion and intuition, but this may not continue to be true for long.
There is a beautiful book by Kazuo Ishiguro, ‘The Remains of the Day,’ which tells about the life of an English butler. He knows everything about the people who are coming to the house, even the minutest of facts, allergies, food preferences, and even information about people who are affectionate to him. Artificial Intelligence does exactly the same. It learns everything around it and reacts to the environment. It is continuously learning; we are also continuously learning. One assumes that human emotions like love, hate, jealously will not enter into the calculations of a machine… Or, will it?
Another of Kazuo Ishiguro’s book, ‘Klara and the Sun,’ is about a girl called Josie, a thoroughly modern girl. Her parents—while having her—choose to have an extraordinary baby, manipulating the genes and coming up with a model baby with extraordinary powers and talent. Josie feels very lonely, so her parents buy her a Robotic friend: Klara. Both Josie and Klara have a very good and intimate friendship. As they interact, Klara learns more each day. One day, Josie says to Klara: “You are lucky that you do not have any emotions and feelings.” Klara responds: “As I learn and watch, I understand more. As I get access to feelings and emotions, it is only a matter of time before emotions become part of me.” The days are not so far off for computers to start thinking, feeling, and imagining.
We know how the world’s first computer occupied whole buildings; now we have computers in the palm of our hand. Even at this size, it can do everything that a regular-sized computer does. Size does not restrict its powers! Now we are becoming facile in the use of nanotechnology.
Let me take you through a few fields in order to understand digital marketing and communication using artificial intelligence.
For decades, we lived under the rules of mass advertising and marketing. We needed newspapers, whole pages of them, to convince people. Now we need two or three words to convey the message through WhatsApp! Gandhiji could convey the whole message of patriotism and sacrifice with two or three words. Think of the words and slogans that Gandhiji used: Do or Die; Be Indian, Buy Indian; Vande Mataram; and Satyamave Jayathe. Even today when we hear these words, we wake up and say we have to do something about this country… Do or die! Stick it on your mirror for every goal you have. He galvanized the nation and organized the Dandi march with just word-of-mouth communication. Imagine the power he would have had today with digital technology! Not surprisingly, he was voted the second most important man of the millennium.
Digital marketing is the combined impact of minute-to-minute interactions and communication. It is direct marketing. You can go to the heart of the person you want to convince. Every time Amazon contacts me, it does so with detailed knowledge. They know what books I like based on my preferences and searches. My sons, founders of a very interesting company called Bank Bazaar.com, use a lot of information about their customers. There is a lot of Artificial Intelligence involved in calling people—to be exact, calling people who need your product. If you have a housing product, you will not call a 15yearold kid; you will call a young man of around 32 years who wants to buy or sell a house.
As Vice President (Marketing), in Apollo hospitals, I have overseen a lot of activities taking place at a time when the concept of digital marketing was very new. But I am very envious of the fact that today we can have a heart-to-heart talk with persons coming in for a check-up. It is possible to treat every patient with unique medicines with unique methods of exercise and vitamins.
Health is a composite of physical, mental and spiritual as well as environmental wellbeing; it is more inward than outward. Each of us can control our own physiology, our emotions. If you know how to do that, we can create an Artificial Intelligence ‘product’ of ourselves.
Understanding product, price, place, and promotion in digital marketing is critical. If you take a product, it will keep changing with Artificial Intelligence: It will constantly improve; it will react to information that flows in from the market, from production, from finance, and even from human resources. Every area gets improved and constantly gets recreated on the run. Adaptation is the most important thing today in this time of extraordinary change ushered in by Covid19. So the product will become finer and finer and more and more suited, that it is like a voice speaking in the customer’s head. That is what Amazon is doing. Look at what they have achieved: 4 lakh jobs at a time where people are being thrown out of jobs. Artificial Intelligence can make our economy strong and powerful. The price of a product will go down once you understand your customer perfectly and you produce and sell the right quantity.
Because of digital marketing, today we have direct access into the homes, hearts and minds of our customers. We are able to listen to what they have to say to us. We can recreate the products we have. Instead of selling a lot of worthless products, we can now have products that the customer really needs at the mind level, soul level, and heart level. So selling will become something that is organic.
Consider ANY place: it is completely revolutionized by Artificial Intelligence and digital marketing. I don’t have to go anywhere; I can sit at the home and get anything, except mother’s love. Digital marketing has erased distance. It has made your home the center of everything.
It brings us back to Alvin Toffler, who in the 1970s said that the Industrial revolution dragged people from their homes to be sacrificed at the altar of technology. Today, it has been reversed by Covid19. We are now in what Toffler spoke about, ‘the electronic cottage’. The power shifts out of large factories and huge sites of production to small, beautifully designed comfortable homes where we can work now.
Somebody said, “Oh, God! All your temples are closed, where is your power?”
God said, “All my temples are closed you say, but every house is now a temple. All the temples have come into homes.”
That is what our philosophy teaches us. That God dwells in each of us, in each of our homes. That he dwells in every aspect of our life. Going somewhere far and praying to Him is not as great as offering Him everything that we do; because, it will be of the best quality. When you offer a flower from your garden to God that will be the best; when you offer work to God that will be the best.
Then we come back to ‘Promotion.’ How do you promote? In the past, promotion was with a broad brush: You say something, and you wanted everyone to like it. But today, to each person, I talk in a different way. Just like in our own mythology, God is in the form of a baby, if that is how you love the best. If you love your mother best, then God in the form of a baby. If you love your husband the best, then God is in the form of Krishna and the Gopikas. If you love power, then you love Tirupati Balaji. Every person sees God in the form of whom he could see, whom he could love on a very personal basis. This is what digital marketing is in the four areas of product, price, place, and promotion.
I would like to mention one thing when we talk about products. Just don’t talk about the physical products, talk about all the intangible services attached to the physical product. I think it is best demonstrated in a service market like corporate hospitals. If you are having a bypass surgery, you can get it free in a government hospital. You still will not take that free surgery, rather you would do it in a corporate hospital. Why? Because of a concept called ‘consideration’. You are willing to pay to avoid the inconvenience and lack of safety in a government hospital. All the different things that cause inconvenience increase consideration. The price is very high, but consideration is very low, then you go to a person who is going to make sure you are going to survive and you will not bother about the price. So this has a great impact on companies. They can increase the price to a great extent because people are more worried about safety, more worried about excellence, more worried about doctors, more worried about consideration. I would like to think through this whole thing where you think of a machine that becomes your friend. Our Whatsapp is almost a friend. Every morning the first thing that you want to know is what all your loved ones have said. What are the great thoughts and ideas received through Whatsapp? If it is used correctly, everything will be a great benefit. But if it is used wrongly, then anything can be bad.
Use your computer to record everything about your family—about their likes and dislikes, their health, and what suits them and what does not. You can build up your own artificial Siri, your own assistant that will coach you through this life, which I hope is a long and beautiful one. You can build your model life using Artificial Intelligence at your own command. Google, led by our own Sundar Pichai, announced that their Sycamore's Quantum System executed a calculation in 200 seconds, a feat that would take a classic computer 10000 years to do. Computers are becoming smarter all the time.
Can AI improve our life? Yes. Can AI destroy our life? Yes, it can. Whether you want an angel or monster, it depends on how you use it.
