Billions of 'custobots' are coming online. Marketers may need to learn SEO for AI Billions of new buyers of goods and services will emerge in coming years, but salespeople won't be able to woo them all with slideware, gifts, football tickets, or lunch – because many of these new customers are machines. So say Gartner distinguished VP analyst Don Scheibenreif, and Mark Raskino, a fellow in in the analyst …
>they will be immune to marketing's appeal to emotions.
Why would you think that? Have they actually used ChatGPT and its ilk for more than five minutes? They are trained on human-generated data. They can detect, react to and fake emotions, and it's actually kinda hard to prevent them from doing so.
It sounds to me like the analyst is still conditioned by old sci-fi movies where the AI is strictly all logic. That's not really the behavior exhibited by LLMs.
And the printer calling home for ink is not an AI, and it's not a LLM. It's barely an algorithm. It's, like, two lines of code. There's no need, or possibility, to try to market to it. It's an extremely poor example of the kind of "custobot" that is then described. I don't think the "custobot" exists yet, or if it does then hardly anyone uses it.
I don't see this situation changing soon, either, because generative AIs are intrinsically unreliable, and I'm not going to hand my credit card details to something that might decide at any moment to buy junk just because the junk was somewhere in the training set and a random float came up 0.0001.
> having AI turn a list of meals into a shopping list. Scheibenreif said that process could be informed by a human advising a personal model of their preferred brand of commodities like pasta, but that generative AI could reach its own conclusions about brands individuals might find appealing.
Seriously?
There were simple programs in BASIC for 80s home computers that turned your weekly menu choices into a shopping list. You could even do the inverse and get suggestions for what to make with what you have in the fridge right now. You do not need to waste power on any form of AI to do that task!
Especially not a generative AI - what are you expecting it to generate? A new and innovative way to make something that looks like stroganoff but is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike stroganoff?
Easy. Given that most basic foods are essentially indistinguishable out of their packets - think potatoes, rice, pasta, beans, frozen peas - the algorithm is 'reduce the price'.
I find it fascinating that my local (DE) supermarket has its own brand beans at 69c, it's expensive brand at 99c, 'outside' brands around 1.99, and Heinz for 2.59 or thereabouts. For some reason, the own brand shelves empty first and most frequently. The same applies to the various rice brands available, the various pastas and so on.
the machine doesn't care if Beyoncé is my spokesperson.
I don't care either, and not just because I'm not a fan of her music[1] but because what a celebrity is paid to recommend is not one of the factors that enters into my purchasing decision. It's suitability to purpose, then price, and then availability, in that order.
[1] I can't even honestly say I've even heard any of her songs but I do understand she is widely popular.
you can't be serious, people (including me) are stupid. The best they (including me) would try to be 'creators' is by using an 'interactive AI bot' to create a shopping bot, rather than buying such a bot (or malbot, obviously ;) by clicking a 'buy-a-shop-bot' button. And it's gotta be a one-click, because 2-click is too tedious.
I see that nowadays AI helps a lot in our work and it is useful in many professions. In my field of software testing,AI has the ability to work no worse than a veteran tester. With many outstanding capabilities, artificial intelligence promises to optimize the testing process and efficiency of the software testing phase.
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