'Making friends with AI is the best way forward for marketers'

The approximate market size of AI is four billion dollars in India, as per Statista, which translates to roughly Rs 3,200 crore. This is almost three per cent of the total Indian advertising spend. 

At e4m’s India Brand Conclave, Kanchan Srivastava, Senior Assistant Editor, exchange4media Group chaired a panel discussion with Jyoti Bansal, Chief- Brand and Communications, Tata Power, Deepak Kumar, Managing Partner, dentsu Gaming, Aditi Mahale, Global Launch Lead - IDG Consumer Marketing, Lenovo and Ruhbir Singh, Global CEO, Tatvic.

Srivastava set the context for discussion and said, “Since this number is huge and has a CAGR of 18 percent, brands, media platforms and agencies are investing heavily in AI-enabled technologies. This is exactly why everyone wants to be at the forefront of this revolution.”

Speaking on how AI helps in understanding consumer behaviour and improving their lives, Bansal of Tata Power explained their collaboration with Blue Wave was exactly to understand power demand, forecast consumer consumption patterns in energy, and predict how to optimise par purchase. 

From a consumer perspective, it provides them with smart energy meters which give the consumer the power to optimise their own energy consumption by observing patterns.

Mahale believes sooner or later marketers and brand owners will realise that they cannot stay away from this revolution. “AI is here to stay and the more we recognise that and make friends with it, that will be the best way of looking at it. It unlocks so much opportunity if you use it right. We ourselves have been using it mainly for automation or towards optimisation and lower funnel activities in marketing, which is termed as performative AI. Last year generative AI also came into being and when the two will get stacked together it will operate in a very efficient manner,” she added.

There is also a martech angle to AI and there is also technology that boosts marketing, Singh explained. “There are marketing-driven use cases and technology-specific use cases but if you see the acquisition angle of the right consumers, the use case is practically deployable for brands. The things AI can do today seem like an extension of efficiency.”

However, guard rails and frameworks are much needed to be in place for the right use of AI and that’s where the lag is coming from since everything is too new for everybody. As soon as the learning curve crosses, the use case of AI will expand, according to Mahale.

Bansal added, “The whole discussion around responsible AI and data frameworks that are now being worked upon, we are moving to this concept of privacy by design which keeps the end user at the centre of it while allowing for innovation to happen. As marketers, it's our responsibility to ensure that we give as much information as we can to the end user, to allow them to make an informed choice.”

Speaking of hyper-personalisation and privacy in the gaming world, Kumar underlined, that in the gaming world, the players are on a mission and in a quest to win they are ready to leave a lot of footprints. Then it's on the game creator as to how he wants to use the data. Games are today getting personalised basis on predictive analysis in determining how a gamer is performing, where they are getting stuck and how they can be outmanoeuvred.”

Lenovo, on the other hand, isn’t diving too deep into hyper-personalisation till the frameworks are well into place.

The hyper-personalisation Tatvic does requires a lot of human intervention. With AI that can be reduced and hence, as they are progressing, they plan to use it extensively.

With AI though, a lot of legal issues are also involved which the Big Techs are already facing the consequences of. There is also a lot of misinformation due to the use of deepfakes in India these days. The cost isn’t for every organisation to handle either. So how easy is AI adoption at this point of time?

Mahale thinks one has to be cautious since it is a new tool and everyone is learning. “Having said that, it is not just a new toy to play with, we all have to be extremely careful on how we use it, where we use it simply because there is risk involved. So, try it but tread carefully.”

“AI has helped in identifying and trying to avoid similarities between two games. I don't think we have heard of any copyright issue in gaming because of AI,” expressed Kumar.

Bansal thinks we will all have to learn and navigate the right guard rails for our businesses, consumers and the kind of data we work with.

Singh of Tatvic foresees AI will be used in the near future definitely for gaining a competitive edge against competitors. But on the cost part, he believes, “If you are training a custom model for a unique personal need, training will be expensive but if it is available in a walled-garden or trained model, one can just deploy it in a cloud instance and do small personal training. This is super fast and not that expensive.”