After waiting for decades for its arrival, the age of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is finally here. AI refers to software systems that have the sophistication and capacity to carry out human tasks, but with increased speed and efficiency.

These systems have the power to process information and customer-driven data with immediacy and, subsequently, evolve each data piece into an actionable insight.

Is AI actually a complication?

It might sound like the addition of AI is complicating marketers’ jobs, but when carried out correctly, AI has the opposite effect. Marketers today are running and optimizing more campaigns across more platforms than ever before.

Marketing teams must be able to effectively monitor campaign performance and make strategic updates on the fly. With the breadth of information that each campaign demands, and the breadth of customer data that each campaign pulls in, it is almost impossible to expect marketing teams to keep up with the speed and sheer size alone.

Here are a few ways AI is changing the game for marketers.

Be proactive

Marketing teams no longer have to wait for potential patrons to fund them online. Thank’s to AI, marketers have the opportunity to pinpoint and connect with customers based on their interests, preferences, and behaviors across digital and social platforms.

Many marketing teams use this capability as a means of offering recommendations to individuals who have demonstrated similar product or service interests.

AI also enhances the sophistication of ad targeting based on audience characteristics and past behaviors. The beauty of running targeting programs using AI is that they are less likely to stagnate. AI technology is always learning more about the humans who interact with their platforms.

With every new search, the technology develops a deeper awareness and understanding of how to connect with the right audiences. Snapchat is one platform that leverages machine-based learning to target engagement based ads.

Be relevant

As AI is developed to always learn and evolve, programs that rely on AI technology have a better chance of staying ahead of the curve of the fickle and ever-changing behaviors on

social media platforms. By now, every brand should be curating their identity through social profiles and content - a but a strong identity may not be enough for your organization to prove that it is (and always will be) relevant.

While some organizations simply track social conversations through hashtag use (which leaves out a large number of social conversations) AI platforms are able to take sentiment into consideration. So even if a social media user did not use the standard hashtag in a post, the AI bots would still be able to detect it presences.

Essentially, AI allows marketers to employ faster and more accurate campaigns than the human brain could handle, all while continuously learning and streamlining. AI support gives marketers the time and freedom to step away from helicopter monitoring and data crunching, and devote more time to high-level strategy.

AI delivers the data and science that marketers desperately need to either fix a campaign that is underperforming or deploy a new campaign at the drop of a hat.

AI represents the next generation of increasingly faster, more 1:1 marketing initiatives and offers. The companies that fail to implement AI will likely be the companies that fall behind.