The role of marketing will soon take a sudden shift with the new advancements in artificial intelligence. The use of AIs in this field has shown massive amounts of upside, as this technology has the ability to take in large amounts of data and accurately input it into business strategies for companies to use to their advantage. The data being processed and analyzed can give businesses valuable insights on certain points of their company that are starting to decrease. The main goal of marketing is to find a target audience and sell them on buying your product. With the help of these AIs, marketers can create more personalized ads and campaigns to attract their target market, allowing consumers to engage with the brand and help start to build a long-lasting relationship with the business.

In this section, we will be targeting a few marketing strategies and applications that will soon become more efficient with the use of AI. The things being discussed will involve personalization, customer service, ad targeting, and chatbots. The use of personalization is a key starter to finding out your customer basis. With the use of certain tools, artificial intelligence can be used to predict the customer's behaviors based on aspects of their online presence. With the ability to look back at past purchases from the customers, along with browsing history, the AI can create personalized messages and ads relating to both the customers and their products. The use of AI allows businesses to get data up to date and better their marketing strategies based on this information. If you have ever been given an email or ad related to a certain product you have been looking up or recently bought, this is because the AI's are using their prior knowledge and trying to get you to make purchases in the future. 

The use of customer service is a core part of a successful marketing strategy. The need for customers to get a response to their questions or issues is a huge part of the loyalty behind the brand, and using AIs has been involved in making this process run a lot smoother. The ability for AI-generated responses to come correctly in a matter of minutes, instead of trying to get in contact with a human employee, has led to many benefits. Now that AIs are used to take some of the work away from employees, companies have allowed them to start dealing with daunting tasks around the office, like providing assistance around the office and helping customers with their purchasing decision. Another benefit of AIs in customer service is their use of analytics to stop issues from occurring as regularly. With the help of AI, they can now track when an issue is starting to arise and put it to a stop before the issues too much to handle. 

Chatbots have become a big talking point over the past year, saying that these bots may have the power to one day make people's lives easier. In regards to marketing, chatbots "enable organizations to improve customer experience, reduce operational costs, and increase customer satisfaction. Chatbots can also gather valuable data on customer preferences, which can be used for customer segmentation and personalized marketing campaigns"(Cheng 2023). The thing that makes chatbots an interesting topic is that they are made with a language processing system that allows them to talk back to the human using them. With the wide range of knowledge, AIs have, the use of this is needed for marketers to get information on their customers has played a significant role in the recent transformation of the marketing space.

The only thing people fear about AI technology is that robots will soon be taking over their jobs, as they are capable of doing better and more productive work than humans. We don't find this to be the case, as there are still occupations that need human labor in order to survive. In terms of marketing, the Harvard Business Review does not believe that robots will be taking over the job market. They have stated that a report saying that humans will soon lose all their jobs also stated: "Even more roles will open as a result of this shift — 97 million to be exact". To conclude this section, even though AIs may have the power to produce knowledge and information at an all-time high, they don't have the ability to show the qualities that makes humans who they are, leading them to still need us in the workforce. 

The use of AI in consumer research is changing the way companies gain valuable insight into consumer behavior and their preferences. The need and use of these AI-powered tools are expanding, allowing for the research of a lot of consumer data. Anything from social media posts to the purchasing history of their customers can be seen by these AI tools. The tools are needed to identify patterns and trends that wouldn't likely be detected by humans. These insights can improve marketing strategies, product development, and the customer experience for companies. Statista has projected that the global AI in market research market will reach $126 billion by 2025 (Thormund 2022). As a society, we believe this is driven by a growing demand for advanced analytics and the growing adoption of AI. Also, AI-powered consumer research solutions are already available from companies like IBM Watson, Qualtrics, and Nielsen, enabling businesses to stay competitive and meet consumers' evolving needs (IBM; Qualtrics; Nielsen 2023).

To speak more on AI helping the consumer research side of the business, we will be discussing an article from the Harvard Business Review that involves tracking how people actually feel about their product by using AI to help complete and reiterate surveys. The authors Mohamed Zaki,

 Janet R. McColl-Kennedy and Andy Neely discuss how companies are wasting too much time and money to try to fully understand the consumers and how the tools being used are becoming outdated. They have also found evidence that the 2 main forms of testing consumer research, customer satisfaction and net promoter scores, don't even tell companies what customers really want in terms of what they think about the product and their feelings towards it. The authors have determined that quantitative studies can't pick up thoughts regarding emotion, so they decided to make to develop an approach using AIs to get customers' feedback to correctly predict how they think and feel about the product. This AI tool was made to search for keywords in the survey that involve the consumer experience using linguistics-based natural language processing. The tool is then able to predict how the customer feels by converting the keywords without using qualitative research that never worked before.

The authors gave their AI tool to 4 multinational service providers to see if the algorithm they put together actually works when diving into their surveys. The service providers then came together after the test and gave the authors 6 benefits of using this AI tool. The number 1 benefit was that this tool showed the mistakes made by the companies. Their example showed that one firm was only focusing on certain areas of their survey that were not necessary when it came to their business, so they were able to sort out this issue and redirect the focus to the mission at hand. Another issue was that the companies were not training their employees on how to better engage with customers, ending up with customer dissatisfaction and a loss of sales. Speaking of losing sales, companies need to make sure they realize the loss of sales before it becomes too much to handle. This can lead to companies going into debt or even losing their worth due to the lack of income from these marketing failures. All in all, companies need to learn to use the insights given from AI technology and make their customer experience more enjoyable to the general public. In order to get the truth out of the people purchasing your product, you need to work together and come up with a plan to get employees and AI on the same page to better the business.

In a study done by Kim et all 2022, they were focusing on AI speakers and how their human likeness is portrayed in helping consumers find the information they are looking for. The study was conducted by way of a survey given out to 311 people who use AI speakers, and the results were only recorded based on the people who finished taking the whole survey. The authors believed that an increase in human-like characteristics can make the consumer's process more reliable and acceptable when being asked a question or concern. The authors had three main ideas when it came to this study: the 1st one being an understanding of the concepts being talked about in this study, those being "human likeness, attachment, and perceived interactivity" when it comes to speaking about the speaker at hand. The 2nd idea involved influence on potentially buying the product using the 3 concepts above. The idea that these concepts can help a consumer make a purchasing decision can become an important aspect of future marketing research. Finally, the 3rd idea is to figure out how attachment and perceived interactivity can play a role in figuring out the human likeness and purchase intention of the consumer.

After the study was conducted, the authors were able to come up with some results based on the findings. The authors came to find out that there were many instances of positive influence in this study revolving around AI speakers and humans. The human likeness was influenced by attachment to the AI speakers, attachment positively influenced the connection between AI and human interaction, and finally, the attachment to the AI certainly affected consumers purchasing decisions. With this knowledge at hand, owners of these businesses should try to take this information and use it in their business schemes. Stores like Apple, Amazon, and Google have been having huge success with their human/AI communication, so why should everyone else hop on board? The authors suggest that to do this study with other types of AI, not just speakers, and see if there would be a difference in the response generated by the surveys. Also mentioned was that when a new study is done, some aspects of the AI responses should be looked into. The AI speakers only use was voice recognition and helping customers make decisions. Other aspects of AI technology like "speech recognition, visual perception, and decision-making" can be examined to see if the answers will then be changed in order to adapt to their marketing strategy. The final thing the authors can think of to differentiate the results can be by looking at different results for their study, like customer loyalty and purchasing decisions to see if that can be a factor in play when making a decision on the human/AI interaction.