Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Those using AI use it for range of reasons, the most frequent being to get news or information. Here are the tasks consumers utilize artificial intelligence to help them with most often:

35% -- Information, news, weather, stocks

21% -- Read, write, text, phone call

17% -- Play music

9% -- Set timer or reminder

5% -- Make purchases, shopping lists...

It’s not enough for marketers to collect petabytes of data; it takes a sharp mind to make sense of it all. Actually it takes a nonhuman one.

That’s why artificial intelligence has invaded the marketing world, with Facebook, Google, Salesforce, IBM, Amazon, and others building machine learning into their platforms.

Now marketers must understand the lingo if they’re going to survive the machines. To help, here’s a guide to the terminology around A.I....

Adobe, one of the world’s largest and most powerful software companies, is trying something new: It's applying machine learning and image recognition to graphic and web design. In an unnamed project, the company has created tools that automate designers' tasks, like cropping photos and designing web pages. Should designers be worried?

The new project, which uses Adobe’s AI and machine learning program Sensei and integrates into the Adobe Experience Manager CMS, will debut at the company’s Sneaks competition later in March. While Adobe hasn’t committed to integrating it into any of its products, it’s one of the most ambitious attempts to marry machine learning and graphic design to date.

There have been efforts to use AI in the design world before—for instance, Wix’s Advance Design Intelligence and automated projects like Mark Maker, but Adobe’s is notable because of the company’s sheer reach in the design world. Although it’s just a prototype, it’s one to watch closely....

Voice assistants are coming in a big way this year.

Last year, 7 million voice-first devices, most notably Amazon Echo and Google Home, hit the market. That was up from only 2 million the year before.

This year, 25 million devices will be shipped, bringing the total number of voice-first devices to 33 million in circulation, based on a new study by VoiceLabs....

The 2017 edition of the Consumer Electronics Show, which concluded today in Las Vegas, featured boatloads of new technologies, driverless cars full of new technologies. Many of these advances, particularly Artificial Intelligence, Augmented Reality, and Virtual Reality, have great appeal to marketers.

AI, AR, and VR are poised to be transformative technologies for marketers — if not right this minute. For the most part, aside from some tentative and necessary experimentation, marketers remain focused on what can help them immediately.

This cross section of 12 quotes from the CES sessions indicates that marketers, for now, will pay more attention to more familiar acronyms, such as CM (content marketing); DDM (data-driven marketing); and CX (customer experience) than to AI, AR, and VR:...

What are the main ways AI/machine learning will impact marketers and their work in the next year or two? 

While AI has tremendous potential, I believe we are still a few years off from having it solve “real world” operational problems at scale. But in the meantime, marketers are benefitting from the speed and breadth of the insights afforded by AI. Early success examples have focused on creative – we've started to see the optimisation of creative using AI, such as improved digital product experiences (see Olay's skincare app as an example) and of course much better media targeting (such as Demandbase's new AI product). Both B2C and B2B marketing stands to gain from AI.

In summary, what will be the long-term impact of AI/machine learning on marketing? 

AI and machine learning will enable full personalisation of the customer experience, driven by the real-time integration of media, creative and analytics. Marketers will be more efficient, and customers will receive more relevant information in the right place at the right time....

IGOR MORDATCH IS working to build machines that can carry on a conversation. That’s something so many people are working on. In Silicon Valley, chatbot is now a bona fide buzzword. But Mordatch is different. He’s not a linguist. He doesn’t deal in the AI techniques that typically reach for language. He’s a roboticist who began his career as an animator. He spent time at Pixar and worked on Toy Story 3, in between stints as an academic at places like Stanford and the University of Washington, where he taught robots to move like humans. “Creating movement from scratch is what I was always interested in,” he says. Now, all this expertise is coming together in an unexpected way.

As detailed in a research paper published by OpenAI this week, Mordatch and his collaborators created a world where bots are charged with completing certain tasks, like moving themselves to a particular landmark. The world is simple, just a big white square—all of two dimensions—and the bots are colored shapes: a green, red, or blue circle. But the point of this universe is more complex. The world allows the bots to create their own language as a way of collaborating, helping each other complete those tasks.

All this happens through what’s called reinforcement learning, the same fundamental technique that underpinned AlphaGo, the machine from Google’s DeepMind AI lab that cracked the ancient game of Go.

Basically, the bots navigate their world through extreme trial and error, carefully keeping track of what works and what doesn’t as they reach for a reward, like arriving at a landmark. If a particular action helps them achieve that reward, they know to keep doing it. In this same way, they learn to build their own language. Telling each other where to go helps them all get places more quickly....

Pop culture and science fiction have ostensibly redefined artificial intelligence – or AI – to describe a futuristic world with robots and space-age innovations. Yes, it’s cool. And yes, it’s all the rage again, but more in the form of smarter systems and prescriptive recommendations, not Hal 9000.
Simply put, AI means making computers and machines capable of human-like, intelligent behavior. For businesses today, the promise of AI is to improve customer engagement by better anticipating customer needs and optimizing work to provide more relevant customer experiences. Recent advances in data processing speeds, big data processing, and machine learning methods – all at lower costs – means the promise of AI can be even more easily extended to most any customer engagement scenario.

But what will AI mean for marketers? Ironic as it might sound, AI technology will actually help marketing become more human. While there is talk of AI replacing marketers’ jobs, in reality it will be an asset that will make marketers more insightful, effective, and smarter about how they engage with customers and deliver meaningful experiences....

..."Law enforcement agencies are increasingly interested in trying to detect plans for disruptive events from social media, and also to monitor activity at large gatherings of people to analyze security," the study argues. "There is significant work on crowd simulations to determine how crowds can be controlled. At the same time, legitimate concerns have been raised about the potential for law enforcement agencies to overreach and use such tools to violate people’s privacy."

And when it comes to employment and the workplace, the study sees AI as replacing tasks rather than jobs, while also helping to create new kinds of jobs.

The authors conclude by saying they’ve found no cause for concern that AI poses an imminent threat to humanity. No machines with self-sustaining long-term goals and intent have been developed, they write, nor are they likely to be in the near future....