Will artificial intelligence soon replace sales employees?

AI, marketing and sales

Much has already been written about the potential of artificial intelligence (AI) for marketing and sales. In the area of marketing, the focus is primarily on automation. Machines learn from customers' data traces and make product recommendations - sometimes more, sometimes less accurate. In sales, forecasting and personalisation are the holy grail. Mathematical methods and statistical prediction models (predictive analytics) are used to discover patterns in historical data from customer relationship management (CRM) in order to predict future customer behaviour and make tailored offers. The market leader Salesforce is particularly present here with its cloud service Salesforce Einstein and is certainly a trendsetter once again.

Recognising opportunities

Both areas of responsibility - marketing and sales - will change dramatically in the coming years thanks to AI technologies. It is therefore advisable to believe those prophets who warn against technological ignorance. In future, it will be important to recognise the opportunities and help shape change for the benefit of all. AI should not be seen as a technology that manipulates people as a "super intelligence" and will soon take over the world. On the contrary. Proven AI researchers such as Professor Dr Wolfgang Wahlster even speak of "specialist idiots" that can be used to simplify and improve time-consuming tasks - tasks that, in a world full of data, almost absurdly have to be carried out by humans.

Where to start?

But where to start if it can't be "super intelligence" to increase sales? It's worth taking a closer look at existing information processing workflows, which are time-consuming and keep your own employees from the essential tasks of customer communication. These include viewing, selecting, organising, sorting, summarising, classifying, linking or visualising content and data for customer-specific marketing materials. Searching for relevant information also takes a lot of time if digital content is not provided with high-quality metadata in accordance with the above-mentioned processes. Metadata maintenance is therefore one of the classic tasks that can be improved through the use of AI technologies. Proven methods from the field of NLP (natural language processing) that automatically analyse texts and generate suitable keywords are ideal here. The automated analysis of multimedia content such as images, video and audio benefits from the major advances in the field of computer vision and pattern recognition based on artificial neural networks (deep learning methods).

Storytelling example

The benefits of AI-supported content analysis and data preparation are enormous. The manual maintenance of metadata in particular often falls by the wayside in everyday life, which makes it even more difficult to quickly provide relevant marketing content for the sales pitch. Furthermore, only high data quality enables the use of recommendation systems, which are useful for a personalised sales pitch or an individual customer presentation. Digital storytelling formats combine emotional stories with factual information to promote sales. The vision here is to receive machine-generated recommendations at every stage of the customer dialogue in order to address customer-specific needs as precisely as possible and almost in real time. The integration of CRM data into recommendation systems for digital storytelling in the customer dialogue is therefore the next logical step.

"Augmented Intelligence"

The scenarios described show this: It's not about omniscient machines that are supposed to replace sales staff, but about the targeted use of smart technologies. They are intended to help simplify complex information processing in marketing and sales in order to be able to optimise the preparation, execution and follow-up of a sales call to meet the customer's needs. AI experts such as Prof Dr Peter Gentsch, who has dealt intensively with these technologies in a publication on artificial intelligence for sales, marketing and service, also speak of "augmented intelligence" in this context. According to this, AI systems must be used in such a way that they strengthen people in their actions and maximise support for human intelligence. From the user's perspective, AI systems can also be described as smart assistants, so that the following formula applies: human + machine = success.

Sources

01.11.2018
AI in sales: Hasta la vista, sales rep?!

09.11.2018
Artificial intelligence: ready for tomorrow's marketing and sales

03.12.2018
Wolfgang Wahlster: "I think AI horror scenarios are nonsense"

About the author

Stefan Grill studied history, cognitive science and linguistics in Freiburg and Edinburgh. As an innovation consultant, he has many years of experience in the development of innovation projects with a focus on the successful acquisition of suitable funding. As a PR and marketing specialist, he also has in-depth knowledge of digital communication, market analysis and strategy development. At 3pc, he heads the Innovation Unit and advises clients on the introduction and development of new technologies. He is currently responsible for the innovation strategy in the BMBF research project QURATOR and coordinates the development of AI-based communication tools at 3pc.