Refocusing and Futuring Perspectives on AI in Marketing

In their article entitled “AI is Changing the World: For Better or for Worse?” Grewal, Guha, and Becker imply two symptom-avoidance rather than goal-approach questions: (1) What fundamental societal problems, previously identified in the marketing literature, will AI exacerbate? and (2) How can society remedy these problems? By only considering articles published in prestigious marketing-related journals, their restrictive bottom-up thought-leader-grounded process for deriving answers to these questions is blinkered and somewhat backward-looking. Instead, a top-down approach, driven by preferred-outcome questions like ‘How can marketing best help optimize societal flourishing in a post-scarcity, AI-rich environment?’, may foster comprehensive, extra-disciplinary, future-oriented, and proactive analyses that yield more effective answers. We close by speculating that marketing can survive in a transhuman and AI-rich environment.