What’s Next for AI and Marketing? Experts Weigh In

Ecommerce

Retailers can use AI to help answer customer FAQs or accelerate customer support responses. They can also use AI to conduct sentiment analysis on reviews to gain better insights into their products, allowing them to pivot business strategies and approaches to increase sales. While the impact of AI technology is evident, retailers must be highly attentive when checking responses to verify accuracy. This is especially crucial when working with global customer bases and across different languages.

It will be interesting to see the percentage of consumers that turn to AI for product searches and recommendations compared to search engines and ecommerce sites. Retailers should prepare for changes in consumer behavior and the rise of a new channel to add to their marketing mix. There will likely be new industries created around organic and paid placement in the results of these models, much the same way the advertising and search engine optimization industry evolved with the evolution of search engines. —Stephen Curial, CTO, Jungle Scout

Research

I was looking for some textbooks on international advertising and asked ChatGPT if there were any new books that had been published recently. It gave me a list of titles, complete with author and publisher, that got me excited. They were perfect for my class and, surprisingly, I had never heard of any of them. Better yet, they had all been published in the last year. I was thrilled…that is, until I tried to find the books. They literally did not exist. I kept asking ChatGPT how to find the books; finally, it told me: “I apologize for the mistake in my previous answer. It seems that the books I mentioned may not have been published or may not be currently available. As a language model AI, I rely on the information that I was trained on and there may be instances where that information is not up-to-date or may have changed.”

This is not an isolated incident, but rather a deeper problem with AI as it stands today. A recent New York Times article confirmed that AI models “are prone to what AI researchers call ‘hallucination,’ making up facts that have no tether to reality.” That’s not always a big deal for me, but it’s a huge deal if you’re making recommendations to a client or brand based on information that does not exist or has been warped by the software. Long and short, unless you know the data it has been trained on, the data it has access to and how it is organizing that data—and you don’t—you should look at the results with some skepticism and double-check their correctness. —Brian Sheehan, professor of advertising, Syracuse University