Marketing has become an increasingly complex science often stretching our ability to navigate the customer journey effectively. Machines have reached a level of sophistication that they can now begin to take over where human reach is inadequate or flawed. And brands are beginning to turn to machine technology to build the complex marketing programs that will compete effectively to capture and engage customer interest. In fact, by 2020, 80 percent of consumer interactions will take place without a human (Source: Gartner).
So what exactly are the trends in artificial intelligence. Here are five emerging capabilities:
- Machine Generated Customer Interaction – AI can help companies interact. Think automated live chat, automated social media monitoring, in application assistance. These technologies can automate customer interaction and help scale human intervention.
- Visual Search – Image recognition is when a machine identifies an image. This will be used in e-commerce to allow marketers to serve up targeted ads based on what resonates. AI automates the process of “seeing” images and allows marketers to gain insights into what images are resonating with their audiences and serve up targeted ads and search results based on the insights.
- Recommendation Engines – The growing sophistication of recommendation engines to understand who you are as a consumer and make successful machine based recommendations. Marketers will begin to have assistance in building custom journey paths based on implied intent.
- Website Personalization – the ability for websites to include personalization, demographics, interaction and location data to provide a more relevant, engaging experience. This can be a powerful tactic as part of an account based marketing strategy.
- Intelligent Media Optimization – The ability for AI to use intelligence to optimize media buys and make recommendations on media buys that convert to won revenue. Staffing media teams and leveraging agencies to optimize media is far from an exact science. Increasingly AI will come to the market offering dynamic media capability.
The emerging area of marketing AI will assist human expertise and talent with a scientific touch. IDC predicts that global spending on cognitive systems will reach $31.3 billion by 2019. This spend is being piloted by brands and will begin to mature over the next decade.
So is it time for machines to step in and take over?
