“Artificial Intelligence is likely to be the best or worst thing to happen to humanity” – Stephen Hawking.
Since the inception of artificial intelligence (AI), two schools of thought have emerged. While the likes of Elon Musk believe AI is potentially more dangerous than nukes, fellow Silicon Valley entrepreneurs like Mark Zuckerberg think otherwise. Back in India too, unsurprisingly, AI is the most discussed topic across podcasts, webinars and business events, closely followed by profitability in start-ups.
As AI continues to disrupt industries, its role in business, and especially marketing, is becoming increasingly vital. Big and small corporations, alike, are training their top management on the power of AI in automation, personalisation, and creativity to bring higher efficiencies to their functions. In addition to coders and computer science enthusiasts, students from other fields and mid-level executives are strengthening their profiles with an additional AI degree. Contrary to popular opinion, AI might have created more jobs (AI trainers) since its inception.
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With introductions like multimodality, agentic AI, augmented intelligence, quantum AI, explainable AI, etc to the ever-changing and dynamic Artificial Intelligence world, the next few years will draw immense funding and interest in this space. While in the West, Microsoft is putting the finishing touches to MAI to take on Open AI and Google’s Deepmind; China is ramping up its game with Deepseek and 5,000+ AI companies representing over 15% of the global total.
The potential of AI
AI’s use transcends across several functions and fields. With further research and regular introduction of new AI tools; a majority of functions, categories and businesses are getting drawn to the efficiency of AI. Among others, e-commerce, due to its scale and growth potential, has and will leverage it to the maximum. Real-time personalisation at scale – product suggestions, creatives, customer response, etc – is imperative for e-commerce platforms to cater to different geographies, classes, age, gender and psychographics. And AI does that well – faster, cheaper and with higher accuracy.
E-commerce brands in the West have taken a head start over Indian counterparts in creativity with several brands producing their holiday campaigns, completely or partially, with Generative AI (Gen AI). Gemini AI from Google enhances product descriptions for better click-through rates and organic traffic. Gen AI also facilitates faster and better product catalogue images, removes deduplicated options, and delists counterfeits.
With Meta & Google’s predictive AI campaigns, manual interventions in campaign operations have reduced leading to better ROAS through cross-selling and upselling – though at the cost of losing control. Predictive AI also helps foretell buying patterns and consumer behaviour; thus improving customer lifetime value, enhancing customer’s search and filter experience, automating CRM lifecycle, detecting frauds and improving pricing decisions.
On one hand, AI can enhance a customer’s return, refund and exchange experience with multi-lingual smart voice and chatbots, and voice-to-text adaptations; on the other, it also helps improve the firm’s profitability through fraud and churn analytics, personalised product visibility, showcasing relevant native ads for monetisation. Supply chains and operations can leverage AI for better predictions of fashion trends, fraud detection at warehouses, intelligent replenishment, better sales and demand forecasting, accurate order allocation, cancellation reduction and much more.
Challenges with AI
But everything isn’t as hunky dory in the AI world as it seems. As per a recent Harvard study, with more adoption of Gen AI, innovation is getting stifled by 40%. AI’s output is as good as the code and the coder. So it’s imperative to train prompters holistically on art, culture, science, history, economics and other fields to think uniquely and independently and create distinct outputs. Not all campaigns should take inspiration from Vinci & Picasso’s art – one can explore Gustave Courbet’s style too.
Ethically, AI needs to stand the test of time. Inherent biases in the data AI learns from can lead to discrimination (gender, racial and more), amplify specific voices and shape public opinions. Deepfake manipulation can throw out governments, partners or marketing agencies. IPR laws need to be rewritten in the context of AI to answer whether and how copyright and trademark infringement apply to AI creations. Brands as well as creators should be wary of the legal technicalities of using AI-led creatives. Creative agencies should ideally take the initiative to keep their clients abreast of new AI laws and regulations and run a mandatory check before releasing AI-led campaigns.
Data privacy, especially Personal Identifiable Information (PII), is at stake. As data-hungry firms use AI to scale up unchecked data collection without investing adequately in cyber security and infrastructure, it can lead to unmitigated disasters as already on display. Customer identity thefts, phishing, and scams are commonplace.
The final word
To summarise, many experts feel Artificial Intelligence is like a Crazy Drunk Genius Friend. Genius – as the name itself suggests intelligence. Friend – as it improves your efficiency. Drunk – as neither AI nor the user is aware of its next move. Crazy (or not) – only time can tell based on AI’s exponential positive or negative repercussions on the e-commerce industry and in general.
(The author is CMO, Reliance Ajio. This article is part of the BrandWagon Plus Master Series. Views expressed are the author’s own and not necessarily those of financialexpress.com.)
