A recent survey of marketers found that over half of them are currently using generate AI, yet few of them realize that it’s going to put them out of work.
The research, sponsored by Salesforce, revealed that marketers estimated AI would save them over five hours per work week, which adds up to at least a month every year.
Since there were 1,029 respondents to the survey, the savings they cited add up 85 full-time employees, or nearly one in ten of them.
Their primary concern? “Accuracy & Quality.” Two-thirds of them say that their employers aren’t providing enough quality data or AI training for them to fully exploit the technology that will render them unemployed.
Of course, this research is part of a propaganda campaign from Salesforce, which has been selling a sales and marketing automation platform for many years (and quite successfully). Its announcement of the survey findings is filled with blather from its executives touting the transformative potential of AI and, without naming its offering, the importance of its offering.
As for the details of the marketers’ use of AI, they’re pretty much applying it to producing the content for which they’re paid to produce. They call it “busy work,” oddly, and then go on to say that they think AI will someday soon “transform the way they analyze data, personalize messaging content, and build marketing campaigns,” among other benefits.
This will allow them to “focus on more strategic work,” whatever that means. There’s a reference that many of them think AI lacks “human creativity and contextual knowledge” and will require human oversight, so maybe they think that they’ll get new managerial jobs to watch robots do their old ones.
But that’s just wishful thinking doing the talking.
We don’t know who these marketers are, and any survey is limited to getting answers to the questions it asks. It’s intriguing that most of them are eager to give AI a greater share of their workloads.
But this isn’t research, it’s sales promotion. And if the marketers who responded to the survey are as clueless as they appear, they probably deserve to get replaced by robots.
[This essay originally appeared at Spiritual Telegraph]