But are robots taking over the world?

Machines have been beating humans at their own games for more than 20 years. In 1996, Deep Blue, a 2,800-pound supercomputer from IBM, defeated Soviet grandmaster and World Chess champion Garry Kasparov. In 2011, IBM’s Watson beat Ken Jennings at Jeopardy! And in 2016, a Google system won a complex game of intuition and strategy called Go against the game’s most skilled human player. (The Atlantic) Today, computers are playing the stock market via quantitative trading, in which investment decisions are based on complex mathematical formulas rather than traditional trading methods that inject human emotion into the equation.

Without question, bots are taking part in more conversations and doing more to power our world than ever. But when it comes to marketing, there’s one fundamental problem with depending on AI to do everything…

…and that’s emotion.

Marketing content is often emotional. We tell stories because we want to influence our audience – to make people laugh or cry or click the buy button. We want to do more than just sell products because just selling doesn’t cut it anymore. We need our audience to watch and read and buy and share because of what the brand means to them.

That’s why effective marketing content usually induces an emotional response, and even the smartest supercomputers in the world today can’t do that without serious help from humans. That’s why supercomputers capable of beating the likes of Hemingway and Steinbeck in a book-writing race have never written a book anyone really wants to read.

If anything, smart human marketers and content creators will only become more critical in the future. Our roles will become more strategic and our content more structured. We’ll still tell stories, but we’ll tell them in a more machine-readable way. We’ll share words and images and videos that can be chunked into specific, consistent buckets to help machines learn and people wade through the billions of pieces of content born every day.

The Content Marketing Institute says AI is “largely intended to augment human knowledge and capabilities, not replace them.” And right now, I can’t envision a world where robots are able to think creatively and critically – which would all but ensure the perpetual importance of human dreamers and doers. No matter how advanced the machine becomes, I believe humans will always need to teach the machine.

But I’ve learned to never say never. Because in marketing and in life, saying never might be the biggest risk of all.