AI and the Future of the Human Experience

Are you designing digital experiences for humans?

How to start loving AI

By now we’ve all read enough AI-generated content and seen enough strangely-fingered AI-generated images to realize that the threat was largely overblown. These are aggregators, derivative by their very nature. That’s the beauty of creative destruction: replace the old, worn-out, no longer useful way of doing things when they no longer create value. (Philosophical aside: If a non-very-smart AI can take your job, maybe you should let it?)

Here’s the thing savvy CMOs and nervous marketers should keep in mind: good marketing is more than just voracious data mining and regurgitated clickbait. A good marketer knows that your job is to understand, connect with, and ultimately sell to people. It’s to dig into the lived, human experience of your customers, to feel their pain and frustrations, to see what your brand can do to spark joy or make their life just that little bit better.

Good marketing — as we here at Ex Squared have said over and over — is about empathy.

And while AI doesn’t understand what it is to BE a human, it CAN make your marketing a lot easier.

Tools make work easier and teams more productive

In an article in Forbes for their Business Council series, AI brand strategist Grant McDougall makes a clear case for how AI can be used to boost efficiency and further your marketing goals — while reassuring marketers that their value to the role can’t be replaced.

McDougall points out that “AI has permanently transformed digital marketing” and accepts the new reality that “integrating AI-powered software, such as predictive analytics […] has become table stakes for remaining competitive.” But he is careful to distinguish where AI’s primary strengths lie: in capturing and taming the “world of torrential data flows that outstrip our limited human ability to comprehend.”

In our era of Big Data, information has become so prevalent, so voluminous, it has simply swamped our human brain-computers. We are awash in facts and information: our challenge is wrangling this unruly mass of information and extracting the sweet nuggets of actionable wisdom.

While AI might not fully get humans, it’s great with numbers and data, at speeds we humans can only dream of.

What’s more, McDougall points out in his piece, not only is this exactly the kind of task AI was designed to excel at, but AI systems actually “grow smarter the more data they ingest.” Instead of getting overwhelmed by data, they thrive on it. Talk about a symbiotic relationship!

It’s a smart piece, and worth the read. And happily it ends on a reassuring note: “To truly connect with customers, though, you’ll still need human perspective.”

In other words, let the machines handle the repetitive, tedious, number-crunching mechanical parts of the job. Save that precious human gray-matter goo for the things only it can do: being human.

Digital experiences need to make the user feel more human, not less 

A Turing Test for the 21st Century