Glimpses – 3
Dear CEO,
Continuing our look at tomorrow’s world through the eyes of others.
Salesforce’s “State of Marketing Report” lists the top priorities for marketers.
McKinsey on Digital Twins: “Building a digital twin, especially for highly specialized applications (such as multimachine production scheduling or vehicle routing), can be time-consuming and resource-intensive. The effort often entails designing and developing new digital-twin models, a process that can take six months or longer and incur substantial labor, computing, and server costs. By leveraging a software development platform such as GitHub, large language models (LLMs) can create code for the digital twin, accelerating the development process and increasing effectiveness. This ability to generate such output leads to an exciting prospect: LLMs could possibly be used to create a generalized digital-twin solution—a foundational, universal model—that facilitates design and serves as a starting point for developers across digital-twin projects and even industries.” More: “a global retailer recently set out to rethink its supply chain with an eye toward cutting costs, optimizing service, and boosting sustainability. It was a complex problem that involved optimizing an array of key levers, such as inventory positioning, product flow optimization, supply planning, and carbon emissions. Drawing on the organization’s vast quantities of real-time data, a team created a digital twin of its global supply chain operations—a sprawling system of manufacturing facilities, freight and cargo operations, third-party contractors, and distribution centers. The digital replica allowed the retailer to test more than 50 scenarios a day, examining potential outcomes for various large and small choices along the supply chain, all without any real-life disruptions. An optimization engine embedded within the digital twin provided users with informed recommendations in the meantime. Ultimately, the company made a series of optimized decisions that sparked a 7 percent reduction in carbon emissions and a 5 percent improvement in customer orders received on time.”
With smarter AI-powered conversations, marketing will look more like sales over time. Rather than 1:many broadcast, we will have many 1:1 agents selling people over chat/phone/video and providing a truly personalized pitch. We only have marketing because 1:1 sales for everything is too expensive. But with AI allowing people to convert $ to labor, we will see unique combinations of mass 1:1 sales with brand efforts to give your virtual salesforce air cover. And along with sales, mass personalized landing pages, product experiences, and so on. Everything will be white glove and concierge, rather than mass-produced.
When a marketer kicks off in new campaign, it might be more like spinning up an instance of millions of virtual AI sales people — or better yet, “sales companions” — that go out and engage consumers in the exact way they want to be engaged. That might be chat, or they might buy online ads (but each one tailored, 1:1), or send emails. Or call.
These agents might speak every language in the world. They might know every idiom and every way to be persuasive no matter who you are. They might not only relay an initial message but know how to follow up exactly the right way. Maybe it won’t resemble selling at all, but instead they’ll be your friend, and part of being your friend is I’ll make recommendations on where you should go when you travel.
Thus, the next generation of AI-driven marketing might be like scaling up a massive team and having millions or even billions of one-on-one conversations…The only thing that keeps marketers from being able to cover the entire surface area of marketing channels, and deliver breathtakingly new creative against all these channels, is the cost of planning creating an executing all the campaigns. But imagine this goes to zero — maybe we’ll be able to cover all the surface area, no matter how many, and how complex.
