Chart of the Day: Brands and Agencies Struggle to Trust AI with Budget Allocation
Business success demands a balanced approach when it comes to decision making – objective analysis and subjective experience. Artificial intelligence (AI) is one of the hottest tools to improve the scale and quality of our data analysis, but research from Albert Technologies has shed light on what tasks marketers are having difficulty letting go of.
Polling brand and agency marketers on their adoption of AI, both groups agreed that budget allocation was one of their hardest tasks to relinquish. Brand marketers had the most difficulty handing over campaign analysis, while agency marketers wanted to hold on to their audience segmentation.
These attitudes may be the result of AI systems having varied levels of automation. Marketers are likely more open to systems they can use to improve their analysis but offer the option to override generated recommendations, rather than acting on said data autonomously. It’s no surprise, then, that the tasks most trusted to AI were both keyword and audience identification.
Sometimes, even the most detailed analysis can give you one answer, but your personal experience tells you to do something else. It’s that ‘gut instinct’ that people go to when they feel a chance should be taken and AI is unlikely to take any chances. It will always go for the options its data indicates – reducing both risk and reward so that it goes for its optimal ‘safe’ course of action.
Brand and agency marketers both ranked ‘inability to communicate’ as their biggest drawback of using AI marketing, suggesting future systems need greater customization if they are going to be trusted with more tasks. Of course, everyone has their own level of control they’re willing to give up, as Albert Technologies found numerous marketers were less concerned with their AI system’s methods as long as campaign KPIs were met.