What are we going to see this year in the marketing world? That’s a question that many people working for various brands ask themselves as we move deeper into the age of artificial intelligence.
There’s a particular context to e-commerce right now. The Internet is getting a major facelift, and company strategies are getting pretty fundamental makeovers as people start to integrate new tools and processes into traditional marketing playbooks.
Here are some of the current trends that have to do with the intersection of new technology and various kinds of social business changes.
Platforms and Channels
First of all, marketing is constantly moving from one platform or channel to another.
We saw the rise of social media advertising over the past 20 years, with Facebook getting the lion’s share of attention. However, other platforms are available, too, and now we have additional changes, such as users moving from X to Blue Sky or over to Meta’s Threads platform. Then there’s visual marketing, where TikTok has remained ascendant for a while despite attempts to ban it in the U.S.
That’s something to think about as you’re looking for where to go with your marketing content.
Generating Content Close to Home
Notwithstanding the ability to create content with AI, companies are still using humans. One big trend is the move away from social influencers to employees and end users.
In other words, one trend that we’re seeing is that companies are becoming more likely to use content from someone who is actually close to the product. That might be an employee, contractor, or someone in-house – or a customer or end user of a service. But the term “influencer” just doesn’t have as much influence as it did in years past.
AI Expansion and Agentic AI
Right now, we’re also seeing artificial intelligence move into new roles when it comes to commerce.
We’re seeing the rise of agentic AI, where computers and digital entities can perform tasks and not just generate content or process information.
Some experts discuss this as the age of AI, which is “doing things instead of just saying things.” One part of that is the ability of autonomous systems to navigate platforms. So you might have AI sending emails, or engaging on social media, or doing other things on the web that humans used to have to do.
Some of the new capabilities and trends include:
Recommendation engines – autonomous interactions with customers to show them what they might prefer.
Chatbot accessibility – the ability of any users to interact with a business through AI agents.
Visual voice search – new search functions eliminate the need for the end user to type in keywords. Instead, they get the results served up to them through new autonomous interfaces.
The Pressure of AI Fatigue
At the same time, customers and businesses are both getting tired of hearing about the new technologies and their applications. It’s important that all of these use cases be intuitive, so that people are comfortable using the fruits of AI, and not just overwhelmed and bothered by it.
That’s a little bit about what’s happening right now – in the next blog post, we’ll talk about skills and strategies for the year ahead.
