When people think about artificial intelligence (AI) today, they might think of computers that can speak to us like Alexa or Siri, or grand projects like self-driving cars.

These are very exciting and attention-grabbing, but the reality of AI is actually thousands of tools and apps running quietly behind the scenes, making our lives more straightforward by automating simple tasks or making predictions. A few years ago, the marketing world moved away from its traditional model to a digital one, leading to a more advanced marketing strategy.

The core of the previous marketing model was to target consumers based on behaviour, which led to the creation of automation…which led to digital sales and virtual customer service. And it may lead to a new need soon!

The high-level use case for AI in marketing is that it improves ROI by making your marketing – often one of a company’s biggest expenses – more efficient. In the old days, before online advertising, businesses would pay huge amounts of money for TV, radio, or newspaper adverts, in the full knowledge that only a small number of the people who saw their ads would ever become customers. This was tremendously inefficient, but companies didn't have any choice if they wanted to position themselves as market leaders.

In the online age, we’ve developed the ability to learn a great deal about who is or isn’t interested in our products and services. The first breakthroughs came thanks to the likes of Amazon with their recommendation engine technology and Google and Facebook with their targeted advertising platforms. Today, each of those platforms has been augmented with machine learning technology that allows them to become increasingly effective as they are fed more data on customers and their buying habits.

AI is changing the future of digital marketing, that is certain. It’s not so much about what new developments are happening, but also what new trends are likely to emerge over the next few years.

The power of AI allows exciting new opportunities to take hold in the digital marketing space. But it doesn’t stop there. So many other techniques, tactics and productivity boosts exist under the AI wing. Artificial intelligence is an insanely growing industry and you need to keep up if you want to make it work for you (and your agency).