Towards A Futuristic Perspective of Introducing AI into Marketing Communication Education in Egypt

The term artificial intelligence (AI) is used for various socio-technological approaches and has been defined in many ways. Nowadays – unlike its inception in the 1950s – it is used every day by everyone to some extent, through Google searches, social media content, and how communication and marketing tasks are performed in companies around the world. Regarding public relations and marketing, AI is positioned to fundamentally change both tactical and strategic processes, thereby thoroughly empathizing relationship management and social responsibility.
Findings of vast empirical research tackling the issue worldwide, suggested that marketing communication practitioners who adopt AI technologies would certainly gain a competitive advantage. It appears that the future of the communication profession in PR and marketing would be a blend of both AI technologies and human insight.
Unfortunately, introducing AI as a major domain in marketing communication education haven’t received the same focus as that of the professional practice, though AI education should be the main pillar in qualifying future practitioners, aka content creators.
The current study tends to explore the qualifications content creators and practitioners should possess when taught about marketing communication to deal with ANI (Artificial narrow intelligence). Via a futuristic approach, the study tends to suggest AI courses and topics to be included in the Egyptian pedagogies of marketing communication programs, evading the controversies surrounding AI ethics and lack of in-depth studies.
The current research is set to answer 5 main questions: RQ1 How is AI professionally utilized in marketing communication by content creators? RQ2 How did academic research tackle utilizing AI in communication, PR, marketing and marketing communication? RQ3 Has academic research tackled utilizing AI technology in marketing communication education? RQ 4 What are the ethical concerns related to AI utilization professionally and are pedagogies keeping up with those concerns? RQ5 From a futuristic perspective, how can Egyptian curricula encompass AI courses and topics to be included in the Egyptian pedagogies of marketing communication programs?
First, a secondary analysis of 80 empirical studies tackling AI and marketing communication published in referred journals and referred books was carried out. The time interval of the study sample has fallen between 2018-2023 due to the recency of the topic. Findings revealed that western research schools haven’t prevailed in this topic, rather Asian AI research school from India, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Vietnam prevailed together with the Turkish literature. Pertaining to building marketing communication curricula depending mainly on AI concepts, the study found out that not only practitioners and content creators lack professional perspective of AI, rather it is the academic discourse that is lacking an investigation on the topic. The study, futuristically, suggests a number of ANI courses obligatory to be introduced in the marketing communication education to qualify content creators and practitioners for the ever-changing milieu of AI based communication, including core and ethical concepts, marketing AI research, content intelligence, data analytics, sentiment analysis and NLP among others.