Why artificial intelligence is changing marketing forever

Gerhard Kürner
4 min readJan 22, 2023

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Gerhard Kuerner CEO 506.ai on Marketing and Artificial Intelligence

2023 will be the year of Applied Artificial Intelligence (Applied AI), and this will lead to radical change in all areas of marketing and customer communications. With the recent releases of ChatGPT and VALL-E, it is clear that Generative Artificial Intelligence (GAI) will not only change marketing and customer service forever, but will give e-commerce in general an unpredictable leap in development. Due to massive improvements in technology, more and more tasks will be performed by AI as early as 2023. NLP (Natural Language Processing) and Prompt Engineering are just two examples that marketing, service and product managers should familiarize themselves with.

After two years of research and development using Large Language Models (LLMs) like GPT-2/3/3.5 with our Artificial Customer Intelligence Platform, our marketing and AI experts at 506 see how e-commerce can be fundamentally changed, enabling for the first time customer targeting that truly matches the customer’s interests, not some simple manual rule that is often wrong. More and more companies are already starting to analyze their customer data using AI. By analyzing this data, companies can for the first time truly understand what their customers want and tailor their marketing and sales efforts, and even their products and services, accordingly.

The democratization of deep tech like AI has begun.

Not techies with in-depth AI and data science knowledge, but those who can combine business understanding in e-commerce with AI will have the greatest success. Anyone who has played with chatGPT quickly realizes that without good “prompting” there will be no good results. “Prompt engineering”, or in other words, the ability to ask the right questions and give the right answers, will become a valuable skill.

New software built on GPT-3 and chatGPT makes it possible to produce content faster by simply entering text. AI solutions such as Runwayml, which maps to many forms of Creative Generative AI, are already available, as is the German AI application Neuroflash, which has already become the german number one artificial intelligence texting application. Not just playing a few “chats” with these systems, but seriously building up expertise in their operation is the order of the day.

If it’s the current texts and mutations that allow for a drastic increase in productivity, images and also videos will be next. The more these systems can do, the more new know-how will be needed. Operation will then be super simple text-based only.

3 points that are important for everyone who wants to work with AI in marketing in 2023

  1. Text input — prompt engineering
    Prompt engineering is a concept of artificial intelligence, especially natural language processing. In prompt engineering, the description of the task is embedded in the input, e.g., as a question, instead of being given implicitly
  2. Trustworthy AI — Trustworthy AI.
    According to the EU Ethics Guidelines, trustworthy AI should be as follows:
    - Lawful — complying with all applicable laws and regulations
    - Ethical — adhering to ethical principles and values
    - Robust — both from a technical perspective and considering the social environment
  3. GDPR compliant Own data — first party data.
    Understanding your own privacy compliant website and e-commerce data is quickly becoming relevant and the basis for marketing data science and customer intelligence projects. AI is increasingly being used to analyze this data.

AI is also influencing the way advertising is designed and placed. For example, not only e-commerce companies can target the interests of customers and thus increase the impact of advertising.

AI is also improving customer service. For example, chatbots can help answer queries more quickly and thus reduce waiting times for customers by not just asking simple, rule-based questions and providing answers, as was the case in the past.

Artificial intelligence will primarily help create a personalized shopping experience for customers in B2C and B2B. These technologies will allow companies to truly identify, understand and predict their customers’ preferences and consumption habits for the first time.

We are still at the very beginning of the opportunities that will emerge in the short term, but it is already clear that they will radically change many business processes. Content creation is the most obvious area, but analysis and prediction of customer behavior, product development and many consulting services in the business environment will also change dramatically. It will also be necessary to create appropriate frameworks for the use of artificial intelligence that are practical and implementable.

Apply AI quickly in your own marketing

It makes little sense to develop new language models yourself or your own applications that use them, but much more sense to quickly get results on how AI can be used in existing business models. Do I have the right data, do I have the necessary expertise such as prompt engineering in-house, and where can I most easily deploy it in the short term to achieve quick success are the most important questions to ask to gain a competitive advantage. The quickly achieved results always provide a new basis for the next steps, which are more meaningful, large, lengthy projects.

AI, or artificial intelligence, will be available to many companies for the first time in 2023, cheaply and easily. Rapidly applying it to build expertise in your own company will be the biggest challenge, but also the biggest potential. Seize this opportunity and start now.

“2023 will be the year of applied AI and will be equivalent to the introduction of the browser”
- Gerhard Kürner CEO 506

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Gerhard Kürner

CEO 506 - European CompanyGPT - Vice Chairman @AIupperaustria - Keynote Speaker