We’re calling it: AI has forced a marketing paradigm shift, driving personalized, real-time, right-place consumer engagement at significantly lower cost. Join our latest interactive VB Live event in the new year to find out how to use AI to disrupt, instead of be disrupted.
It’s the Law of Accelerating Returns: When tech pundits try to predict the future, they always underestimate. The scientific reasoning: The more advanced a technology is, the faster it can progress — precisely because it’s more advanced. Just take a look at not only the progress of artificial intelligence and machine learning, but its proliferation of use cases, which is moving inevitably into the marketing realm.
And this is the kind of growth explosion you want to be at the forefront of. It’s why here at the tail end of 2016, we’ve watched over 200 AI-focused companies raise nearly $1.5 billion in funding, and have seen a 6X increase in equity deals to AI startups from 70ish in 2011 to almost 400 in 2015.
Part of it’s because they know the machine learning call is coming from inside the house. AI has been slowly infiltrating company processes for years — predictive analytics, for instance, uses a clustering algorithm to unite information from diverse datasets and powering new Netflix recommendations for your next binge watch, or Amazon’s suggestions for your next impulse buy.
But companies like Under Armour are tapping into IBM Watson AI technology to take this kind of insight even further and deepen customer relationships to an almost unprecedented degree. They’re combining user-submitted data with third-party data and industry research in order to create fully personalized training, health, and nutrition content as well as offer personal assistant–level support like mapping training routes based on weather and time of day.
It’s turning search engines into personal assistants, too. With the AI-powered RankBrain, Google is using natural language processing (NLP) to not only improve content and query relevance, but offer users a more accurate interpretation of their voice search, as well as take user context into account, so that someone can turn to Google and say, “Hey, I’m broke but I’m craving Chinese food. Where can I get some really good dumplings?” and actually get results. On the marketing side? It’s a major rewrite of how marketers understand and manage SEO, and it’s already impacting your results.
But AI is also a tool for marketers to use themselves, with deep learning — large data sets tackled by machine learning — poised to weaponize your social media strategy. Social platforms like Facebook are pouring cash into using AI for sentiment analysis, precision product recommendations, and refining image and voice recognition to help social networks to improve at scale, and bring your marketing tactics with it.
Plus there’s dynamic price optimization, predictive customer service, and lethally accurate ad targeting with significantly lower CPA (watch machine learning optimize not only bids but the likelihood a user will click).
All this means an arms race for marketers. Machine learning and AI is providing marketers more — and more powerful — tools and you can’t afford to fall behind. What was once an interesting market trend has to become tablestakes for you, if you want to stay competitive. Join this interactive VB Live event to learn how to step into the future of marketing.
Don’t miss out!
In this VB Live event, you’ll:
- Learn how speech recognition impacts the SEO value on your web presence
- Understand the full ROI of fully automated chat bots for artificial human interaction
- Integrate deep learning into your marketing strategy to realize unbelievable lift
Speakers:
- Stewart Rogers, Director of Marketing Technology, VentureBeat
- Wendy Schuchart, Moderator, VentureBeat
More speakers to come.