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Welcome to the HBR IDA CAST from Harvard Business Review. I'm Kurt Nickage.

A growing number of companies are turning to artificial intelligence to solve some of their

most vexing problems. The promise of AI is that it can go through vast amounts of data

and help people make better decisions in one area where companies often search for profitable

use cases for the technology is in marketing. It's harder than it looks. Data scientists

at one consumer goods company recently used AI to improve the accuracy of the sales forecasting

system. While they did get the system working better overall, it actually got worse at forecasting

high margin products. And so the new improved system actually lost money. Today's guest

says that many leaders leaned too heavily on AI and marketing without first thinking through

how to interact with it. They might be asking the wrong questions or forcing the technology

into incompatible systems. Eva Asgartha is an associate professor at Harvard Business

School and she's the co-author of the HBR article Why You Aren't Getting More From Your

Marketing AI. Eva, thanks for joining us. Thanks for having me. Let's start a little broad

here because I know that artificial intelligence or AI is a term that everybody hears thrown

around a lot. We may have our own understanding of what AI is based off of the industry that

we're in or how we use it. How do you think about AI today and what is its most common use

in marketing applications? What we mean, me and my co-authors, what we mean about AI

and what we have seen the most in marketing, it is generally the use of data collected

by different tracking devices, different systems, transactions. So it's data of usually

...