Artificial Intelligence (AI) is an intelligence exhibited by machines. Yes, computers think and they can be smart. At first, making them able to learn unsupervised is like science-fiction. But the truth is not far from reality.
Our lifestyle is already detailed and curated down by buttons. Almost any digital activities involve a touchscreen or a simple click on keyboards. Automation is replacing the old hard word, putting practicality into our lives lesser and obsolete.
But for the greater goods, innovations that come with AI and automation are all geared towards replacing many of the already existing human repetitive tasks. Not only that they will make our job to be less difficult, they are making it look easier as well.
Since many have experience better productivity with AI present, automation revolution is here to stay. And their inclusion is also changing the fields of sales and marketing.
Marketing Automation
The marketing and sales industry as been exploding, and became one of the hottest trends. Marketing automation software is expected to become a multi-billion dollar industry, with its growth increasing very fast as more benefits from it.
One of the highlights is that, marketing automation programs can save tremendous amount of money, saving both time and also labor over what's otherwise considered mundane tasks.
Given that automation is making things easier for people that are using it, sales and marketing are also taking a drastic leaps to adopt such technologies. From lead generations to follow-ups, the processes can be conducted with greater efficiency and accuracy using machines.
Smarter Targeting, Smarter Sales
Computers need data to work, and AI needs a lot of them in order to learn what it must do.
One of the side product of technology is that information is abundance. With better insights, analytics technology, trackers and many others, the amount of big data we can consume is larger than probably most of us ever need. Such innovations have given us more power at our fingertips.
When it comes to automating sales process. Computers can learn from the data it gathers to gather and create the best plan of approach. From targeting to the best marketing type, computers create sales decision. And what's more, AI and automation can also use smart data to pinpoint the exact times and dates it should follow up and what it should say.
So not only that sales can be smarter, it can also be revamped big time using computers.
Machines Aiding Humans
One of the fears of AI, automation and computation in getting into everyday's life is that people are losing their job. With computers and automation are taking over the sales and marketing process, some think that circuit boards and cables are replacing flesh and bones.
To some extent, this is true. However, some others believe that this is far from the truth.
They think that the goal of these services isn’t to replace the human but make them smarter and stronger at their position. One example is chatbots. While some believe that those automated systems with AI in mind will replace an entire sales team, there are certain things that bot will never be able to understand.
It's true that humans can train AI to be smart enough to gauge responses and lead them into successful sales. AI and automation can also be good in scheduling appointments, filling out customers' details and many others. But computers always have difficulties in interpreting language tone, emotions, and other human characteristics.
Humans can assess the audience's attitudes, emotions, and preferences, in ways far better than any AI or computation. Since this is crucial in building trust, humans are not expendables.
So what computes can do, is aiding humans in doing their job. In the fields of sales and marketing, it's the same thing for at least the close future.