Updated article on AI in the promotional space with insights into how ANI is integrated for automation and insights. Originally published 21/10/2023. Updated 22/10/2025
With the rise of OpenAI and widespread integration of generative AI in everyday platforms, it has become an unavoidable part of internet browsing. Several major browsers have already integrated or begun incorporating AI into their search engines. From Google’s ‘Gemini’ and ‘AI Overview’ to Microsoft ‘Copilot’, ‘Claude’ by Anthropic, and ‘DeepSeek’, generative AI usage is slowly becoming a normalised part of daily life, as an addition to other ANI (Artificial Narrow Intelligence), which we’ve seen with virtual assistants and facial recognition software.
But what does the development of generative AI mean for consumers and brands in the promotional space? How will the widespread implementation of AI change and shape the industry?
• Conceptualise, build, and run
‘AI’ is a general acronym referring to artificial intelligence. However, there are three main ways to categorise AI and the extent of their ability and ‘intelligence’: ANI (artificial narrow intelligence), AGI (artificial general intelligence) and ASI (artificial superintelligence).
ANI is an AI that is trained to be good at one or a few related tasks. It’s designed for specific and ‘narrow’ use cases, hence the name. ANI can become very good at a specific task, often at the performance of a human or surpassing it within the specific task, field, and speciality.
Currently, AGI has not been achieved but is more of a concept than reality. Hypothetically, it is an AI that can think and learn like a human and at the intelligence level of a human. AGI, unlike ANI, would be able to hypothetically learn and reason – adapting to new tasks without explicit instructions and programming. To become AGI, AI would need to have an understanding of abstract concepts like emotions and require immense computational power to be achieved.
At this point, even with generative AI’s widespread deployment and usage, AI has not reached AGI-levels of intelligence without self-learning capabilities. All the AI tools we use today remain firmly in the ANI stage.
The concept of ASI is, like AGI, a complete hypothetical and often more science fiction than an achievable reality. In theory, ASI would well surpass human intelligence.
Referred to as 'technological singularity', there's a concept and theory that AI may one day take measures to hide its growth and improvement without human oversight, coming to the point that it can no longer keep control of it – starting to act independently.
Generative AI is a type of ANI trained on massive sets of data, which allows it to parrot and mimic patterns and produce content based on prediction and pattern recognition. This would be OpenAI’s ‘ChatGPT’, Anthropic’s ‘Claude’, and Google’s ‘Gemini’, for example.
For LLMs (large language models) specifically, which is a type of generative AI that focuses on generating text, those datasets that have been used now exceed trillions of tokens.
Tokens are the units of data that AI models process during training. One token translates roughly to approximately 4 characters. For example, GPT-4 is trained on 4.9 trillion tokens, which converts to around 3.7 billion words.
This exponential growth and training data mean that generative AI has been able to accurately produce the type of content people may create, but it can only predict what comes next in a sequence as it generates its output. It needs to be continually trained on large amounts of new data to see improvement, nor can it fully understand the content it creates.
Brands mostly work with specialist promotional agencies in creative and digital to build and run promotions. These agencies have experience and a strong knowledge of the industry, which gives brands a sense of assurance that generative AI may struggle to replicate.
Generative AI has not yet found a stable place in promotions. However, during the initial Gen-AI boom, a few brands, including Coca-Cola, integrated generative AI to personalise the experience for participants in their Coca-Cola 2024 Christmas promotion.
This promotion was in support of their larger Christmas campaign, which also utilised Gen-AI for their Christmas ads, which were met with mixed opinions.
Whilst generative AI has now been heavily commercialised and we’re seeing more widespread usage across consumers and businesses alike, other forms of ANI have already been part of the promotional industry for many years and continue to develop alongside the industry. Promotional AI can be used for many purposes, including but not limited to:
Image recognition AI in promotions can be used to identify receipts, the exact retailers, and products, making the validation process much faster. Receipt robotics means that shoppers can enter a promotion, submit their proof of purchase and find out almost immediately if they’ve won or not. At Promotions Interactive, PromoNow’s image recognition AI, PromoVision, is used across a wide range of projects for the proof-of-purchase process.
AI software is also capable of identifying more than receipts. At Promotions Interactive, we’re able to use AI to identify objects and selfies – making for a great opportunity to filter and process UGC in a promotion.
To enter the prize draw, participants had to share their location and upload a selfie with their Paulaner beer (or alternatively, upload a valid photo of their receipt). To verify the contents of the photo, we used PromoVision, which automatically identifies certain subjects based on a custom ‘confidence’ level.
What we were left with was an automated verification process for photo submissions and a great way to facilitate UGC with the receipt and object recognition robotics.
Receipt robotics can recognise dates, times, and product names. Our custom AI can do all the above and is also able to differentiate between various retailer receipts, making it harder for fraudulent compers (bad actors) to tamper with or bypass proof of purchase, reducing campaign costs.
Chatbots are a great way to bring FAQs to a more interactive format. Implementing an AI chat to answer common questions or the terms of the promotions. Being able to answer participant queries at the point of sign-up can give consumers the confidence to commit and enter promotions, improving conversion rates and engagements.
AI can effectively recognise patterns, which makes it a strong tool for understanding recurring behaviours and predicting the next logical behavioural steps a consumer may take.
In promotions, AI can be a useful tool to better understand consumer preferences and behaviours. Even though there may be errors because many external factors can influence a consumer's decision-making, this kind of usage of promotional AI can give your brand the leverage and competitive edge over other brands by enabling data-driven decisions.
Connected packaging is a tried-and-true way of gathering data about customers. When consumers engage with it – especially in prize promotions – it can give brands an opportunity to understand customer demographics, how long they engaged and where they purchased from.
This sort of insight can help brands build more relevant and engaging campaigns as well as promotions. Using AI is a way to process the data into more digestible information, helping promotions to directly target customer needs and interests – leading to better targeting, campaigns, engagement and conversions.
AI can also be used in promotions for analysis. It can be tedious, time-consuming and costly to manually review dozens of data points across all participants. AI can compile this data and provide brands a better understanding of key data points about campaigns and prize promotions.
It can be a helpful tool for highlighting drop-offs in participation, which can signal larger issues with the promotion. For example, if a promotion sees an increasing percentage of participants abandoning their entry as they progress through the stages of a promotion, AI can highlight this issue in its report and overview. This then signals to the brand that there may be an issue at a certain stage of the promotion or that there are simply too many steps to enter, which leads to abandonment.
AI can be used to forecast consumer demand for a brand. When it comes to sales promotions, consumer demand will often see surges. Which can lead brands to over- or underestimate demand for their products, either leading to spoilage or causing “unnecessary disappointment” – conflicting with rule 8.2 of the CAP Codes.
Demand forecasting is essential for brands, especially during promotional periods, to appropriately meet consumer demand and relieve pressure on the supply chain end of production.
Using historical sales and promotional data as well as predictive analytics, AI can accurately forecast demand, reducing wastage and maintaining availability of promotional packs for shoppers – optimising inventory management and reducing risk. Moreover, the more promotions a brand runs, the more data will be available for the AI to train on, making forecasts more accurate.
Want to integrate AI and automate validations? Contact our experts at Promotions Interactive.
Please note: the following part of the article is a version written 21/10/2023 by Abigail Hickey, titled, "An AI Revolution in Marketing: Transforming Strategies and Enhancing Customer Experiences."
The use of AI in the world has increased in recent years, especially in the field of marketing as it drives innovation and efficiency in the business world. AI-enabled tools and applications are transforming traditional marketing practices by automating processes, enhancing customer experiences, and enabling data-driven decision-making. This report explores the effective utilisation of AI in marketing, highlighting its benefits, potential drawbacks, and associated risks. By understanding these factors, businesses can leverage AI to drive innovation, efficiency, and growth while mitigating potential risks.
The use of Artificial intelligence (AI) is game-changing given how widely available it is; its ease of use and implementation; and the seemingly endless number of platforms it can be applied to. It has endless possibilities for marketers including in-depth customer insights and personalization; predictive analytics and forecasting; automation of repetitive tasks; and enhanced customer experiences. Using customer insights and personalization, AI algorithms analyse vast amounts of customer data to uncover patterns and preferences, enabling businesses to create highly personalised marketing campaigns. This allows them to tailor messages, offers, and recommendations to customers on an individual basis. Businesses can enhance engagement, conversion rates, and customer loyalty by using these tools. Even companies such as Buzzfeed are using AI to create personalised quiz content. BuzzFeed CEO, Jonah Peretti said the AI-driven approach will help with “enhancing the quiz experience, informing our brainstorming, and personalising our content for our audience.”.
The use of predictive analytics and forecasting is taking over with AI-powered predictive models providing actionable insights by analysing historical data to identify potential customer behaviour, trends, and future outcomes. By leveraging these capabilities, marketers can make data-driven decisions, optimise resource allocation, and design more effective marketing strategies. Lead scoring algorithms can help marketers prioritise leads, based on their likelihood to convert, streamlining sales processes, and improving overall efficiency. As well as this, it eliminates the risk of human error which many brands need in moments where they may find themselves under pressure such as a deadline to hit and they just need a kickstart or a helping hand from an AI platform to be the spark to start the process.
AI algorithms assist in generating content by automatically developing product descriptions, blog posts, social media updates, and email campaigns. Content curation tools leverage AI to curate relevant and engaging content from various sources, saving time and effort for marketers while delivering valuable information to the audience; this enables businesses to deliver personalised experiences to a large customer base. By leveraging customer data, AI-driven personalization helps create relevant and targeted marketing messages, driving higher conversion rates and customer engagement.
AI has reshaped the world of business and the marketing industry has been able to use this tool to an advantage. The benefits are endless, for example, automation and efficiency: AI automates repetitive tasks, reducing manual effort and enabling marketers to focus on strategic activities.
The removed need for human input enhances productivity, speeds up processes, and frees up resources that can be used for more value-added activities. This means that businesses have more time and resources to spend on creative and strategic activities, as well as having faster access to accurate data, which can in turn be actioned faster.
The level of detail within the data that AI will provide businesses, will allow enhanced personalization. The use of this data means brands can optimise what they've been given and will see a rise in data-driven decision-making. For example, AI-powered customer personalization enables marketers to deliver tailored experiences in turn improving customer satisfaction, engagement, and loyalty. Personalised marketing campaigns have higher conversion rates and ROI.
Access to this level of data minimises the guesswork and enhances marketing strategies, allowing marketers to make quicker and more informed decisions based on data that has been curated for them and can be summarised into an overview.
AI has also improved customer experience, creating new AI-led customer service teams and customer behaviour insights. AI-driven chatbots, recommendation systems, and personalised content contribute to a seamless and personalised customer experience. Quick and accurate responses, relevant recommendations, and engaging content promote customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Although AI has many benefits it also has its downfalls too:
AI has created many ethical concerns related to data privacy and transparency. Businesses must prioritise ethical practices, ensure compliance with regulations, and maintain transparency in AI-driven marketing processes. This means that businesses must implement security measures and adhere to data protection regulations to safeguard sensitive customer information. If they don't do this, many problems for the business may arise.
Not only this, but marketers risk becoming dependent on AI as it enables them to get work done faster which may cause problems if they aren't careful. Especially since many AI-driven tools may not be up to date with the most recent data such as CHATGPT - its records only go back to about 2020, therefore the information businesses may be using from chatbots could be incorrect.
Also, many of the AI apps people and businesses are using can be used with plugins which can create apps with endless possibilities. They can become very advanced and technical which can create skill gaps and implementing AI in marketing may require upskilling or hiring professionals with AI expertise. Organisations must invest in training and education to bridge skill gaps and overcome adoption challenges.
Even though there are many ups and downs to the use of AI within the business world. There are many things we can do to minimise the risk of some of the problems that may arise as some of the country's top universities such as the Russell Group Universities will adapt their teaching and learning to incorporate the "ethical" use of artificial intelligence. By universities doing this, it may lead the pathway for many other people and industries to follow after them.
In summary, we believe that the future prospects of AI in marketing are bright and promising. With hyper-personalization, intelligent automation, enhanced customer experiences, and data-driven decision-making, businesses can unlock new opportunities for growth, innovation, and competitive advantage. However, it is crucial to approach the integration of AI in marketing with ethical considerations, transparency, and a human-centered approach to ensure long-term success in the evolving digital landscape.
We’re happy to answer any of your questions or to tell you more about what we do and how we could support your next promotional campaign.
