Pau Virgili, Marketing Professor at ESADE Business School, Rotterdam School of Management, and Luxembourg School of Business, talked about how Artificial Intelligence (AI) can be used for value creation in marketing in four ways to impact customer engagement, at Sasin Research Seminar. By using AI, marketers can leverage these four points: Understanding the Customer, Understanding Demand, Generating Demand, and Connecting with Customers. Understanding the Customer Today’s marketers are always keeping an ear on where the conversations about their brands are and making their brands the center of the conversation. “I have to know what you care about, what you are talking about, and what everybody is talking about,” said Virgili, who is also a Consultant working for brands like Apple, HP, Nike, and Coca-Cola. For instance, as Virgili explained, Coca-Cola focuses on connecting with its customers by becoming part of the conversation—regardless of income, age, or background. The goal is to tap into real-time social conversations and align the brand with what people are already talking about, so that Coca-Cola doesn’t just join the conversation, it becomes the conversation. These conversations are where AI works as an enabler to gather data into useful information that marketers can use to understand their customers. With the tremendous amount of data available from YouTube, X, LinkedIn, and other types of social media, marketers can create structured data from unstructured data through social listening and media monitoring platforms like Brandwatch, Talkwalker, Mention, and Meltwater. Despite consumer’s needs for privacy, marketers are spying on every footprint they leave on the internet. “Any single time we do anything we leave a mark, you click into something – I know,” said Virgili, adding that even a simple statement like “I love Bangkok,” can be analyzed by using sentiment analysis or opinion mining, a field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) that uses natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML) to analyze the emotional tone of the sentence. Virgili also added that synthetic personas, AI data-generated fictional user profiles, are another tool marketers can use to interact with to help companies simulate and understand customer segments, creating a culture of customer-centricity. Understanding Demand What makes a person purchase a Hoka instead of a Nike or Adidas sneakers? Although consumers might consciously seek out one brand instead of another or might be driven by other factors, marketers must understand consumer’s demands. Virgili said that the Marketing Mix Modelling (MMM) can be driven by AI to better understand them. Marketers are using AI-driven MMM attribution to gain deeper insights into their campaigns. By leveraging AI, they can dynamically analyze large datasets and assign credit to various marketing touchpoints based on their true influence on customer behavior. This advanced approach adapts to changing data patterns, offering a more accurate and efficient understanding of the customer journey than traditional models. As a result, marketers can make smarter decisions, optimize their strategies, and allocate their budgets more effectively. Generating Demand A new approach to segmentation is emerging, one that shifts from traditional demographic categories to behavior-driven predictive analysis. Virgili said that marketing is no longer about who you are, your age, height, or social background, but about how you behave and what patterns data can uncover. This means two completely different individuals, like you and your grandfather, could fall into the same segment if their behaviors align. This shift allows for one-to-one personalization at scale, making it possible for brands to be much more effective in delivering culturally relevant and localized content. Virgili emphasized that in this environment, the concept is king. Brands must create ideas that are compelling enough to persuade consumers to choose them. At the same time, improving efficiency in creation and localization ensures that these messages are delivered quickly, accurately, and in the right context. Connecting with Customers According to Harvard Business Review, one of the top reasons that people use AI is as a therapy and companionship at the consumer level. More people are using AI for emotional support and asking for recommendations and advice on what to do on a daily basis. Utilizing emotional connection, marketers are leveraging AI to connect more with their customers. For instance, when it was found that people had an emotional connection with their Roomba (the robot vacuum cleaner), Roomba producers used this to their advantage making the Roomba have emotions such as one day hitting all the furniture, randomizing their behavior, and putting eyes on the Roombas to increase consumer’s emotional connection with their cleaning robots. “Just by doing that the amount of emotional attachment to Roombas was out the roof!” said Virgili. Virgili gave another example of how AI is being used to connect with customers on an emotional level. For instance, Eugenia Kuyda, an AI programmer, recreated her deceased friend using AI by analyzing all their social conversations. This project led to the creation of Replika, an AI companion designed to simulate human interaction. Through these four points, Virgili emphasized that AI is not a product, but an enabler that helps humans create greater impact and value.