Despite all the scaremongering, AI is steadily advancing into our daily lives, at home and at work.
In the absence of any firm regulation or non-aggression pact among the main developers, it’s up to us to learn how best to ride the lightning.
It can automate all our drudgery, rapidly analyse vast quantities of data, and develop content at scale. Sure, it might eventually autonomously develop a bacterial weapon that wipes out humanity, but in the meantime, let’s party.
In financial services marketing, beyond the plain vanilla tasks, its real strength doesn’t lie in content but in the data and analytics capability and particularly how it can support the drive for personalisation.
This drive has been relentless and is not confined to emails from your credit card provider, as commonly assumed. It applies in the wholesale and institutional world as well.
The ability to source publicly available data on individuals to build a CRM profile means even that touching personal email from a relationship manager following a big win can be automated and make you feel all warm and fuzzy, even though it was written without human intervention.
AI-powered marketing has become so advanced that it’s becoming difficult to distinguish between what feels genuinely personalised and what is algorithmically generated.
Ridley Scott’s dystopian classic film Blade Runner, based on the Philip K Dick novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, featured “replicants,” androids almost indistinguishable from humans. As the models improved, they became harder to spot.
Eventually, some rose up against their planned obsolescence and returned to Earth seeking eternal life.
For the record, I am not suggesting that financial services is going to be staffed by robots, any more than it already is (I am referring to robo-advisors not your average executive). But paradoxically, we are pursuing an authentic connection with clients by the most artificial of means.
In Blade Runner, replicants would be subjected to the Voight-Kampff test to distinguish them from humans by their emotional responses.
It might not be too long before financial marketers develop their own tool to measure the emotional engagement of customers with AI-generated content. I personally love the idea of using AI to gauge human emotion and the quest for genuine connection.
Replicants also had implanted memories to give them depth and a semblance of humanity.
If we continue to draw on publicly available information on clients, including their social feeds, we can create highly personalised marketing strategies that feel so tailored, they almost seem to hold memories of our desires and fears. We are increasingly fabricating a sense of intimacy.
So far, so wonderful. But where does that leave the financial marketer while we slowly build our replicants?
Well, the good news is that there is no substitute for genuine human interaction. Before we are faced with a resistance movement of clients craving human touch, we can use AI to deliver the best of both worlds.
AI is best viewed as an enabler. It can enable us to elevate our roles and focus on exploring higher value tasks that really make a difference.
In marketing, it can enable us to bring people together for real encounters and also enable us to bring genuine human empathy and understanding to situations we previously might have missed. It can be used to strengthen human connections, not weaken them.
This means using data and analytics to make introductions and build networks among customers and clients that become part of your marketing ecosystem, creating a sense of real community.
It also means using data and customer profiles to identify who might be struggling and need a personal touch, or to start difficult conversations with a client based on a deeper insight into their situation.
We need to navigate the ethical and emotional landscapes of our increasingly digital world with care and consciousness.
We can harness the power of AI to enhance human connection rather than replace it, if we strive to strike the right balance between technological advancement and maintaining our humanity. We need to do the right thing.
The integration of AI in financial services, if done ethically and thoughtfully, can bring about a new era of personalisation that respects and enhances our humanity rather than diminishing it.
It is an opportunity for us to demonstrate our real strengths and the value of connection. The alternative is to leave it to the machines, in which case, the best of us will disappear in time, “like tears in rain.”
Alexander Clelland is director at Houston.