AI x digital industry: an interview with our experts about AI’s impact - part 1

AI is the biggest change since electricity. Just as we can't imagine a world without electricity, soon we won't be able to imagine life without AI. It’s now a reality, no longer just a concept from science fiction. However, this isn’t a story of robots replacing humans, but of a powerful collaboration that unlocks a new era of creativity, efficiency, and innovation. 

In this series of interviews, we’re shining a spotlight on our experts to explore how they’re navigating this new frontier to harness the power of AI, as well as how they’re tackling the challenges it poses. 

They’re sharing their insights on the next big wave of AI in their respective fields, and uncovering the secrets of how tomorrow's winning brands will harness AI to elevate their digital experiences and stand out from the crowd.

Within the agency marketing landscape is gonna be twofold: there's gonna be agencies that will have successfully implemented AI in a relevant way into their operations. On the other hand, there will also be agencies that have ignored the AI wave. Just like there were agencies that ignored 'digital' for a while, or 'mobile' and later 'social'. Those agencies are now gone, or at least struggling to keep up.

I believe AI has a significant impact across the entire agency spectrum. No one can escape it. Whether you are a designer, developer, or strategist, if you do not embrace AI, you will soon be replaceable. 

While I believe there are aspects of human creativity that AI simply can't replicate, I do think that it sets a higher standard. AI can play a role in crafting brand stories that resonate with customers on an emotional level, but it's humans who drive the strategy behind it, deciding which emotions to trigger and what makes a story unique and tasteful. An AI might be able to replicate things, but it will never have taste.

The way I see it, brands can prepare for what’s to come by investing in developing a unique brand and scalable brand ecosystem, gaining experience with CRM systems and personalization possibilities so that you can get to know your customers better. Build an experience ecosystem where you distribute relevant stories and content that your customers would actually want to engage with.

AI tools have become integral to my work, significantly enhancing productivity and creativity in several key areas: accelerating the research process for strategies, quicker development of measurable goals, predictive analytics, enhancing storytelling, faster mood boards, presentation decks building, and so on. 

The real challenge is finding the right balance between the 'human touch' and the incredible capabilities of AI. It’s an ongoing process of learning how to make good use of AI to simplify everyday tasks without losing the unique soul in your work.

Over the next 2-3 years, it will become even harder to stand out as a brand. In an overcrowded media landscape, brands boosted by AI will shout even louder for customer attention. For customers, it will be harder to distinguish between what’s authentic and what’s generated. 

Let’s take Spotify’s example. Many of the songs currently appearing in Discover Weekly playlists are AI-generated. But how can people recognize them? That's difficult. What they can do is determine what they like or don't. It's up to human artists to meet that level, or to come up with new original music that surprises you again. I am confident that we can do this, and I am simultaneously excited about the fact that AI is raising the standard.

I think that AI currently helps marketers effectively at the bottom line by segmenting based on preferences, for example, through interactions with digital platforms. This is more about predicting purchase intentions, where messaging plays a significant role. AI shaping brand strategy is not something I see happening at the moment.

Winning brands will use AI to ensure a seamless customer experience (CX) across the entire ecosystem by recognizing and remembering consumers, and providing a personalized experience. They will come with their own trained AI tools, based on tone of voice etc., and will actually interact with their audience.

However, these brands will only thrive if they can combine human authenticity with the benefits of AI. Only brands that stand for something will survive, brands with their own story, their purpose, and a unique character. Reaching their customers through modern platforms, with an approach that is competitive and thus makes efficient use of all the possibilities AI has to offer.

I think it is important to embrace AI in your daily activities and in your work, but of course, don't expect it to give you all the answers or all the solutions. It's always good to give your own creative takes and your own solutions to the problems you're trying to solve. AI will help enhance the work that you are doing. 

Our tech team is currently using some AI tools to help them with their coding. There's a lot of tools that help with code suggestions, but it also helps a lot with debugging the code, therefore it makes the coding process and the development process a lot quicker and overall it expedites the work. 

We are also using some AI tools for the front end. When it comes to building the websites, we use AI tools to help us generate dummy content to test the website development. Before developers used to create all this content manually, now we are using I tools to generate the content itself. 

 Overall, I don't think that AI tools are going to replace the tech industry or the tech developers yet, but it will definitely help a lot with the development process and make the work a lot easier and faster. I think we should embrace it, we should integrate it within our processes. We have already automated certain aspects that will help us with the development process using AI. 

 At the moment, I think AI is capable of achieving a lot, however, it's only capable of achieving things that it has learned. So the more and more it goes on learning, I think the better it will get.

At DPDK we use AI as part of our strategies, in our development, and in our design process. It is already a peer programming buddy in many tech teams. Many brands with vision have teams of developers dedicated specifically to creating AI tools to improve their tech solutions and products. 

To be more productive and more competitive, winning brands will be the ones making AI a full-time employee within their work environments to produce higher quality products and of course more engaging digital experiences. Embrace AI, integrate it within your processes, and make the most of it. Push it beyond its limits and learn as much as possible about it.