Rumman Chowdhury of Accenture bats for AI in generative art design

Rumman Chowdhury, Global Lead for Responsible AI (Artificial Intelligence), Accenture Applied Intelligence, was one of the speakers at the 44th IAA World Congress recently held at Kochi.

BestMediaInfo.com caught up with her in an exclusive chat to discuss the use of AI in advertising, and digital and social media marketing. Here’s what she had to say.

One wonders how AI would aid the world of advertising except improving customer targeting. She explained it would be interesting to think about the use of AI in generative art design. “You create an appealing and attractive looking piece of advertising; what is it that is appealing and attractive about it. You can then actually start to collect data and information, and then start to train AI to make data and to make art. I think that will be very interesting for advertisers,” she said.

Another thing to think about is the combination of human and AI — where it is a human being aided by AI to create some sort of an experience for somebody else. “So we think about advertising, this is more than just things on your phone, on your television, etc. We can create good user experiences, but we also need a human to design the human component and then the AI helps them realise it efficiently,” she suggested.

Does she think AI will eat into the share of creative agencies? No, she clarified. “I’ll give you an interesting parallel. Journalism is a really good parallel.”

From the beginning of the internet, people kept talking about how journalism is dying and newspapers would close — specifically about print and even online journalism. Because it is hard to earn a profit, because so many people put up media for free. Then how do you create a profit without making it advertisement-heavy?

“But what we are seeing in some media houses is like a rebirth of journalism, it’s a combination of data science and journalism. In-depth reporting backed up by statistical analysis and data,” Chowdhury said.

So that’s where she thinks that these potentially hybrid industries are going to head. “There are so many things you can do with AI. More jobs will be created, and we will be able to shift people from one set of jobs to another, seamlessly. So education is a very critical component,” she added.

How is AI going to take digital marketing forward? “About prescriptive analytics - when we are doing analytics and then making decisions on future consumer behaviour, which we are already doing for a while - but we can do this now at a more granular level. So there is that aspect to it,” she explained.

Also, there is this idea of an omni-channel. “So you can create an experience that could move from television, to laptop, to cellphone to the in-person at the store, and it could be the same sort of seamless experience for whoever is part of it,” she added.

What is the role of AI in social media marketing? “Huge,” she said. Targeted ads etc., pose as both pros and cons.

“We are targeting ads and we are targeting media, but there is a need to be cognisant of how people are being shaped and manipulated,” she suggested.

“And the reason I bring this up is that we will have regulation against AI, so we are thinking about how we may be misguiding people. What I’ll say that it’s never intentional, people often do these things with the best of intentions and then it ends up being something like they didn’t mean to do,” said Chowdhury.

She goes on to say this that there is wonderful possibility, “But we should really think about what is the end goal; in the end, is it just to sell a product, or to improve someone’s life, and then optimising for the goal that we want to achieve,” she said.

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