By Gauraav Thakar
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been around for decades. Films have popularised it, from Metropolis, a 1927 German movie where a robot-double stirs up trouble, to the latest Blade Runner, a Hollywood sci-fi action movie where replicants are the manufactured humanoids. Of course, we must not forget the Red Queen from the Resident Evil franchise, a universally famous character.
Changes in business models due to AI
Various changes have brought AI to the mainstream, one of them being a deep mobile penetration which allowed people to rapidly adopt mobility. There have also been changes in customer behaviour, which has increasingly become momentary appeasement, along with the easy availability of computing power and strategic shift in business models like those of Kabbage, Uber and Airbnb. Artificial intelligence enables the development of new models to transform every business. Tools such as customer engagement, digital production, marketing, self-driving cars, risk management, augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), natural language-processing and speech recognition, are maturing.
Focusing on AI from the marketer’s point of view would baffle a seasoned marketer from the 1990s, who would find themselves lost in the 15-minute daily stand-up marketing meetings of today’s tech-savvy organisations. The questions of sustainability in AI-marketing, along with using it as a leverage by professionals, continue to haunt the imagination.
For marketing, AI use is still quite nascent, but evolving at a rapid pace. Technology like Elasticsearch, a company based on Lucene, is relatively mainstream and helps smaller e-commerce retailers match search queries beyond just the keywords. Therefore, trying natural language-processing, a tried and tested case, is the ability of Neuro-Linguistic Programming, NLP, in sentiment analysis of social media. NLP is the art and science of converting unstructured data into a coherently structured construct. NLP systems can also help predict customer behaviour in the buying cycles. Intelligent Recommendation Engines help accelerate the customer buying cycle. Amazon and Netflix can predict with fair accuracy the next item or movie that will catch our fancy. Hence, by using programmatic advertising, a marketer is spoilt for choices across channels like Google AdWords, Facebook, and Twitter. AI-powered programmatic platforms help marketers create personalised advertisements, manage advertisement inventories and costs at scale.
AI penetrating inner crevices of businesses
Using customer-servicing with chatbots are already mainstream. Marketing, Sales, and Customer Servicing teams leverage chatbots to personalise interactions with end-users, reducing wait times, minimising human errors and creating a seamless experience with minimal human interaction. Marketing Automation is yet another area where AI is leveraged extensively. Customer segmentation, customer analysis, revenue analytics, and personalisation are the areas where marketers have found excellent AI ROI. That is why everything is connected. The Internet of Things (IoT) and Machine-to-Machine communication are exponentially on the rise. From connected cars and homes to intelligent manufacturing, sensors and machine-learning are poised to automate a lot of manual interactions. How does this impact the marketer? Visualise this, “Alexa, I am out of detergent. Please order some.” However, the brand that Alexa will order is still unsure, whether it will be based on past orders, current market leaders, or ones with the greatest promises.
The marketer needs to evolve into a techno-functional specialist. AI is an excellent tool that helps a marketer gain actionable insights into previously “dark data” or unstructured data. Machine learning and automation free up valuable time, making marketing teams lean, efficient and agile. The modern marketing professional has the advantage of understanding the customer’s preference in near real-time. Organisations will scale new heights if they can leverage this opportunity with the help of AI, machine learning and cognitive analytics.
Featured Image Source: Flickr