“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

So wrote science-fiction author Arthur Clarke. The hype around AI fits that mold.

The facts don’t lie. AI will change the face of Sales and Marketing for good.

In the past 1.5 years alone, AI has created approximately 15 billion images, matching the number of photos taken by photographers over the last 150 years.

Today, 81% of digital marketing professionals responsible for text, images, videos and music perceive that the roles of content creators in the profession are threatened due to the advancements in AI (Source: Forbes).

 In 2023, AI's value in the marketing domain stood at 15.8 billion U.S. dollar. In just three years it will grow 7-fold at an annual expansion of 186% and beyond 107.5 billion by 2028.

When more than  90% of the internet’s content will be AI-generated by 2026, the big question isn’t whether, but rather how will reshape brand engagement. And will we, humans be left behind in the great race for productivity and efficiency.

 Today’s Economics favor AI-Generated, synthetic content.

 Creating original content requires skill and subject matter expertise which can take years to develop. In contrast, AI technologies can produce high-quality content quickly and cheaply.

 Brands that use content for customer engagement feel the pressure to drive costs and efficiency which puts downward pressure on the perceived need for human expertise. Investors see outlays in AI-infrastructure as one-time, albeit high capital spend that strengthen the future.

 Conversely, business leaders see investments in people such wages, skills development, and engagement as recurring expenses which weaken the balance sheet.

Brands are racing to use AI across their sales and marketing playbook

Today, AI-Generated content is actively replacing or minimizing human-led roles to drive productivity gains in Sales and Marketing such as improving customer service through smart chat bots, improving writing marketing copy for different channels, optimizing it for search, and personalizing offers.

Higher value applications such as supercharging creative work, moving customer segmentation beyond traditional, high-priced ABM (example: 6Sense), and deep personalization in complex dynamic customer journeys and experiences (example: Khoros) will follow soon.

Consumer facing companies such as Mastercard, Under Armor, Spotify, Zara, Netflix and PayPal are leading the pack in distilling billions of human conversations into sophisticated experiences that create new business value. B2B companies aren’t far behind.

However, Customers still prefer Authentic Human touch.

Despite its advantages, AI-generated content is known to occasionally provide inaccurate answers or recommendations, particularly when its underpinning data models haven’t been exposed to the latest rules, regulations, and security topics.

Without appropriate human supervision, relying on AI on sensitive topics such as a sustainability or a financial compliance report can put your business at risk.

A Forbes AI Consumer Sentiment study for that 75% consumers are concerned about the mis-information from AI.

According to Shelly Palmer, AI is a smart word-calculator, which means it doesn’t really have the intelligence or holistic contextual understanding about the big picture unless the details are clearly spelled out by the prompter.

What AI can do effective word-matching at scale to piece together an answer. Therefore, the quality of output is disproportionally related to the quality or built-in perspectives of the prompter (such as implicit bias) of input and therefore could become fodder for a wide range of interpretation, despite factual evidence to the contrary.

While brands rush to embrace the positive economics of AI, customers are reinforcing the need for authentic engagement. A few examples include:

—> Content Engagement: SEO performance currently favors human-generated content over AI content. Industry experts like Neil Patel from HubSpot found that while AI-content predictably reduced production time by a third, human content performed better on both volume and engagement over time.

—> Consumer Backlash: There is growing resistance against AI-generated content that stifles human creativity and critical thinking. This sentiment has led companies like Google to pull down their AI-driven ads. Apple faced similar criticism in the commercial announcing the release of iPad Pro.  AI Hallucinations such as the ones at Canada Air,  Googles Gemini showing images of Romans as black or recommendations to eat rocks, or using inaccurate research in legal cases, are all examples where there is erosion of both trust and financial impact.

—> Transparency Tools: Organizations, including OpenAI amongst others, are developing tools to detect AI-generated content using watermarks, ensuring transparency and differentiation between synthetic and organic content. A classic case is verifying the authenticity of essays in the college admissions process.

The rise of AI-generated content is reshaping the content creation landscape. Driven by economic factors and the demand for cost-efficient solutions, we will soon be at a tipping point where synthetic content builds on itself creating a recursive loop of no-return.

Unless these economics are balanced by human intervention and oversight, organic, original thinking, creativity, and ingenuity can be stifled. For brands, it means finding the right balance between human originality and digital scalability in customer engagement. It means continually optimizing at the intersection of Authenticity and Superficiality.

The no-holds-barred, winner-takes-all mentality is already moving investments away from people in terms of jobs, wages and skills developments and pushing it into soulless, environmentally damaging digital infrastructures that can process more and more data in infinitesimal time buckets.

This is a foreboding trend.

Creating checks and balances to ensure AI becomes an “Augmentation of our Intelligence” rather than “Artificially replacing our Intelligence” requires strategic intent and unwavering resolve.

Several questions remain.

Will regulators tacitly permit the Big-Tech fox to guard the AI henhouse, as they did during the internet and social media era?

Can we recognize, preserve, and nurture the immense value in original thought, critical thinking, contextual awareness, and human creativity?

Will our business leaders resist the easy path of cutting staff and depressing incomes to fund AI investments to drive short term stock gains at the cost of long-term prosperity?

The choices we make today hinges on our collective will to shape the world of tomorrow.

Let us choose wisely.