How artificial intelligence will change the future of

marketing
Author: Thomas Davenport, Abhijit Guha, Dhruv Grewal, Timna Bressgott

This paper outlines a framework to understand how AI will impact the future of
marketing, specifically to outline how AI may influence marketing strategies and
customer behaviors. It builds on prior work, as well as builds from extensive
interactions with practitioners. First, they develop a multidimensional framework
for the evolution of AI, noting the importance of dimensions pertaining to
intelligence levels, task types, and whether the AI is embedded in a physical robot.
In so doing, they provide the first attempt to integrate all three dimensions in a
single framework. They also make two (cautionary) points. First, the short to
medium term impacts of AI may be more limited than the popular press would
suggest. Second, they suggest that AI will be more effective if it is deployed in
ways that augment (rather than replace) human managers.

To examine the full scope of the impact of AI, they propose a research agenda
covering three broad areas: (1) how firms’ marketing strategies will change, (2)
how customers’ behaviors will change, and (3) issues related to data privacy, bias,
and ethics. This research agenda warrants consideration by academia, firms, and
policy experts, with the recognition that although AI already has had some impact
on marketing, it will exert substantially more impact in the future, and so there is
much still to learn. They hope that this research agenda motivates and guides
continued research into AI.

In context of our own research, from this paper we learn 3 complications with
respect to data privacy (1) the low cost of storage implies that data may exist
substantially longer than was intended, (2) data may be repackaged and reused for
rationales different than those intended, and (3) data for a certain individual may
contain information about other individuals. Also, questions remain as to how to
best acknowledge and address privacy concerns at the moment data is collected
and at the time of data privacy failures. Also it discusses that testing the bias in AI
applications is important topic and AI may not be able to distinguish attributes that
induce potential bias. Also it says that there must be examination about how ethical
concerns about AI vary across cultures as well as address upfront the types of
applications for which AI must be used (or, should not be used for).