Business seeks to use AI instead of people and to attract investment for the robotization of production processes in the enterprise for various reasons. For example, ensuring consistently high-quality products, reduction of the production cycle; increased technological production flexibility; reduction of staff turnover; maximizing profits by saving on costs (Garza, 2019). This paper will focus on the minimization of problems associated with the human factor.
A full evaluation of staff performance is crucial for maintaining a business. Nowadays, one can observe the implementation of AI technologies for this task. Such technological decisions are not the least motivated by the minimization of human errors associated with organizational risks (Garza, 2019). Thus, an employee evaluated by AI can feel relieved and motivated, since this evaluation is free from personal attitudes and illogical decisions. At the same time, a manager or supervisor can experience disadvantages because a full performance evaluation is a complex procedure, on which business processes depend crucially, and thus, they lose control over the business maintenance.
On the other hand, when one speaks about feedback during the ongoing process of performing job tasks, the advantages differ. It might be a distracting factor for an employee due to psychological reasons (for example, having to deal with a machine while tackling the work routine). On the contrary, a manager can benefit from such a decision: they can have more time for the concentration on more important tasks instead of wasting time on routine tasks.
If one considers a whole replacement of middle or even top-level managers by the AI, the possibility of such a scenario depends on a type of business. If a business is associated with simple routine tasks and much of the work is automated already (for example, delivery businesses), this decision is possible and even desirable for the reason the business owners and investors will benefit from it. On the other hand, if a business deals with challenging intellectual activities, a replacement of human top-level managers with AI would still not be conceivable since much of and performance in such business depend on complex human brainwork, which is still not perceived by AI.
Smartphones have replaced a significant amount of technologies that people use for work and everyday life. On the one hand, it has become much cheaper to buy a smartphone than previously all the technologies people used daily in the 1990-s. Consider radio, personal stereo, earphones, cameras and camcorders, CD and MP3 players, tape recorders, and many other devices. Cichon (2014) counted a difference: $3054.82 in 1991 (equivalent to $5100 in 2012) against an affordable cost of a smartphone. For me, personally, a smartphone has substituted CD and MP3 players, cameras, and credit cards (I use a paying device in my smartphone).
There is a common belief that all of the old-fashioned technologies replaced by smartphones will discontinue sooner or later. I would like to express my disagreement with this statement: I suggest that none of these technologies will disappear completely; instead, they will continue to exist as valuable vintage technologies for connoisseurs. They will offer their owners and potential buyers a feeling of exclusivity and well-known flavor of good old stylish vintage. This happened, for example, with vinyl records and players, the same is true for tapes. Although they are not a part of mass production and consumption, they have their own audience with special symbols and values attached to them.
Considering the prices of smartphones vs. the price of old-fashioned technologies, one could say the question of comparing prices is more ambiguous than it seems. When buying technologies in the 90s, people could be sure that those technologies are long-lived and the prices are final. Today, technologies and ideology behind them are designed to make people buy new smartphones much more often. Moreover, with an acquisition of a smartphone, one’s purchases do not cease, making it difficult to count the real cost of this technology.
The Internet has changed advertising significantly and nowadays the Internet marketing demonstrates a very high marketing potential, also reducing costs of advertising. The term Internet marketing has been firmly established in business and academe, referring to the promotion of products, services, and brands through the Internet. It involves display ads, email marketing, search engine marketing, social media marketing, and other methods. Internet marketing, or online marketing, has two main advantages for business promotion. First, it is a valuable source of consumer data: demographic characteristics, patterns of everyday life, preferences, previous consumer choices, and identities. Second, online spaces provide various opportunities for access to the consumers themselves: a number of targeting instruments, which have been becoming more and more sophisticated and nuanced. These are the main differences between online and traditional marketing, where the coverage is just about its scope and size.
Another distinction lies in ads’ presence in people’s everyday lives: Internet marketing is everywhere in online space, making it difficult to distinguish between real content and ads. This fact leads to a suggestion that online marketing is more effective in persuading and communication. I believe that its most powerful method is social media marketing since it uses human’s most fundamental desire to belong to a community (Husain et al., 2016). At the same time, I find display ads and email marketing to be most annoying because such advertising does not adapt to one’s purchase cycle and, thus, often appears to be irrelevant.
References
Cichon, S. (2014).Everything from 1991 Radio Shack ad I now do with my phone. – Trending Buffalo. Web.
Garza, A. de la. (2019). Cogito AI Software Coaches Customer Service Workers. Web.
Husain, S., Ghufran, A., & Chaubey, D. S. (2016). Relevance of social media in marketing and advertising. Splint International Journal of Professionals, 3(7), 21-28.