What are Marketers Doing with AI Right Now?

The business world is asking itself – has artificial intelligence finally moved beyond being yesterday’s buzzword of choice into an actionable solution for my marketing issues? The answer depends on who you ask. Many forward-thinking companies have already implemented AI into their marketing infrastructures. Others say that it is an innovation that still leaves much to be desired.

Each company must decide for itself if it will use AI within its marketing program. The best course of action is to take a look at how other companies within your business profile are handling the technology. The advantage we have today is the amount of real data on the subject.

The Digital Outlook 2018 Convention in Singapore

Among the data that we have on artificial intelligence and marketing is a conference of over 400 marketing professionals who met in Singapore to discuss this very topic. Econsultancy headed the event and asked the question quite directly, “What are marketers doing with AI right now?”

Many executives in companies from many industries had a similar viewpoint. Although artificial intelligence has had some hiccups in its past, 2018 may be the year that it is fully ready for mass adoption. Many of these executives pointed to similar concepts that they were employing in their businesses currently.

Producing Scaled Content

One of the first artificial intelligence examples is the production of blog content and ad copy. AI has the ability to change this copy according to the reaction of the audience. For instance, Toyota used AI marketing to feed an engine with 50 scripts for its new Mirai commercial. The program used was Watson AI from IBM. Watson was able to deliver thousands of ads from those 50 scripts that sounded surprisingly human.

AI tools now have the ability to write long form blogs as well. They can even produce short white papers using an AI technology known as natural language generation, or NLG. Currently Groupon, Credit Suisse and Forbes are using NLG to produce over a million words of content per day.

One on One Communications with Every Customer

Communication at scale has always been an issue with marketers. The more expansive a customer base, the less personalized communications become. However, with AI marketing, this does not necessarily have to be the case.

The aforementioned NLG technology, when used with dynamic menus, can be utilized to handle customer complaints in place of a customer service representative. Similar to the Toyota scripts, the AI can generate an exponential number of very humanized responses from just a few dozen scripts. You may have seen this technology at work if you have engaged in online chatbot. However, this is really just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to what AI can do.

Better Recommendation Engines

A recommendation engine is a tool that uses the behavior of a browser to find the next best action for a company to deliver to that prospect. Artifical intelligence uses have the ability to do this without human intervention. As a matter of fact, it may actually accomplish this better than a human.

The advantage AI has over a manually run recommendation engine is that AI cannot be lied to. For the same reasons that social media comment threads delegitimized focus groups and surveys, AI recommendation engines outperform humans – a computer cannot be fooled by a misleading answer about why a prospect took a certain behavior. AI responds strictly to the action with no filter.

These are only a few of the actionable solutions that AI is currently helping marketers to achieve. You can definitely look for artificial intelligence to replace many of the functions of marketers in the near future.

see this and more posts at our blog