Will AI change how marketers communicate with consumers?

Artificial intelligence has become ubiquitous in every field of work. An organisation uses AI in a variety of ways across different functions, so it makes sense that it would also find applications in communication. In particular, marketing communication. The adoption of AI, particularly generative AI, has caused a fundamental disruption in communication, prompting the question of how and whether it will alter the way marketers interact with their audiences.

At the recently concluded Challenger Brands conference, I posed this question to my panelists: Kanika Anand, GM-Media Marketing, Airtel, and Varun V Nair, Brand Marketing Head, POCO India. And here is what I learnt about the use of AI in product and communication by these two brands, as well as the potential impact it could have on communication.

The smartphone industry has been at the forefront of embracing artificial intelligence in cameras for the longest time. Nair of POCO cited the example of smartphones having the ability to remove elements in the background of a photograph or being able to customise home screens on the basis of app usage. 

Airtel’s Anand spoke about the telecommunications company’s latest AI-led feature that alerts users about calls from scamsters. The telecom major uses AI models to analyse information such as call velocity, device frequency, SIM change, and the use of robocalling devices with government data, thereby identifying suspected spam calls. 

However, all that implementation of AI focuses on enhancing a product.

What about communication?

Anand said Airtel, which needs to communicate with a user base as large as almost 300 million, has deployed AI for translation. She said using AI-generated vernacular translation for SMS, emails, etc, helped the company churn out communication at a much faster rate than earlier. “This is one of the largest use cases of AI at Airtel, which we are still working on and developing further,” she said. 

Some brands have been using generative AI to style and create visual content. For example, Swiggy introduced an AI-led feature that helps restaurants refine menu images. At the same time, Zomato, a competitor of Swiggy in the food aggregation space, has taken a strict stance to ban AI-generated food images on restaurant menus. 

Nair of POCO also said that his smartphone brand steers clear of AI-generated imagery because he believes that technology has not yet evolved to the level where a tool can generate a completely flawless piece of work. However, POCO’s agency partners have deployed AI to generate templates to achieve a certain look and feel. “Eventually, an AI-generated output is only as good as the prompt. Our agency partners have cracked some prompts to develop content with uniform consistency,” he said. 

Nair said he has experimented with Director Mix from YouTube, which allows a brand to customise videos at scale by swapping out different elements to tailor content to specific audiences. He also suggested that the most effective application of Gen-AI lies in generating personalised video content at large scale, akin to the Not Just a Cadbury Ad campaign starring Shah Rukh Khan.

AI-generated voice and chat bots have taken over customer service for several brands across categories like BFSI, travel aggregation, etc. But customers are unhappy about not being able to speak to a human being who can understand their concerns. So how does Airtel, a brand that must receive a lot of customer feedback and queries, use AI-generated voice or even chat bots? Does it?

Anand explained why Airtel has been cautious about using AI chat bots or AI-generated voice for customer support. “As a network provider, we rank among the most hated categories on social media. We don’t receive any positive sentiments from consumers, as they become very upset when a telecom network fails. We felt that deploying AI-powered bots to address customer complaints would be unfeasible, as a robotic tone may not effectively pacify customers and could potentially undermine their trust in the brand,” she said. 

Nair attempted to use AI responses for social media comments on the brand’s page, but the result was a series of hilarious errors. “Unfortunately, some of these algorithms study your history to create responses for the future. We once received a positive feedback on our brand page, and the response that went out was on the lines of, ‘We are so sorry to hear that..’” He immediately shut that program down, deciding that “people are better at this.” 

We also explored whether consumers, who are growing more conscious of AI usage, can still find generative AI captivating. Both Anand and Nair felt that AI-generated visuals will always lack the authenticity needed to resonate with consumers. Content might temporarily go viral, but it won’t necessarily move a consumer. 

We concluded that while AI will surely improve the efficiency of marketing communications and help with scaling some parts of the mass communication a brand has to undertake, the role of the human touch will never go out of fashion. 

Watch the entire video for the detailed conversation. 

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