 Great photo by Alex Knight. From bots to AI, everyone’s in a tizzy about this new technology which threatens to take over the world, eliminating vast swaths of good-paying jobs as it goes. And yes, we did use the word “tizzy.”
Here’s the thing. This is a two-way street. There’s an inherent creative challenge here that no one is talking about. And that’s making the positive case for this technology, which—spoiler alert—often saves jobs, rather than displacing them. We know. We toil in these trenches quite often. So what’s this all about? Let’s take a second to discuss these supposedly-evil technologies before we weigh in on how to portray them, positively, from a creative standpoint. Broadly, the two we’ll discuss here are robotic process automation, or RPA; and artificial intelligence, or AI. Quickly and purposely over-simplified:
Honestly: Does any of that make you shake in your shoes? We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: We’re not any more threatened by these than we are by a word processor. They’re just tools. Powerful tools. And that’s why they’re making such a big splash nowadays. They’re new. So there’s a fear-of-the-unknown factor at work. The good news We have a client that custom-builds lots of AI-powered bots. And we help to promote them in various media. So the age-old creative challenge goes something like this: How do you “portray” a bot that you’d like to sell, knowing that it’s actually an evil job-killer? This would have you asking yourself things like: “Should we even portray it at all?” and “Do we even mention this evil technology?” Well, we’d spoiled this above, and so we’ll dive in here. This technology, this tool, is hardly evil. And in the majority of the use-cases that we’re tasked with promoting, they’re a downright godsend to the people who “work side-by-side” with them. How is that? Imagine you’re a worker. Sitting at your computer all day. Doing tons and tons of drudge work, like creating reports using data from one system, and manipulating it in another and doing all this stuff, over and over, because none of the systems talk to each other and, importantly, all this drudge work is eating up the time you’d rather be devoting to the more important and fulfilling parts of your job, such as serving clients or customers or developing new solutions. Wouldn’t you love it if you could simply flip a switch, and all of the work, in your day, that you hate-hate-hate, magically goes away? That’s what happens. You’ll never see this in the news, because it isn’t scary, and the media’s job is to try and scare you in order to keep you clicking. But workers who get bots not only love them; they actually show them off to their co-workers, who each want their own. Talk about viral. The creative challenge that solves itself All of the above discussion was not a digression. To the contrary: It was the setup for solving the initial creative challenge. The answer, as you can now see, is to address this one head-on: In other words, feel free to depict this technology as friendly, as an assistant, a life-changing development like the microwave oven or the cell phone. Thus, we routinely work on marketing materials which, yes, personify and anthropomorphize RPA bots. And they’re all portrayed as eager, friendly helpers. Incidentally, this entire tale is a great example of taking a customer-back approach to a creative challenge. Once you know what the end customer (in this case, the worker who could benefit from the addition of an AI-powered bot) needs, the way of expressing the solution, creatively, becomes not easy… but straightforward. Need help with challenges like these? Contact us. We’d be delighted to hear from you.
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