Coinciding with ChatGPT celebrating its second birthday last week, I spoke at two conferences dedicated to the impact of GenAI on marketing: D-CODE 2024 by the Ad Club of India and Google, and another one at an MMA knowledge session. Even as we enter the age of AI in work and business, some functions and industries will be affected more than the others. I believe that the functions in the immediate cross hairs of GenAI are contact centres, creative functions, software development, and, yes, marketing.

Marketing is a unique function which combines creative with quantitative. A marketer’s right brain needs to create strategies, advertising and positioning and the messaging of it to an ever-dynamic consumer. The left brain, meanwhile, needs to be on top of media buying, media response analytics, and delve into the innards of the AdTech algorithms that dictate buying search and social ads. AI has been all over the latter, with Google, Meta and others building AI into every piece of advertising that they sell. The former, the creative part, has been a human domain so far, as the best marketers and advertisers created unique and evocative messaging and advertising to support their marketing strategy. While the latter is ‘arithmetic,’ the former is ‘language.’ And it is in the language part that marketers now have a competitor – GenAI and its Large Language Models which are built on language, and can spin out creativity at will. Thus, it was not surprising to see both nervousness and excitement writ large on the face of the marketers I met last week.

I believe that GenAI is the best thing that could happen to a marketer, but only if she is willing to grasp it, and leverage its awesome power to connect to the new kind of customer emerging in this AI era. Marketers have gone through a wrenching change once before, as the Internet, social media and Search upended their lives and forced a change from who could produce the best TV ad or choose the best hoarding in town, to who could master the arcane world of AdWords and real-time bidding. The pre-Internet customer, who I call the Industrial customer, gave way to the Digital Customer as Instagram, Google and other apps started dominating their lives. The Digital Customer, I believe, will give way to the AI Customer, as ChatGPT and other AI tools and agents inveigle themselves into our lives.

The Industrial customer had limited and standardized choice, while the digital one reckoned with the abundant variety that Amazon threw open for her. The AI customer’s choice will be infinite and hyper-personalised, as agents scour the Internet to find what she wants, based on her innate preferences, likes and dislikes. Interaction with products was transactional and local for the Industrial Customer, social and omnichannel for the Digital one; for the AI Customer, chatbots will make this interaction conversational as with another human, and totally immersive as companies like Meta infuse AI into our visual and tactile environments. The Industrial Consumer had minimal technology use, the Digital customer was more reactive and click based as

she incessantly click on apps; the AI customer’s will be proactive as our personalized AI assistant anticipates our needs for what kind of food we would like to where and how we would like to travel. Finally, the brand relationship that the Industrial customer had was functional, the Digital one had social and emotional loyalty to cult brands like Apple or Patagonia; the AI customer will have a collaborative partnership with brands as they develop a deeper relationship with them.

This revolutionary change in customers that AI will drive will mean that marketers will need to change too – they will need to embrace AI, become literate in it, and use it to anticipate and follow their customers. They will need to learn that AI can be a friend and a powerful tool when used right, and can enhance both the left and right brain aspects of their job. It would not ‘take away’ their creativity, but would enhance it.

In both the conferences, I showed how Sam Altman teased Sora, OpenAI’s text-to-video technology, by inviting impromptu prompts on X, and instantly generative videos with the same. Entrepreneur Kunal Shah gave an intriguing one, “A bicycle race on ocean with different animals as athletes riding the bicycles with drone camera view.” Sora produced a stunningly creative video (check it out here: https://bit.ly/3ZgGnHD; it has garnered more than 8mn views so far). The question I then pose marketers is that who was being creative here – Kunal Shah, or Sora. The answer, inevitably, is Kunal; he could not have thought of such a creative prompt, without having the right tool to execute it. This is how marketers need to think– as AI as a powerful part of their teams, who can help them negotiate this wrenching change in their jobs, as they enter the age of the AI Customer.