Artificial Intelligence - Rules of Engagement and the Customer Journey
Artificial Intelligence - Rules of Engagement and the Customer JourneyPermalink
AI has changed how we relate to the customer and the customer journey. Specifically, deep machine learning will impact the landscape in the next year. In 2018, I suspect forward-looking marketers will begin to harness AI to engage larger and more targeted audiences. Decisions on AI will allow marketers to develop better campaigns delight our customers, and as such earn repeat business and drive brand loyalty. Therefore, understanding and leveraging AI is critical to a brand’s success in 2018.
What is AI?Permalink
In general, AI is simple. Rather than giving our software the set of rules to execute tasks, we provide fuzzier rules by which it must abide, and run our software in this “world”. In other words, rather than providing strict input to our software, we allow our software to acquire input from the ‘world’, and then derive from that input how it could and should behave. To better illustrate, imagine trying to tell some software how to “make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich”. We would provide rules to take two slices of bread, take a knife out of the drawer, spread the peanut butter and jelly, and place the two slices together. In contrast, if we were to “teach” an AI to do the same task, we might provide some basic functionality explicitly, but attempt to “teach” the system to make the sandwich by abiding by a certain set of generic rules, as well as an ‘understanding’ of how the system should calculate responses to input. It is those calculations that provide the ‘Intelligence’ to the system. In other words, it is these calculations that give the system the ability to actually make the sandwich.
How do I use it as a marketer?Permalink
Today, the most forward-thinking Companies rely on AI to optimize marketing initiatives. For example, companies use AI to automatically bid on ad-space, learning hidden rules to optimize visibility. Companies use AI to better serve customers, driving struggling customers to customer service representatives or online chat. Companies use AI to run and design optimizations, developing new features by allowing software to choose when and how to run experiments. Companies use AI to sift through mountains of data, automatically generating visuals, prose, and analyses. Companies can use AI to decide the content and timing of campaigns and given historical data can use AI to decide what type of campaigns will generate the most lift in the future.
Should I use AI?Permalink
While AI is powerful, organizations should not invest in AI to solve all problems. While simpler problems with straight-forward rules can be solved with AI, the complexity of constructing AI increases costs, and simpler problems do not merit such an investment. To go back to the peanut butter and jelly sandwich, teaching an AI such a simple task could be an immense undertaking, and therefore organizations would be wise to simply input the rules themselves rather than utilize AI.
Responsible AIPermalink
AI is powerful. Like any powerful technology, the potential to misuse AI should give organizations pause before employing them to solve problems. Some of the risks include malevolent modifications of existing AI systems, job displacement in favor of AI, and privacy concerns as a result of the large number of data sets input into an AI. Organizations would do well to engage an expert to design, assess, construct, measure, and evaluate their AI strategy.