Auto – Correct?
When I'm walking my dog, she picks up sticks and I take a picture. Then, instead of sitting there trying to type, while I'm walking a dog, I hit voice prompts and I record my voice and it transcribes it into text. When I get home and look at what the autocorrect did to what I said, I start cracking up and fix it. Today, I want to talk about why artificial intelligence is so bad at sales and marketing.
One of the main reasons is that artificial intelligence (AI) bots need to have some contextual information in order to understand what you're saying or what you mean. As AI is getting smarter every single day, it's creeping into everything that we have and use. It's in our phones, our cars, and even our vacuums. I use it every week to transcribe meetings and my podcast, via Rev.
I know it's cheaper to use the AI version of Rev, but it's not as accurate as the human version. So, I find it worth the extra dollar per minute, to pay to have a human do it because he or she understands the context, and often the metaphors that I present as well.
There's a classic example of AI gone awry. Let's say that somebody asks, “Hey, Siri, call me an ambulance.” And Siri comes back and says, “Okay, I will now call you Ann Ambulance.”
Press 1, Press 3, Press HELL!
As AI becomes more prevalent in business today, that does not mean we all like it. When you try to contact customer support, a lot of times they try to drive you towards their online bot-driven Q&A database, which is AI and can become very frustrating when your problem is unique or more complex than the basics. Have you ever experienced the “JOY” of being connected and dropped by level 2 and level 3 tech support, only to have to start the entire process over and over again?
Once in a while, you can get caught in voice prompt hell. You could say, “My problem is I can't boot my computer,” and it tries to send you down a path. Often, it can't understand the full context of why or how this happened? Even when you're talking to humans, it can be that they're just reading off a script, which is just as frustrating as AI.
There's a good reason why artificial intelligence is used. It saves money. You don't have to talk to a human being, which is much more expensive than basically putting a computer in front of somebody, but it has its challenges. AI is getting better and faster every single day, and it's good at some things. For example, it's really great at playing chess.
Google invented the computer and AI program called AlphaGo, which could play a Chinese Go game, which has hundreds of thousands of moves. But chess and Go have a defined space, meaning there are squares and there are specific moves that it can make, and it can learn those things.
But when it comes to things like playing poker, it has a much more difficult time because it can't predict what cards are going to be drawn by whom at the same time.
Now, AI is getting smarter, but it's not quite ready to replace your marketing and sales team just yet. Here's the main reason for this, AI lacks four main skills.
- Agility.
- Leadership.
- Creativity.
- Empathy.
Agility
Agility refers to the ability to rapidly change the position of the entire body or mind with speed and accuracy. Artificial intelligence is good at board games, but if you change the rules or invoke a game of chance on it, it can't follow any rules. It has to learn how to adapt and that takes more time. So, it's not as agile as you and me.
Leadership
Leadership is the art of motivating a group of people towards achieving a common goal. In a business setting, this can mean directing workers and colleagues with a strategy to meet the company's needs. Now, management is setting tasks and making sure they get done, hopefully in the right order and to a level of satisfaction. But leadership is a soft skill. How do you inspire others to get excited and take action?
Creativity
Creativity is the tendency to generate or recognize ideas, alternatives, or possibilities that may be useful in problem-solving. Also, reativity is also important in communication and entertainment. We need to create mental images for people that are going to make our messages stick. Computers can logic out ideas, but they can't imagine them. They can't see somebody's face when they look puzzled. It's really hard for them to figure out based on what they know about that person, what metaphor, or what image they can create to get their message across better.
Empathy
Finally, there's empathy. Empathy is the ability to sense other people's emotions, coupled with the ability to imagine what somebody else may be thinking or feeling. As I said, you can train a computer to read facial expressions, but what you can't train a computer to do is use its own experience in history to imagine feeling what that person is feeling. It could be happiness, joy, pain, or sorrow, and you have to be able to adapt to what you're doing and how you're communicating based on how you feel that person might be feeling at that time.
The concept of empathy is well documented in a basic version of what's known as a dilemma. It's known as the “Bystander At The Switch” or the “Switch”.
Moral Dilemma
Imagine there's a runaway trolley, barreling down on railway tracks. Now, imagine you control a switch that can redirect the train. If it keeps going down its main path, it's going to kill your dog or a loved one, but you can flip that switch and send it down another path where it will kill five strangers. So, what do you choose? That takes empathy, logic, creativity, and agility all at the same time.
Are you delivering your communications through storytelling? With creativity and empathy?
Final Thoughts
This is why marketing and sales have a really hard time with artificial intelligence because marketing is about empathy. It's about understanding the point of view and being able to communicate with a potential customer or a current customer, what it is that you have and how it deals with their personal problems.
You need the agility to adapt to questions and concerns and objections. You may need leadership or people skills to direct other people to communicate those messages in the right way. And you need the creativity to imagine what this is going to do in business for your customers. In sales, it's all about listening, understanding, and having an empathetic view. In marketing, it's about communicating in a way that's going to get people's attention so that you can create conversations with clients, with prospects, even with leads, to get them to want to engage with you, your business, and your sales team.
So, when I'm walking my dog, I use AI to put in the text for those pictures, because I don't want Siri to call me an ambulance. I just want to entertain my friends and I can imagine they are entertained when they see some of the text AI creates. When my friends see my original AI posts, they are probably looking at it like my dog with its ears up saying… “Dewd… Whaaaaaat?
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