One of the hottest technological trends in today’s world is probably Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) and its numerous applications which can prove to be life changing for us human beings. Though A.I. was founded in 1956 as an academic discipline which created lot of optimism around the technological centers of the world, slowly it fizzled out leading to a period called “AI winter” were not much progress was made.
Artificial intelligence term is used for a machine when it mimics “cognitive” functions that humans associate with other human minds, such as “learning” and “problem solving”. Capabilities generally classified as AI as of 2017 include successfully understanding human speech, competing at a high level in strategic game systems (such as chess and Go), autonomous cars, intelligent routing in content delivery networks, military simulations, and interpreting complex data, including images and videos.
From past 6-7 years a lot of Tech giants have jumped on the bandwagon of Artificial Intelligence. They have invested huge amount of resources both in terms of monetary and human capital to develop their own AI platforms which are capable of performing task which is far superior to normally coded programs. AI platforms unlike them do not require human intervention and regularly updates its information base, logic and learning abilities through multiple iterations that it goes through. The best example would be when Google’s AlphaGo defeated world champion Ke Jie in the ancient game of Go which unlike chess is much harder due to numerous possible moves. For comparison after the first two moves of a Chess game, there are 400 possible next moves whereas in Go, there are close to 130,000 moves.
To name a few noted AI platforms/applications developed by reputed companies are:
Deepmind AlphaGo;
IBM Watson
Amazon Alexa
Microsoft Azure
Amazon Echo
Apple Siri
Uber Michelangelo
Salesforce Einstein
Wipro HOLMES
Infosys NIA
TCS IGNIO
Some of these platforms are made up of cluster of individual bots where are self-sufficient to perform tasks independently, for example NLP bot i.e. natural language processing bot which is capable of processing human (natural) language to machine language for further action. Hence when a large task is to be performed, the required bots are assembled from the A.I. platform.
Now the questions arises how the A.I. applications is going to transform traditional marketing functions.
- Chatbots: Chatbots acts as the interface medium to communicate with brands/companies replacing human executives like in traditional method. They are capable to answer to normal queries and also resolve less complicated problems. Facebook through its chat messenger is emerging as new hot favorite place for communication to brand through chatbots. Company can market their products according to the needs of their customers through chatbots.
- Voice Search: It is one of the oldest thought application of AI technology. Lot of companies have their own voice assist search apps like Google’s Ok, Apple’s Siri etc. It implication on marketing side is that company can organically increase traffic on their site through voice search due to higher ranking given thanks to AI driven virtual personal assistants search results.
- Marketing automation: Through big data and A.I. technologies like Machine learning and natural language processing companies can send better personalized mails to their customer through enhanced understanding of their customer’s behaviour and the stimuli to which they respond. At the same time these can be done for millions of customers hence making the job easier for marketers and help them achieve better results.
- Targeted Ads: By analyzing the user data through data analytics, one can better understand the needs of the customer and show him products and services which will be relevant to him and he/she is most likely to purchase. Most of the companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon, Flipkart have different product ads shown to their individual customers according to their profile generated through their use pattern. Netflix content suggestion algorithm is well acclaimed because of the personalized experience that it provides to its users.
- Content Marketing: Brands can publish content about their products, services, past success stories etc. through the A.I. applications which are capable of going through large databases, repositories, web etc. and generate well-articulated content for them. It makes the life of marketers easy. It can also analyse the impact of the content, how much buzz and web traffic it has been able to generate and modify the content for next publication for better results.
- Predictive Analytics: Predictive analytics can help the marketing in numerous ways like to know which customer is likely to convert, his price point of convergence and his future repeat purchase probability through the profile generate by his use pattern. This would help marketer to better target the potential customers.
- Re-targeting: Highly accurate predicting models can be built through the help of A.I. which can suggest how to cross sell and up sale their existing customers and what would be the add on products that he/she might require with the products already bought. Also future requirement of service can be predicted and at the right time ads can be targeted which would increase the likeliness of purchase.
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