Are you still on the fence about adding Artificial Intelligence to your marketing mix? About time you jump over and start experimenting because if you don’t, you’ll be one of ‘those’ people who are still living under the rock in the next five years. Too dramatic? It is because we need to grab your attention right now and tell you that AI is the biggest thing happening to marketing as we write this. It promises to change many facets of marketing that is in practice today. It’ll need you to improve your skill set in behavioral targeting, work with data and in the end, deliver a seamless experience to your customer – all of it without treading on their privacy. AI is no longer a part of sci-fi movies. It is moving into retail stores, e-commerce platforms, and your customer’s mobile phones. Here’s a quick fact Source: Hubspot That, in a way, is the beauty and wonder of AI. It is making human lives easy by intelligently and independently completing tasks for them without making them realize that there was a machine behind their action. Artificial Intelligence covers a huge ground including machine learning, image recognition, speech recognition, search, advertising, security, content and more. But how do marketers really use this on their own journey? Here is how AI is already being used by the best minds in the industry. 1) Website design How about a website that designs and builds itself? Does that sound threatening to the graphic designer and developer in your office? It isn’t yet, but it gives you a quick view of where the future is heading. Meet The Grid whose AI web designer ‘Molly’ who has apparently designed thousands of web pages including their own website. “She’s quirky, but will never ghost you, never charge more, never miss a deadline, never cower to your demands for a bigger logo”. Do those words sound like a summary of the problems you’ve been having with your ‘human’ designer? You may just want to give Gird a try to see if an AI designer can do better. Sacha is another AI web designer by Firedrop with similar functionality. The designs look functional and may be getting more intuitive with time too. Now, one of the biggest names in the design world – Adobe – is using Sensei, their AI and machine learning program to automate several of a designer’s task like cropping photos and designing web pages. The sheer reach of Adobe and its popularity can usher a new era in designing if all goes well. 2) Content Creation There goes another job that could be upended by AI? Almost… but not fully. AI is set to weed out content writers who write template content filled with keywords. While unfortunately, such meandering content may not disappear, it will now be written by AI bots quickly and easily. It won’t be Pulitzer Prize-winning content but it’ll be unique, it’ll make sense and it’ll do the job at almost no cost. NarrativeSicence is a Chicago based company that trains computers to write news stories. Quill is a rabbit they’ve pulled out of their magician’s hat. Powered by Advanced Natural Language Generation (Advanced NLG), Quill is an intent-driven system that automatically transforms data into Intelligent Narratives at scale, in conversational language anyone can understand. In fact, NarrativeScience’s cofounder Kristian Hammond predicts that over 90% stories that you’ll read in the next 15 years will be written by computers with artificial intelligence! Another prediction from Hammond is that it won’t take 20 years for a computer to win the Pulitzer – probably just 5! Does that mean you are about to lose your job? Not yet…. Take an example of NarrativeScience when it started tracking the women’s softball beat to give a detailed account. The software first focused only on the winners which made it write a downgrading account about the loser. When the software engineers were asked to tweak this, they found a way. They also found a way to skip the kids’ errors in the little league game as parents did not want to read about them. The thing with AI and machine learning is that they’ll learn on the go and won’t make the same mistake twice. Today several popular websites, even Forbes, use tools like Wordsmith and Quill to create more content in a timely manner. The future jobs for content writers will be less, and will definitely require more skills to Another disturbing factor came to light when a few scientists used AI and deep learning to churn out fake reviews which were not only good but perceived as written by humans. This created a huge uproar on how AI can falsely alter a brand’s perception in our minds. We wonder where things are headed next. 3) Content Curation Content curation has been using AI for a while now. That’s how you’ve been getting recommendations on YouTube once you finish watching a video. That’s also why you are able to binge watch videos on Amazon and Netflix. The software works to understand your video genre preferences and shows similar videos without any human having to make suggestions. If you eventually choose a different genre, the software learns that you now like both these genres and shows you options from both. Outbrain – a content discovery platform has been doing a great job for advertisers to create content that can generate traffic to your website. Even simple ‘Related articles’ plugin in WordPress is an example of presenting curated content to your readers as per their what they are currently reading. There are other interesting applications for AI in content curation. Take the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art with uses an AI bot called ‘atbot’ that answers requests from people to see specific types of art. Curation with AI has automated the content discovery process to a good extent these days. It is only set to get better. 4) Search
