The Impact of Artificial Intelligence and Virtual Personal Assistants on Marketing
As marketers and consumers simultaneously adopt Artificial Intelligence (AI) services and applications, the dynamic of the process of exchange between the buyer and seller in the marketplace is being fundamentally altered. Clearly, the Internet and social media have radically altered not only the roles and relationships, but also the differential advantages held by marketer and consumers in the marketing game, as consumers can now find (via Google) and buy (via Amazon and more recently via Facebook) anything, anytime, anywhere on the recommendation of friends and family (via FaceBook) or other customers (via Yelp) and communicate globally the transaction in 140 characters or less (via Twitter) Traditionally, marketing has been something done to the consumer. Products were pushed. Communication was one way and intrusive. Commercial messages remained mostly brief, designed as much to entertain as to inform and often provide the consumer with little more than a catch phrase in the guise of a slogan or jingle. With the advent of the Internet and emergence of social media, the communication pattern of the marketing game expanded from strictly "outbound" with the marketer doing all the talking, to include "inbound," wherein the consumer searches, contacts, and transacts with the marketer. Marketers no longer can simply buy consumers' interest; it must be earned. Consumers increasingly rely on each other for product and service information and recommendations. Rather than the customer being targeted by the seller, the seller seeks out the buyer. However, as significant and swift this change has been (given social media is but a decade old) arguably the greatest change is still to come with the advent of AI. As marketers and consumers begin to fully take advantage of what AI agents have to offer, the nature and process of the facilitating exchange in marketplace will dramatically change. As AI agents increase the knowledge and insight marketers have regarding consumers' product preferences and buying patterns, those same agents decrease the consumers' susceptibility to the marketer's message and manipulation. As AI agents search, evaluate, recommend, and finalize purchases, the actual consumer may actually be removed from the final purchasing decision. This entry will review the state of the art in AI, with a particular focus on applications in marketing. Based on the current capabilities of AI in marketing, the author's explore the new rules of engagement. Rather than simply targeting consumers, the marketing effort will also be directed at the algorithms controlling the consumers' virtual personal assistants (VPAs) Instead of exploiting human desires and weakness, marketing will need to focus on meeting the user's actual needs. The level of customer satisfaction will be even more critical as marChristina L. McDowell Marinchak University of Alaska Anchorage, USA