Can AI Really Get Marketing to a "Minority Report" Future?

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In the 2002 movie Minority Report, which was itself based on a 1956 novella, the police apprehend criminals "by use of foreknowledge."  Before they commit the crime.  Meaning that they know what certain people are going to do before those people do themselves.  (Most people wrongly recall it as a technological breakthrough, but in the story, three human psychics called "pre-cogs" actually provide the foreknowledge.)  

With the current buzz about artificial intelligence, it seems many are convinced that we are close to using technology to do the same thing. That would surely be the holy grail for marketers, correct? Knowing which consumers are going to buy, what they're going to buy and when would make it awfully easy to be a marketer.

But I’m not so sure we’re going to get there any time soon.  We’ve had great analytic minds and sophisticated analytic tools, not to mention increasingly powerful computing resources, working on improving analytic techniques for years, but they've only moved the needle incrementally.  We're stuck with propensities and likelihoods.  Are recent advances in artificial intelligence a game changer from that perspective?  At heart, AI is a logic puzzle - an application of rules-based look-ups to drive decision making. Machine Learning increases the look-up knowledge base at rapid speeds. Computing power shortens the time to make decisions, and allows for greater depth in considering alternatives. These technologies themselves will continue to get "smarter", but that’s not the issue.

As always, it is about the data.  Historical intent signals and purchase data have only limited predictive capacity to forecast the future - human wants and needs change over time, often in the moment, and do not always follow repeatable patterns. The ability to precisely predict the what, when, why, where, how of individual purchase decisions is going to remain out of reach until we can feed the increasingly sophisticated analytics tools with the necessary input data.  

If that is true, in the short term, it may just be that the promise of artificial intelligence for marketing analytics is merely an evolution of the age-old function of marketing: finding better ways to persuade people to change their behavior.  Just faster and with increasing levels of precision.  Maybe the Minority Report view of the future lies as much in knowing who is not likely to do something, and knowing the best ways to alter their behavior, as it does in knowing who, what, and when.

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