There’s no question that technological adoption is often inspired by the intent to be more efficient, but there are other larger—even transformative—outcomes available to smart leaders with the adoption of artificial intelligence (AI.) The lifetime value—from revenue to engagement and loyalty, untapped in digital marketing—is finally within the grasp of innovators who are discovering AI, machine learning (ML), natural language generation (NLG) and deep learning.

These technologies are how forward-thinking leaders are going to unlock that hidden value, finally surface the insights and trends that will guide nimble, data-driven decisions and inform strategy.

And it’s not a moment too soon. New privacy changes have made it more and more difficult for companies to understand their customers. This sea change is driving the leaders across every industry to develop new first-party data strategies—and making room for unprecedented personalization opportunities on the other side. It’s not going to be possible to make that giant leap forward in customer understanding without the help of AI.

A new Coresight report explores the evolving nature of AI in digital marketing, surveying 165 U.S.-based executives who use advanced technology or plan to do so in the next three years. The insights revealed just how crucial AI will be to marketers in the next decade. Let’s take a closer look.

AI is going to be your colleague

Don’t fear adaptation. And yes, it’s time to adapt. AI is going to be on your team; you might need to start thinking of it as your colleague, in the trenches with you, solving your problems and surfacing opportunities. And as with any other colleague, it will be accountable for the performance of its outputs.

According to Coresight’s survey, 78.3% of respondents hold AI accountable for creative development and execution by tracking the impact of words and phrases that are generated with AI. By implementing a data-driven approach, marketers can quantify their ROI from the AI investment and drive the information back to the models, so the robots are performing at even higher levels.

AI is already producing language indistinguishable from human-generated copy. Natural language generation significantly reduces the time it takes to produce thousands of different messages with process automation. AI can select the most appropriate words and phrases, to personalize the language experiences for different customers. NLG then enables data sets to be more insightful and easy to read. It uses data and mathematical formulas to extract patterns from any given database and translate them into text designed to inspire human action.

5 common applications of natural language processing

Aside from creative content generation, (NLP) is used for a variety of purposes, including business intelligence, data reporting, personalized email and in-app messaging, loyalty programs, client portfolio updates, and more. It’s useful everywhere an enterprise needs to speak to customers with language that matters. Here are five common applications:

• Natural language generation: Using AI programming to produce written or spoken narratives from a data set, summarizing insights from multiple data points
• Speech-to-text conversion: Translating broken language into text
• Text-to-speech conversion: Accepting, interpreting, and producing audible language
• Text processing: Using little to no human intervention to identify and extract relevant information to generate meaningful insights
• Chatbots: Answering specific questions and providing customized answers

Nearly three-quarters of survey respondents reported that their organizations either use or plan to use AI for creative content generation within the next 12 months, and another one-fifth plan to use AI for this purpose within the next three years.

Personalizing experiences at scale

Content is where the wheels come off. There is simply no way for human beings on their own to generate enough content and personalize it for customers fast enough to meet the speed of marketing today.

AI is the only way to scale content, creating the types of personalized experiences that brands absolutely must produce to connect with customers. By understanding the consumer through real-time contextual data (purchase history, browsing data and past engagement) and using it to inform content generation—to create relevant, personalized experiences—marketers can finally produce not just the volume of content, but highly effective content that increases loyalty and engagement.

But managing and collecting this data can be taxing, especially as an organization grows. AI automates simple, repeatable tasks that expedites pattern recognition. It helps businesses improve marketing initiatives to provide the right offer to the right person at the right time, through the right channel. Personalization can be incorporated into customer communications regularly through email, messaging, product recommendations, dynamic pricing and ad targeting, and AI can make it possible—without killing your copywriter.

Maximizing customer data with AI

Organizations that take advantage of the opportunities available through AI, ML, and NLG are set up for a great reward. According to a report published by Boston Consulting Group in Oct. 2021, AI language generation is predicted to unlock $200 billion in incremental revenue for the Fortune 500 and $800 billion in revenue worldwide over the next decade.

First-party data is at the core of this competitive advantage. Organizations that understand there is value in their customer data, and haven’t been able to release it, should understand that partnering with AI may be the only way to maximize that first-party data. The leaders who lock into this new technology aren’t just set to generate more effective creative content, but will find new opportunities to anticipate customer needs, use newly uncovered data to inform ideation, create more strategic campaigns and yield repeatable results with mathematical certainty.

In fact, the Coresight survey revealed that 74.5% of respondents agree or strongly agree that using AI helps organizations manage challenges related to offering personalized customer experiences. More than half of all respondents (53.9%) are currently using AI or ML to offer a personalized experience to customers, and only 6.7% do not leverage or plan to leverage these advanced technologies in the future.

It’s time to get more data-driven insights into the hands of the executive leadership team. It’s time to start developing strategies and campaigns with the advantage these tools provide. And AI language generation is your partner at the forefront of the change.