• by Ray Schultz , Columnist, May 16, 2018

Artificial intelligence may not be a comfortable topic for some email marketers: As reported by MediaPost, a survey by GetResponse found that only 5% of marketers rate themselves as expert at it — most still have a steep learning curve. But AI is not going away.

Salesforce predicted last year that 80% of customer relationship management will be done without human interaction by 2020. And the report goes even further, stating that AI will drive 95% of all customer interactions by 2025. Are you ready?

The above findings are included in Should You Be Using AI In Your Business?, a white paper by Yazmin How, who draws from multiple sources and contributors. These predictions clearly apply to transactional email and communications in other channels.

Consider the use cases already being driven by AI: Data analytics is the top one by far -- a key tool in email marketing, followed by sales/marketing, health care and automation. Further down the list — way down — are ioT, security, FinTech and legal. But nobody should be left behind.

"As more companies are able to implement AI models in their businesses through the availability of cloud platforms (for instance, from Google, Amazon, Microsoft), AI technology will continue to become more accessible to both industry and society at large," the paper states, quoting Hugo Larochelle, Google Brain.

What is AI exactly? It is “the simulation of intelligence in computers: behavior exhibited by non-biological systems that we would consider intelligent if exhibited by humans,” it says, quoting Ed Newton-Rex. 

It adds that “A more recent approach, is ‘machine learning’ where the computer learns how to complete tasks by being exposed to large datasets.”

What does this mean for email marketers? The paper cites research, showing that 90% of marketers believe personalization is the future, while 86% say it has an impact on their purchasing. In addition, 82% of consumers feel more positive about a company after receiving personalized content.

“Companies striving to build emotional connections with their users will see increased customer satisfaction through emotional AI,” one source states.  

Another adds that consumers will be “unable to differentiate bots from humans workers via online chats as well as over the phone.” 

What about fears that jobs will be lost? Some will: A Capgemini study estimated that 1.8 million jobs will disappear. But they will be replaced — and then some — by 2.3 million new jobs, the same study predicts. 

Meanwhile, here are a couple of other insights into AI: 

• 60% of AI platforms will be hosted by Amazon, Alphabet, IBM and Microsoft by the next decade due to their cloud computing strength. 
• 57% of consumers expect voice-activated assistants to affect their daily lives by 2020.

Some of this is already happening.