Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve probably heard a lot of hype and hysteria around AI. Some breathlessly hail it as the most transformational technology since the internet, with the potential to revolutionize the industry as we know it while also eliminating tons of jobs. Others dismiss it as this year’s version of blockchain. Just another hype cycle waiting to burst.

As usual, the truth lies somewhere in the middle.

Like other major technical innovations, it will likely have a major impact on our industry and enhance it. Instead of viewing AI as a competitor to humans, we should view it as a sort of partner or helpful assistant. We should leverage AI to automate the things computers do really well, so we can spend more time on the things that only a human can create and understand.

What Is AI, Actually?

Despite the influx of articles treating AI like it’s the next big thing, it’s actually old news. Artificial intelligence is defined as technology that allows computers to simulate intelligence or problem solving skills. This has been around for years. When you open your phone with a glance using facial recognition to prove your identity or use a map app to get directions and it predicts that there will likely be traffic along your route because it’s rush hour, you are using AI.

So why can you suddenly not escape chatter about AI, even from your least technically literate friends and family? The answer is probably less exciting than you think. Instead of a sudden major breakthrough or discovery, AI getting more attention now is the result of steady but incremental progress on key technical infrastructure. As things like computing power and cloud storage have gotten better and cheaper, it’s gotten easier and cheaper to obtain the resources required to train and power AI algorithms behind tangible tools anyone can use like ChatGPT.

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What Does AI Do Well

So what does that mean for us humans? My take is that it means humans can allow the robots to perform tasks that robots do really well, and humans don’t. For example, combing through millions and millions of rows of data to find patterns or anomalies would probably take you hours. Your eyes would get tired and you may miss something important. You probably wouldn’t enjoy that kind of mundane work, either. A computer, on the other hand, is perfectly suited to perform these tasks. Kind of like doing Control + Find, but on a massive scale. We’re already seeing AI algorithms outperform their human counterparts in this type of task.

For the ad industry, I think this means that tasks such as analytics could be powered by AI. Our tools could not only surface the data we pull, but also leverage AI to identify patterns and suggest optimizations in plain text.

We can also leverage AI’s abilities to create entirely new offerings. For example, Clicktivated uses AI to identify objects, locations, and experiences within videos as they play. That way, audiences don’t have to wonder where to buy that cool pair of sneakers or which restaurant has that delicious looking dessert.

What Humans Do Well

What robots don’t do well, though, is creativity. AI can only draw on the past so crafting something completely new and unheard of is a much bigger challenge. Humans are also better (for now!) at understanding nuance, such as connecting a brand concept to a current cultural phenomenon.

For the ad industry, that means that humans generally do better at building ad creatives for campaigns that make an impact.

How to Partner with Our New Robot Friends

To me, the future of AI will be one in which we don’t talk much about AI. Just like we don’t talk about which coding language powers a given app we love, we’ll talk more about the benefits of the tools that AI powers.

The best of these tools will be the ones that allow AI to handle the things it’s built to handle, like data analysis in human readable form, while giving humans the tools to supercharge what makes us human: creativity.

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