Marketing managers and agencies are trying to figure out how to best employ rapidly emerging AI technology. When powered by data that tracks consumer behavior at a granular level on social media, in web searches, in ecommerce, and at retail, AI enables marketers to provide an unprecedented level of message customization that responds to individual interests.

In that context, I was interested in the comments of marketing executives who are graduates of the Tuck School at Dartmouth in the latest issue of my alumni magazine, Tuck Today. These top marketers are looking at AI as a key tool in promoting their brands by using real-time data on consumer behavior to customize pitches on a heretofore unachievable level of granular personalization.

Heather Cole T’03, senior vice president of American Express, sees the promise of AI for extreme personalization of Amex’s marketing messages. Machine learning will take personalization to the next level by creating new content including text, images, audio, and video based on specific parameters generated by customer data.

“Generative AI is really going to change the landscape of how we create content,” Cole says. “The more agile we can be in creating personalized content, the better we can serve our customers, even iterating on the content as our customers engage with us.” For example, Amex uses email marketing as a key means of reaching customers. Cole says that emails that used to be created manually and might take months to get out now can be automated and turned around in days. Content can anticipate where a customer may want to go in her relationship with the brand, not just respond to previous behaviors.

Karilyn Anderson T’14 is group vice president for digital marketing and CRM for SPARC Group LLC, which manages a portfolio of seven fashion brands including Brooks Brothers, Nautica, and Forever 21. SPARC uses purchase and online behavioral data to create customer profiles such as new, repeat, and likely-to-churn shoppers. Anderson says, “By developing a deeper understanding of our customers’ behavior and preferences, we can design marketing initiatives that are more relevant and compelling and leverage our best customers as a look-alike audience model for new customer acquisition.”

SPARC uses customized text messaging as a nimble and inexpensively deployed communication channel to target specific segments based on their behaviors in real time. These include reminder texts when a customer has added items to her cart but then left the website, personalized texts to a VIP audience of regular buyers, and unique back-to-school campaigns customized for each state. SPARC uses ChatGPT to generate text content, write product descriptions at retail, and for search-engine optimization (SEO). She notes, “The most interesting application is automating personalized written content that lands in our customers’ inbox.”

While AI is seen by many in agencies and marketing departments as a threat to their jobs, top managers are using it as a tool to sell one-on-one at an individual level never before achievable. Essentially, this is the old-fashioned interaction of retail sales person and customer scaled up to reach millions.

What were you thinking?