Artificial intelligence is about to arrive in strategic marketing
Artificial intelligence (AI) has moved out of the realm of science fiction and into routine use in the workplace. This rapidly accelerating technology is set to revolutionize work and will soon reach even “soft” functions like communications, meaning it’s time to prepare for these new opportunities.
At our company, for instance, some of us are already using an artificially intelligent assistant named Amy to help schedule our meetings. She saves each of us at least three hours a week in email ping pong. Though the technology is still evolving, sometimes it’s amazing how many emails pass back and forth before the person involved realizes Amy isn’t a real person.
Without a doubt, the AI field is booming. Headlines about “machine learning” and “neural networks” are appearing almost daily. Google is building its own chips to handle AI processing. Recently, an AI system was able to correctly foresee the outcome of some 79 percent of human rights cases, and a Yahoo! algorithm achieved a 90 percent success rate in determining whether comments were abusive. These results approach human levels of performance. IBM, a leader in the field thanks to its Watson system, notes that:
Amazon and Netflix recommendation engines suggest books or movies based on previous selections, Google Now reroutes drivers around traffic accidents on the commute home, and smartphone digital assistants like Apple’s Siri and Microsoft’s Cortana answer questions about the weather and sports scores. (via “How Marketers Are Using AI to Improve the Brand Experience” — IBM THINK Marketing)
General Electric has begun using Microsoft’s HoloLens augmented-reality headset to allow humans to “talk” to “digital twins” of machines and ask them questions. Researchers are homing in on processors that mimic human brain functions and could replace electronics with “ionics” to create “neuromorphic computing.” AI, it seems, has truly arrived.
So how big is the potential? In a survey of top executives at some 2,000 companies around the world with about $7.3 trillion in revenue, Cognizant found that:
Leaders from every region, every industry, every company type, of every age, all noted that AI combined with analytics will be the number-one driver of business change between 2015 and 2018.
When you look at the ways companies are already using such systems, even at the admittedly crude stages at which they still operate, it’s not hard to see why there is such optimism:
BMW is also using AI to improve its owners’ experiences. BMW Connected is an opt-in system and personal mobility companion that gathers data around customers and their cars. It can do things like find and share destinations with the car, schedule trips, avoid traffic, find a parked car or nearby gas stations, lock or unlock the car from anywhere and give walking directions once parked. BMW Connected launched in March as a mobile app but has since been integrated for Apple Watch and Amazon Alexa. Customer feedback so far has been positive, with the most common request, in fact, asking for more features. (via “How Marketers Are Using AI to Improve the Brand Experience”)
There are even a few dramatic AI leaps that point to what is about to come. For instance, when Google Translate was switched to a machine-learning basis, the team found that “the AI system had demonstrated overnight improvements roughly equal to the total gains the old one had accrued over its entire lifetime.” In a matter of days, the system stopped producing clunky translations like this:
Kilimanjaro is 19,710 feet of the mountain covered with snow, and it is said that the highest mountain in Africa. Top of the west, ‘Ngaje Ngai’ in the Maasai language, has been referred to as the house of God. The top close to the west, there is a dry, frozen carcass of a leopard. Whether the leopard had what the demand at that altitude, there is no that nobody explained.
And it began producing far more fluid readings:
Kilimanjaro is a mountain of 19,710 feet covered with snow and is said to be the highest mountain in Africa. The summit of the west is called ‘Ngaje Ngai’ in Masai, the house of God. Near the top of the west there is a dry and frozen dead body of leopard. No one has ever explained what leopard wanted at that altitude.
Amazingly, this is a passage from Hemingway that was human-translated into Japanese and then fed into Google Translate, which produced something almost indistinguishable from the original. (Read more of this fascinating story at “The Great A.I. Awakening.”)
Soon we may even merge our collective wisdom into federated artificial intelligence systems. The largest hedge-fund operator in the world, Bridgewater Associates LP, is already using iPad apps and other exhaustive data-collecting tools with the aim of eventually automating every decision, creating an overarching algorithm called the Principles Operating System. “One employee familiar with the project,” according to the Wall Street Journal article, described it as “like trying to make [founder Ray Dalio’s] brain into a computer.”
If this all sounds futuristic, it should be noted that this nascent technology is now on the cusp of being integrated into the strategic marketing process. Consider:
Campbell Soup Co., Unilever, Toyota and GSK Consumer Healthcare are using Watson Ads, a cognitive system for advertising. Incorporating data from Weather Company, which IBM bought in 2015, Watson Ads helps brands offer relevant one-to-one brand experiences built on new consumer and product insights uncovered by Watson. Consumers can ask Watson for Campbell Soup recipe ideas with answers built around weather, personal preference, past choices and even groceries on hand.(via “How Marketers Are Using AI to Improve the Brand Experience” )
IBM says “cognitive assistants” are beginning to help improve the customer service space:
Instead of replacing [human] agents, cognitive assistants optimize them. These systems are often used to support live agents during calls instead of interacting with customers directly. They are often used to handle mundane inquiries, leaving complex requests to live agents and putting their brains to better use. (via “Customer Service of the Future Is Powered by Artificial Intelligence”)
And there are many other possibilities for marketers:
Not all brands using AI are Watson customers, of course. Insurance and financial services company USAA uses AI across its brand, with its largest effort around its digital enhanced virtual assistant named Eva … Today USAA customers can ask Eva questions to help them search and navigate for information; however, the future opportunity is to deliver an even more proactive interaction … Eva could, for instance, continually evaluate and review a USAA customer’s financial information and then reach out with personalized money management suggestions. (via “How Marketers Are Using AI to Improve the Brand Experience”)
It is clear, then, that AI is here to stay. But how to make sense of the possibilities? The CEO of one analytics company, reporting on Salesforce’s Einstein AI product, offers a useful way to think through what we might do with such tools:
I suggest businesses look for three things:
1. Accomplish tasks quickly — For informational tasks (e.g. answering the question, ‘What’s the highest rated smartphone?’), a machine could automatically assemble answers from agent responses, social media sentiment, online reviews, and other knowledge sources. For transactional tasks (e.g. a consumer making a purchase), it is difficult for a machine to generate logic through autonomous learning, and therefore machines are much more reliant on humans.
2. Do things that humans can’t do — Companies possess great amounts of data that they haven’t tapped into because it would be far too labor intensive for a human to do it. By quickly mining and processing this data, a machine can not only personalize user experiences, but also predict what a person wants to do and proactively provide information. …
3. Bring out the best in your people — … In the contact center industry for example, we’ll see a shift from having an agent actively chatting with consumers, to having someone who designs and oversees the customer experience. Individual conversations will be handled almost exclusively by chatbots and AI.” (via “Salesforce Einstein Proves that AI is Relative”)
There are unknowns and concerns. Elon Musk, founder of Tesla, said recently that the government must consider a universal basic income for large populations whose jobs will be eliminated by automation and intelligent software. Futurists like Jeremy Rifkin have said for some years that steadily increasing productivity, driven in large part by robotics, would put us in just such a position. Artificial intelligence is certainly accelerating these trends. The White House recently released a report noting that the number of jobs in jeopardy from artificial intelligence over the next 10 to 20 years could range from nine to 47 percent, while also noting that the lowest-paying jobs are at the most risk.
One certainty is that awareness of this emerging technology is key. If you’re interested in the AI field (and who wouldn’t be by now?), you can find a massive list of resources on Medium at “The Non-Technical Guide to Machine Learning & Artificial Intelligence.”
In the end, though we’re still far away from J.A.R.V.I.S. of Iron Man, it’s looking more possible every day.
Ron Watt Jr is Founder + President of Watt + Company LLC (WATT), a communications and marketing agency serving Fortune 500 clients worldwide.
