Digital
From data to delight: How AI is powering the next wave of customer engagement
Mumbai: Artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly reshaping the marketing landscape, becoming a key tool for brands looking to deliver smarter, faster, and more personalised experiences. For digital marketing agencies and brands, AI is moving beyond hype and becoming an essential part of how they connect with their audience. Whether through automation, personalisation, or predictive insights, AI is driving significant changes in marketing strategies.
Personalisation at scale: A game-changer for marketers
Personalisation has been a core goal for marketers for years, but scaling it has always been challenging. AI allows brands to analyse massive amounts of customer data in real time, providing valuable insights into individual preferences and behaviours. This enables brands to deliver highly personalised content, offers, and recommendations to consumers at scale.
For example, many e-commerce platforms use AI algorithms to recommend products based on a customer’s browsing and purchase history. This type of hyper-personalization has been shown to boost engagement and conversions. According to a 2023 McKinsey report, companies using AI to power personalisation have seen a 10-20 per cent increase in conversion rates. This makes AI an invaluable tool for digital marketing agencies striving to deliver unique, targeted experiences to each customer without the need for excessive manual intervention.
One major advantage of AI is its ability to constantly learn and adapt. As customers interact with a brand, AI-driven systems can fine-tune recommendations, content, and offers to reflect evolving preferences. This dynamic capability allows brands to stay relevant and responsive, offering a level of personalisation that was previously unattainable.
Predictive analytics: Anticipating what customers want
Predictive analytics is another area where AI is making a profound impact. Instead of relying on historical data alone, AI-driven tools are now helping brands predict future customer behaviours and preferences. By analysing past interactions, purchase history, and external factors like trends or seasonality, AI can forecast what products or services a customer may be interested in next.
This proactive approach allows brands to tailor their marketing strategies, accordingly, delivering offers or recommendations before the customer even realises their need. For instance, streaming platforms like Netflix use AI to recommend content based on user viewing patterns, significantly improving customer retention and satisfaction. A 2024 study by Deloitte highlights that companies using AI for predictive analytics are 1.5 times more likely to retain customers compared to those using traditional approaches.
Efficiency through automation: Scaling marketing efforts
While personalisation and predictive analytics are driving enhanced customer experiences, AI’s power in automating routine marketing tasks is equally transformative. AI tools are increasingly being used to automate processes like email marketing, social media management, and even ad buying, allowing brands to operate more efficiently.
One of the biggest benefits of AI-driven automation is that it enables digital marketing agencies to focus on higher-value tasks such as strategy, content creation, and relationship building. For instance, AI can optimise email marketing campaigns by determining the best time to send emails, selecting relevant content, and analysing recipient responses. This kind of automation not only increases engagement but also saves marketers significant time and effort.
AI is also optimizing digital advertising. Through programmatic advertising, AI tools analyze real-time data to adjust bids for ad placements automatically, ensuring that budgets are spent efficiently while reaching the right audiences at the right time. This automated approach to digital marketing can dramatically improve ROI and reduce wasted ad spend.
Conclusion
AI is fundamentally transforming marketing, enabling brands to deliver more personalised, predictive, and efficient customer experiences. As AI continues to evolve, its role in marketing will only grow, making it essential for brands to adopt these technologies to stay competitive. The future of marketing lies in embracing AI-driven strategies that not only enhance customer experiences but also streamline operations, offering a significant advantage in an increasingly complex digital landscape. The future is clear: AI is not just enhancing marketing—it’s revolutionising it.
This article has been authored by VUI Live co-founder and business head Akash Manchanda
Digital
The creative cull: how AI is coming for the marketers, ad men and researchers
Robots aren’t taking over yet, but the writing may already be on the wall for some of the US’ most glamorous white-collar jobs.
CALIFORNIA: The robots are not, it turns out, storming the factory floor. They are sitting quietly at a MacBook in a Soho agency, rewriting your copy, summarising your focus groups and generating your mood boards, and nobody has been sacked. Yet.
A new report from Anthropic, the AI company behind the Claude chatbot, offers the most rigorous look to date at what artificial intelligence is actually doing to jobs, as opposed to what doomsayers and boosters claim it might. The verdict from economists Maxim Massenkoff and Peter McCrory is nuanced but pointed: there is no mass unemployment so far, but some sectors have good reason to be nervous. Marketing, market research and the arts are squarely in the crosshairs.
The researchers introduce a new measure called “observed exposure.” It goes beyond theoretical speculation about what AI could do and instead tracks what it is already doing, drawing on real Claude usage data. The approach is clever. They weight automated uses, where the machine performs the job entirely, more heavily than augmentative ones, where it merely assists. They then map this onto roughly 800 occupations, weighted by how much time workers actually spend on each task. For now the target user base has been the US market, but the findings offer a glimpse of what may be happening in other countries as well.
The results are sobering for the creative and analytical classes. Market research analysts and marketing specialists clock in at 64.8 per cent observed exposure, meaning nearly two-thirds of their daily tasks are already being performed, at least in part, by AI in professional settings. The leading automated task is preparing reports, illustrating data graphically and translating complex findings into written text. In other words, this is the kind of work junior analysts spend most of their days doing.
Arts and media fare little better. The sector shows meaningful theoretical exposure, as large language models can in principle handle the lion’s share of tasks, though observed usage still lags behind capability. The gap is narrowing, however, and the direction of travel is unambiguous.
Here is the sting in the tail. The workers most exposed to AI disruption are not, as popular mythology suggests, low-paid drudges. They are older, better educated, more likely to be women and considerably better paid, earning 47 per cent more per hour on average than their least-exposed counterparts. Graduate degree holders are nearly four times as prevalent in the high-exposure group. The creative professional, the senior analyst and the market researcher with an MBA are precisely the people who should be paying attention.
“We’re not talking about the checkout operator,” the paper implies. “We’re talking about the account planner.”
The most alarming signal in the data concerns not those already in jobs, but those trying to enter them. Among workers aged 22 to 25, hiring into highly exposed occupations has slowed measurably since the release of ChatGPT in late 2022. There has been a 14 per cent drop in the job-finding rate, a figure the authors describe as “just barely statistically significant.” Young people are, in effect, finding the door to exposed professions quietly closing. Whether they are staying in education, taking different jobs or simply giving up is not yet clear.
For a bright graduate eyeing a career in market research or media production, this is not merely an academic data point. It is a flashing amber light.
The paper is careful about what it does not find. Unemployment among highly exposed workers has not risen in any statistically meaningful way since the ChatGPT era began. The apocalypse has not arrived. Even in the Computer and Math category, the most theoretically exposed of all, Claude currently covers just 33 per cent of tasks in practice. The gap between what AI can do and what it actually does at scale in professional workflows remains vast.
Think of it less like a tsunami, the authors suggest, and more like a slowly rising tide. The internet did not destroy journalism overnight. It took 20 years and the collapse of a generation of classified advertising revenue. The China trade shock also took decades to fully register in unemployment statistics, and economists are still debating the numbers.
What does this mean for the luvvies, the admen and the pollsters? The honest answer is: not much yet, but watch this space. AI is already doing the grunt work, including data summaries, draft press releases and boilerplate creative briefs. The question is whether it stops there or continues climbing the value chain.
The authors are building a framework to track exactly that and promise to update it as new data arrives. If the tide does come in, they want to see it coming before the sandcastles are already gone.
For now, the creative industries can breathe, but perhaps not too deeply. The machine is not at the door. It is already at the desk.
