10 Predictions For AI Content Automation In 2024

First thing’s first – We’d like to wish all of our readers a very happy New Year! We’re excited for 2024 and can’t wait to see what it has in store. 

And what better way to kick off the year than with a new blog post? 

Better yet – a blog post about what to expect from AI automation in 2024!

In this post, we’ll unveil the top predictions for AI automation this year and the potential these developments hold for marketers, writers, and managers.

Let’s jump straight in!

Top 10 predictions for AI automation in 2024, and how to prepare for them

1. Personalization at scale

We’ve all had those instances where we could swear our phones were listening to our conversations. Sometimes it seems like all you need to do is think about the shoes you saw another person wearing and an ad for them will pop up on your Instagram feed. But rest assured – This is all the result of highly advanced AI technology. 

These crazy “coincidences” may be the tip of the iceberg as AI-driven personalization continues to evolve. Luckily for marketers – this means adopting and properly implementing this technology will lead to soaring conversion rates and customer loyalty. 

With an astounding 92% of global businesses using AI-driven personalization, this is a trend you don’t want to miss!

AI will enable marketers to create highly personalized experiences for each customer by using data from various touchpoints. Everything from website content to email marketing campaigns can be tailored to individual likes, behaviors, and preferences.

How to prepare:

• Invest in Data Infrastructure: Make sure you have robust data collection and management systems that can handle large volumes of data from various customer touch points.
• Adopt AI-driven Tools: AI-powered personalization can analyze customer data and deliver personalized content in real-time.
• Ensure Privacy Compliance: Stay ahead of privacy regulations. This will help you ethically use customer data for personalization while still respecting user privacy.
• Test and Optimize: Continuously test personalized marketing strategies and use AI insights to optimize them for better performance.

2. Conversational AI and Enhanced Chatbots

We all remember the days when ChatGPT first came onto the scene. This conversational chatbot took the marketing world by storm in November of 2022. In 2024, this is now expected from AI chatbots and is considered the norm. It’s taken some time, but the hype is now starting to stabilize as AI finds its way into everyday operational activities. 

Chatbots are expected to become even more advanced, moving beyond simple scripted responses to engaging customers with natural, context-aware conversations. AI will help businesses automate customer interactions seamlessly, providing personalized advice, support, and sales assistance. In fact, by 2027, a quarter of all companies will use chatbots as their main channel for customer support. 84% of companies already believe that AI plays an important role in customer communication. 

How to prepare:

•  Embrace Natural Language Processing (NLP): Invest in AI solutions with advanced NLP capabilities for more natural and contextually relevant conversations.
• Integrate with Omnichannel Strategy: Ensure your chatbots provide a seamless experience across all customer touchpoints, from social media to your website.
• Train Your Bots: Regularly update and train your AI systems with new data to improve their understanding and customer interaction quality.
• Monitor Interactions: Keep an eye on conversational AI interactions to identify areas for improvement and maintain a human touch where necessary.

3. Gravitation towards more specialized platforms

While larger and more diverse AI models are often preferred by newbies, they could end up costing a business more money at the end of the day. They are vast, have a steeper learning curve, and require more storage and maintenance. 

For businesses that have tried and tested AI tools, they may choose to downscale to platforms that are more tailored to their needs. They may opt to go with industry experts like ContentBot to help drive results and maximize performance in a particular area. Rather than finding value in how many features a tool has to offer, they’re more concerned with the efficiency and effectiveness it guarantees in its area of expertise. 

We may also see organizations use a number of different platforms for various purposes and create their own wheelhouse of tools. The goal is to try to maximize results, performance, and profits while keeping operating costs low.  

How to prepare:

• Identify Niche Platforms: Stay informed about emerging platforms that cater to specific interests or demographics relevant to your brand.
• Customize Content: Develop platform-specific content strategies that resonate with the audiences on these specialized platforms.
• Monitor Platform Performance: Use analytics to measure the effectiveness of your campaigns on these platforms and adapt your strategy accordingly.
• Agility in Marketing: Be prepared to pivot and redistribute resources to emerging platforms that show high engagement and ROI.

4. A rise in threats to organic website traffic

Back in 2022, we wrote a blog post on the top SEO trends of 2023 and how to apply them. In that post, we spoke about the rising number of featured snippets showing up on SERPs. 

Well, we were right. 

These small, highly focused sections of content have increased dramatically and are set to climb higher still in 2024. This makes applying the necessary SEO principles to your content more important than ever if you’re going to secure this top spot. It’s now the first thing that viewers look at when conducting online searches. As a result, 25% of all desktop searches are now zero-click. 17.5% of mobile searches are also zero-click. 

And by 2028, generative AI advancements will leave websites with a 50% decrease in organic search traffic.

Tools like ChatGPT are also steadily making ranking on search engines redundant. With more and more users turning to these GenAI-powered searches, it’s nearly impossible to rely on organic traffic as a driving factor. 

How to prepare:

• Diversify Traffic Sources: Don’t rely solely on organic search. Use a multichannel marketing approach that includes social media, email marketing, and other channels to drive traffic to your site.
• Improve User Experience (UX): Optimize your website for speed, mobile use, and overall user experience to keep visitors engaged.
• Content Quality: Focus on creating valuable, high-quality content that addresses user needs and encourages engagement.
• SEO Best Practices: Stay current with SEO trends and updates to maintain and improve your organic search rankings.

5. Autonomous Media Buying

If you thought it was challenging to understand the customer psyche and the factors that influence consumer buying behavior, wait till you hear this!

We’ve done some digging, and the numbers don’t lie. 

In 2023, the Autonomous AI and Agents market size was 4.8 billion USD. In 2028, this number is expected to reach a groundbreaking 28.5 billion USD. 

2024 sees programmatic advertising becoming more intelligent. AI is slowly becoming capable of performing real-time bidding and media buying autonomously. While we admit this development is still in the beta phase, it shows huge promise across industries as time passes. 

By studying buying patterns and purchase behavior, AI uses algorithms to carry out further transactions on behalf of the user. Machine customers appear to be an inevitable part of our future and learning to market to them presents a whole new challenge for marketers. 

How to prepare:

• Understand Programmatic Buying: Educate yourself and your team on the ins and outs of programmatic advertising and how it can be leveraged for your business.
• Choose the Right Tools: Invest in the right technology platforms that can automate your media buying effectively.
• Set Clear Objectives: Clearly define your advertising goals and KPIs to ensure that your autonomous media buying is aligned with your business objectives.
• Monitor Campaigns: Although media buying can be automated, continuous monitoring is crucial to ensure campaigns are performing and to make necessary adjustments.

6. Sentiment Analysis for Brand Monitoring

When we look at sentiment analysis, it refers to the way that the public views your brand. In other words, the “sentiment” around your business and brand. 

Advanced sentiment analysis tools will allow marketers to gauge public sentiment around brands, products, and campaigns in real-time. This allows marketers to make a rapid response to emerging issues or negative perceptions. Flames can then be extinguished before they turn into raging fires. 

How to prepare:

• Implement Robust Tools: Adopt sentiment analysis tools that accurately capture and interpret the public sentiment about your brand.
• Real-time Response: Set up systems to alert you to significant sentiment shifts so you can respond quickly and appropriately.
• Cross-channel Analysis: Ensure that your sentiment analysis covers all channels where your brand is discussed, including social media, forums, and review sites.
• Sentiment Insights for Strategy: Use sentiment analysis to inform not just your PR response but also your overall marketing strategy and product development.

7. AI-Powered Visual Recognition

If we use a well-known example like Google Lens, we know that this trend has been around for a while. Again, we mentioned it in our previous blog post. However, maybe we underestimated just how big this trend would be and how long it would last. Studies show that 36% of consumers have used visual searches, mainly for clothing and furniture shopping. 

It’s safe to say now that visual searches and recognition are here to stay.

Optimizing for visual searches is an important part of SEO and digital marketing. Marketers need to pay close attention to file names, meta descriptions, and alt text if they’re going to show up in these search results. 

This also opens a window of opportunity for marketers to use AI to analyze images and videos across the web and various social media platforms. It’ll help them gain a better understanding of how their products are being used, spot trends, and gain insights into consumer behavior. These factors play an important role in social listening, a necessary consideration for businesses looking to closely monitor their brand and its image.

How to prepare:

• Explore Visual Analytics: Invest in AI that can analyze visual content to gain insights into how customers interact with your brand visually.
• Benchmarking: Monitor how competitors and industry leaders are utilizing visual recognition AI and learn from their strategies.
• Consumer Insights: Use visual recognition to understand customer preferences and trends based on user-generated content.
• Product Innovation: Leverage insights from visual data to influence product design, packaging, and marketing materials.

8. AI-Driven SEO and Content Strategy

As the task of implementing adequate SEO across marketing forms becomes more important, marketers tend to use AI to help them achieve their goals. Search engines become smarter and marketers often find that AI makes their job a lot easier. 

To put it simply – AI tools will provide insights that align the existing content strategy with the latest algorithm changes and search trends. Depending on your preference, you can use AI to generate SEO content or optimize existing content. 

How to prepare:

• Stay Informed: Keep up with the latest developments in AI-driven SEO tools and techniques.
• AI-Content Optimization: Use AI to optimize your content for search engines and user intent, focusing on readability and relevance.
• Voice Search Optimization: Adapt your SEO strategy to include voice search optimization as conversational queries become more common.
• Leverage Predictive Analytics: Use AI to predict future content trends and align your content strategy accordingly.

9. Customer journey and digital assistants grow in popularity

We all have experiences visiting an online store, adding various items to our shopping cart, and abandoning them at the checkout. Whether that’s because the total amount shocked us or we came to the realization that the impulse buy wasn’t a smart move, it’s a common occurrence. This has led to businesses using automation to send reminders and notifications about our items waiting for the next step to complete our purchase. 

From the ad we saw for the product to the last-minute decision to back out of the payment, these prompts are designed to assist us along the customer journey. These assistants have been adapted to form the digital assistants that are now gaining popularity. 

Voice search optimization will also rise in importance due to the growth of digital assistants. Alexa and Siri are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to voice assistants, and optimizing for these types of searches is no easy task. However, with over 100 million people in the US said to use generative AI this year, and an estimated 116.9 million by 2025, it’s a challenge that marketers need to try to embrace and overcome. 

How to prepare:

• Map Customer Journeys: Clearly map out various customer journey paths to understand different customer experiences better.
• Seamless Integration: Ensure that AI customer journey assistants are well-integrated with your CRM and other systems for a seamless experience.
• Continuous Learning: Implement AI systems that learn from each customer interaction to provide increasingly personalized and relevant guidance.
• Human Backup: Provide an easy way for customers to reach a human assistant if the AI cannot address their needs adequately.

10. Interactive and Immersive Experiences

While the concepts of virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) aren’t new to us, these technologies are gaining momentum in the e-commerce industry. Businesses are quickly finding ways to make the buying experience more interactive and immersive for their customers. 

How are they doing that?

It may come as a surprise that industry leaders have already made it possible for users to visualize products in a very real way. Businesses who are choosing to adopt this technology are reaping the rewards as AR generated 200% more engagement. In 2023, 32% of consumers were already embracing this new method of shopping. 

Let’s use an example – You want to change the wall’s color in your living room but don’t want to commit to buying the paint in case it doesn’t turn out the way you’ve envisioned. You also don’t like the idea of 100 different color smears on your walls, with none of them being the right shade or hue. Well, what if you found out that there was an online store that allowed you to visualize the color on your wall without having to lift a paintbrush? 

That’s exactly what this AI technology was developed to do! 

By uploading an image of your living room, you can tap on the numerous color options and have it splashed onto your wall through the lens of your cell phone. No mess, no stress, and way more fun! This is also possible with furniture and even clothing through apps like Google’s virtual try-on.

How to prepare:

• Invest in Emerging Tech: Explore technologies like AR, VR, and mixed reality to create engaging and immersive brand experiences.
• Skill Development: Train your marketing team in the use of these technologies or partner with specialists who can bring this expertise to your campaigns.
• Customer-Centric Design: Focus on creating interactive experiences that provide real value to the customer, rather than just novelty.
• Multi-platform Compatibility: Ensure that your immersive experiences are accessible across various devices and platforms.

Surprise, + 2 Bonus Trends!

11. Greater emphasis on data and security 

There was a big uproar when ChatGPT admitted to a security breach of data in 2023. Perhaps this is the reason why we’re seeing a rise in data protection and security measures when it comes to AI tools. 

Diverse regulations are also coming to light in 2024. These requirements include restrictions on the use of AI for certain tasks in Europe, and imposing restrictions based on each model in the US after evaluation. Each country seems to be adopting new regulatory requirements as they see fit to control the rising use of AI in businesses and by individual persons. That means that in 2024, companies that use this technology need to prepare to adhere to these changes. The result – Slower AI rollouts as the short-term developments are stalled. 

How to prepare:

• Strengthen Data Security: Implement stringent data security measures to protect customer information from breaches.
• Stay on Top of Regulations: Keep updated on data privacy laws and ensure your marketing practices are compliant.
• Regular Training: Educate your team about data security best practices and the importance of safeguarding customer data.
• Invest in Secure Technologies: Prioritize investment in technologies that offer advanced security features and keep your data infrastructure safe.

12. Brands advertise AI’s absence

Yes, this is a blog post about AI automation trends for 2024. But, the list wouldn’t be complete without mentioning the controversial AI-free trend that’s emerging. 

We know – This one sounds a bit strange. 

In a world that seems to be becoming more AI-inclined, it’s estimated that 20% of brands will choose to take the opposite approach. In fact, not only do they not adopt AI into their operations, they advertise the absence of AI. They instead take the route of 100% real human content in all its authenticity and room for error. To certain demographics, this knowledge is welcomed and reassuring. A unique approach to marketing a brand, but effective nonetheless. 

How to prepare:

• Highlight Human Element: Emphasize the human aspects of your brand and the value that direct human interaction brings to your customers.
• Authenticity in Marketing: Create authentic marketing messages that resonate with consumers who are skeptical of over-automation.
• Quality Assurance: Assure customers that quality and personal care are central to your product or service, even if AI is used in other areas of the business.
• Balanced Messaging: Find the right balance between leveraging AI benefits and promoting the importance of the human touch in your brand experience.

So, here’s the gist of it…

Whether you’re leaning more towards the AI-free image or want to learn more about the rapidly advancing world of AI, one thing’s for sure – the future sees AI as ever-present. 

We’ve provided numerous ways to combat and prepare for all that AI may bring to businesses and marketers in 2024. To stay up to date with the latest developments and industry trends, we recommend signing up for ContentBot and receiving our monthly State of Content Newsletter. 

With a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 26.4% from last year to 2032, it’s clear that the AI marketing market is going to continue its path of rapid growth in the years to come. If marketers want to stay relevant and keep up with competitors, they’ll need to find ways to use this technology to their advantage.

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