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10 Ways to Be More Human in the Age of AI

Posted in: AI, artificial intelligence, b2b marketing, IT Strategy - Jun 15, 2021

 

What is one way that brands can be more human in the age of artificial intelligence (AI)?

To help brands market themselves in the age of AI, we asked business owners and marketing managers this question for their best advice. From creating genuine connections to personalizing your customer service, there are several suggestions that may help you reach more customers for the next quarter. 

Here are ten tips to be more human in the age of AI: 

• Create Genuine Connections
• Resist Automating Everything
• Forefront Improvements to Productivity 
• Post Employee + Customer Profiles on Social Media
• Strategize Your AI Processes
• Personalize Your Customer Service
• Show Your Followers Your Personality
• Emphasize the People Behind the Business
• Highlight Your Humanitarian Efforts
• Use Tech to Enhance Communication

Create Genuine Connections

Having that personal touch is a quality that consumers look for in the brands that they choose to buy from or do business with. Although artificial intelligence can streamline operations, there is nothing like having a genuine human connection. Brands can be more human by communicating with their customers through having real people answering calls and messages. Having that connection resonates with your customers and builds a relationship causing them to remain loyal.

Henry Babicheknko, Stomadent

Resist Automating Everything

That’s easy – don’t automate everything! I know lots of businesses want to automate as much as possible to increase their profit margins, but the truth is that people enjoy working with and buying from other people. Knowing that there is a real person processing your request versus a robot makes a huge difference to the end users. That is not to say that you shouldn’t automate anything, you should simply be very picky about what you chose to replace with AI.

Dale Gillespie, Tic Watches

Forefront Improvements to Productivity  

Consumers generally approach artificial intelligence (AI) with apprehension. To help relieve that apprehension, brands need to position the benefits of what AI can help a consumer accomplish. For example, Lightkey highlights how our AI-powered grammar correction and text prediction software can assist users in writing quickly and confidently in email and word processing. Our software learns user typing patterns so that it can offer up spelling revisions and multi-word prediction that includes punctuation. By filling in the blanks and defining the limits of technologies, brands can better connect with consumers.

Guy Katabi, Lightkey

Post Employee and Customer Profiles on Social Media 

One core value we have is “You Are Unique” – which is defined by respecting the uniqueness of every human being. We aim to practice this value by posting employee and sometimes customer profiles on our Instagram account (in fact, these profiles are pretty much all we post!). Not only are these profiles a great way to showcase the people behind our “digital” business, but they are also great ways to attract other job seeking candidates and like-minded small businesses to our company. For anyone looking to humanize their business, consider featuring the humans who make up your company on social media. 

Brett Farmiloe, Markitors

Strategize Your AI Processes

Artificial intelligence is incredibly useful in some areas of business, but in others it is more important to have a human element. My advice would be to map out your business processes and decide which bucket each process belongs to. For example, social media management does not produce great results when controlled by bots – in fact, you are penalized for it if caught. Because of this, it makes sense to have a human behind the screen, creating content, featuring real people in your organization, and of course engaging with your followers. These informed decisions will ensure your audience is taken care of during the most important times in their customer journey.

Francesca Yardley, Threads

Personalize Your Customer Service 

In the age of artificial intelligence, the way to be more human as a brand is to focus on all your touchpoints with your consumers. This means personalizing your customer service responses, improving your various marketing tactics, and more. Even if there are automated responses to customers, there are ways to personalize these and create a more human-like experience. Focus on your brand’s tone of voice, and what writing you use in your communications efforts. This is, after all, where your audience is going to get that sense of a human brand. It’s also a good idea to have real human interaction where it’s needed most (e.g. customer service) to strengthen that bond between your brand and the consumers, as well as prevent frustration from inaccurate AI responses. 

Tarah Darge, Time to Reply

Show Your Followers Your Personality

If you want to come off more human to your customers then you have to work on speaking in a direct and casual way in your social media posts and marketing campaigns. The business world has become so automated that all business\’s voices are coming off all in the same. Your interactions online should always be as organic as possible. You don\’t want to sound automated or planned. Posts need to be light-hearted and quippy to show everyone that you can relate to them instead of coming off as a big business. The better you can keep a small business feeling with your marketing strategy then the more likely your followers and customers will see you as a human than an organization.

Chris Gadek, AdQuick

Emphasize the People Behind the Business

It depends on exactly how you combine AI with your brand. In our case, we use AI to create customized skincare products for our customers. We also make sure to emphasize the backstory on how our business came to be. I was frustrated with not being able to find workable skincare products and then I found out through a specialist that customized skincare formulas are the key to improving skin. Our Co-Founder Amy Yuan was able to build a huge database of skincare information in order to use AI for creating customized skincare formulas, and now our business has grown. We make sure to emphasize the human element to this story – That trying to find the right skincare can often be frustrating, and this is why we are care a lot about what we do. As long as there is a real sense of enthusiasm behind your business, whether or not you use AI, your customers will sense this energy and feel more of a sense of connection with your product or service.

Ming Zhao, Proven Skincare

Highlight Your Humanitarian Efforts 

Prioritize your humanitarian efforts. There are so many ways businesses can give back, and every business should look into charities and organizations they can help out at. A recent effort we made was the introduction of our first apparel item, the “Bread X Life Sweatshirt”. All proceeds of this item are going to the World Food Programme, an organization combating food insecurity globally. Not only does this get the word out about our company, but it goes towards our greater message of intuitive eating and humanitarianism.

William Schumacher, Uprising Food

Use Tech to Enhance Communication

After a year of isolation, the importance of human connection can’t be understated. Artificial intelligence can play a key role in helping you manage internal processes. It can even help you manage lead qualification. But when you greet customers with an automated reply, you\’re essentially saying “I don\’t have time for you. Leave a message and I\’ll get back to you at a time that suits me. In a 24/7 business landscape, that\’s just not accessible. Human connection is particularly vital in your customer support. Connection is about feeling heard. And even the most advanced AI in the world can’t offer your visitors that feeling. The very act of automating your interactions shows you’re not hearing your visitors. For true connection, you need real people ready to reach out and respond, whatever the channel. In short, use technology to enhance communication, not replace it.

Benjamin Graham, AnswerConnect

 

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The post 10 Ways to Be More Human in the Age of AI appeared first on CIO Insight.

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Business Intelligence Journal | Vol 26, No 1<br /><span class=’memberInlineSnipe’>TDWI Member Exclusive</span>

Posted in: Business Intelligence - Jun 15, 2021

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Six Strategies for Building Resilient Supply Chains with Multi-Domain MDM

Posted in: Master Data Management - Jun 08, 2021

Join this TDWI Webinar to learn how multi-domain MDM helps you reduce data chaos and gain faster and easier access to diverse but accurate and complete data. top

Six Strategies for Building Resilient Supply Chains with Multi-Domain MDM

Posted in: Master Data Management - Jun 08, 2021

Join this TDWI Webinar to learn how multi-domain MDM helps you reduce data chaos and gain faster and easier access to diverse but accurate and complete data.top

AI vs. Machine Learning: Their Differences and Impacts

Posted in: AI, Big Data, Innovation, machine learning - Jun 08, 2021

Artificial intelligence (AI) vs. machine learning. Just the words can bring up visions of decision-making computers that are replacing whole departments and divisions—a future many companies believe is too far away to warrant investment. But the reality is, AI is here, and here to stay. And particularly at the enterprise level, a growing number of companies are tuning in to the productivity and promise of machines that can think for themselves.

In fact, a recent study by McKinsey showed that by 2019, venture capital investment in AI had already topped $18.5 billion. And IDC predicted that by 2023, global spending on AI and Machine Learning solutions will reach nearly $98 billion.

All this development promises to have a tremendous impact on every corner of industry. McKinsey recently released figures predicting that by 2030, 375 million workers—about 14 percent of the total global workforce—will need to switch occupations as robots and algorithms take over tasks once done by humans. Yet most analyses project net job gains as a result of AI—like this report from Gartner, which predicts that in the US, AI will displace as many as 1.8 million jobs in the near future, yet experience a net gain of at least 500,000 to two million new jobs as companies expand to absorb the new productivity.

So, with all that in mind, how do you understand dial back the AI vs. machine learning hype? And how should you be thinking about what cognitive computing can do for your business? Let’s take a closer look.

 

Defining Artificial Intelligence

Artificial intelligence is a computer system designed to think the way humans think. That means more than just doing one task well, like say, Alexa, who responds to your voice command to play your favorite song. True artificial intelligence has the ability to parse data, make decisions, and learn from those decisions to create something new.

AI has been famously used to tackle big problems, like testing drug compounds for curing cancer. Alibaba uses AI not just for predictive advertising on their sites, but also for monitoring cars and creating constantly changing traffic patterns, or helping farmers monitor crops to increase yield. Amazon Go is using AI to rethink the future of retail, creating unmanned convenient stores that monitor your shopping experience and charge you automatically when you walk out the door with an item.

Experimental AI has written novels (badly), played chess against world masters (very well), and parsed the world’s medical literature to help doctors make better and more complete diagnoses (and saved lives.) With AI platforms like Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and many others, developers now have the resources they need to think creatively about AI for their own businesses. Further, AI in the cloud significantly reduces a company’s infrastructure costs for the massive computing capacity AI needs to be most useful.

Defining Machine Learning

Sometimes, machine learning is used interchangeably with artificial intelligence, but that’s not quite correct. Machine learning is actually a subset of artificial intelligence. Machine learning refers to a program which does one task really well by parsing and analyzing data over time. It is only as good as the data flowing into it. However, examples of machine learning are all around us, from Alexa on our tabletops, to the dynamic pricing that goes up or down on a website based on your personal information, or the email that gets automatically filtered to your inbox, and the chatbot that responds when you ask a question on a website. 

Go deeper with Datamation‘s Top Machine Learning Companies.

Seeing the big picture

Artificial Intelligence has promise, and is becoming more feasible for companies to incorporate into their systems, says Sitima Fowler, vice president of marketing for national IT consulting firm Iconic IT.  But she recommends most companies start small.

“AI is trendy right now, definitely. But the reality is, most companies will be starting with machine learning, such as bots that parse their user traffic, for instance, to mine data. They might use it for chatbots on their website to direct consumer inquiries to the right information. From there, many companies can use the AI development tools available in the cloud from services like Amazon and Microsoft to develop AI that powers their consumer facing apps, and so much more. We’re all very excited about the future of where artificial intelligence can take us. But it’s important to take it one step at a time, so the rest of your systems can integrate and keep up,” Fowler said. 

“For example, at Iconic IT, we use AI to prevent cyber security breaches. Just simply installing an antivirus and email spam filter on your computer isn’t enough. The bad guys have figured out ways around this software. So we incorporate AI on top of these software so it looks as the person’s normal behavior and interactions with other people. Over time it learns a user’s email habits, communication styles, contacts to determine if a particular email is legitimate or potentially harmful,” she added. 

 

Background Reading on AI vs. Machine Learning

Enterprise security is having a year: Here are 2021’s hottest cybersecurity startups.

Want to learn more about AI vs. machine learning? Check out these resources from CIO Insight and Datamation.

The post AI vs. Machine Learning: Their Differences and Impacts appeared first on CIO Insight.

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