When hearing about Artificial Intelligence, I’m sure the first thing that comes to mind is a futuristic world controlled by robots. As a B2B marketer, the second is probably the anticipation of what it means for your daily job and how it will change it.

Well, the time to embrace the future is now and it’s pretty exciting!
AI is already everywhere and we’re using it every day whether we know it or not, whether we like it or not. And it’s here to simplify our lives and B2B marketers’ daily jobs.

Here are 5 examples of how B2B marketing teams can leverage AI to better understand their prospects, engage their audiences, increase customer satisfaction or simplify their most boring tasks — and some examples of companies that can help.

Predictive analytics and cognitive computing

Providing B2B marketers with a complete view across all their channels, AI increases the human ability to make sense of disorganized data and make data-driven decisions based on facts and not just intuitions. With AI, B2B marketers can access data on-demand, updated in real time to better understand their customers.

Sample companies: Salesforce Einstein, IBM Watson, Leadspace

Predictive marketing

Marketers can also (already) optimize their online media spend and improve the performance of their campaigns with predictive marketing. By analyzing the entire marketing process across the entire buyer’s journey, and across every channel of communication, they can already harness the power of AI to be smarter ad buyers and improve their ROI.

Sample companies: Rocket Fuel, Kenshoo, Mintigo

ABM – Account-Based Marketing

To make ABM really work for you, you need AI. AI helps marketers create true one-to-one experiences. Using AI-powered predictive analytics, marketers will be (are) able to better identify the right leads, predict which ones will convert and provide their audiences with relevant information and content at the right time.

Sample companies: DemandBase, Engagio

Conversational interfaces and chatbots

Chatbots and virtual assistants help brands become more conversational and take a consumer-centric approach. Chatbots drive consumer engagement and help companies improve the level of their customer service (and customer satisfaction) by creating useful and insightful two-way dialogue around the clock, without being labor intensive.

Sample companies: MindLink, IBM Watson Virtual Agent, Converse

AI-generated content or machine-driven language generation

Marketers can already incorporate AI into their content marketing efforts. In the new AI-powered world, the challenge for marketers is going to be able to interact with every customer and prospect at the right time, through the right channel, with the right tone, and the most relevant content — AI can help accelerate and automize the process. Machine-driven content can help marketers generate the most personalized and conversion-optimized marketing message for each individual customer. Marketers will be able to generate tailored content on the go.

Sample companies: Persado, Automated Insights, Skyword, Phrasee

AI is exploding and excitement is rising (as well as some concern) about its increasing role in B2B marketing. You might see it as a revolution, but it is actually more of an evolution — AI will continue the trend of what has been happening in marketing for several years already:

• AI will replace the most boring, mechanical, repetitive tasks, allowing marketers to apply their strategic and creative skills to better-defined problems.
• Data and analysis replace intuition. Marketers become more accountable for providing measurable results. A cool picture and a catchy slogan won’t replace poor performance in the AI marketing future.
• When it comes to buying a product — or a cloud software solution — people are still the ones making decisions. Customers might be more informed but they are still human — buying with their own knowledge, of course, but also their emotions. Marketing will still need to take that into account.

In the era of the smart customer and the smart marketer, I believe the role of marketing is to add more humanity and creativity to what the robots are bringing.

Where do you stand?