8 Ways You're Using AI Without Even Knowing It
You've probably heard: Artificial intelligence (AI) is the future of marketing. But it's not just the future—most marketers already use AI everyday.
Whether you’re a marketer applying predictive algorithms to optimize creative messaging or a customer service manager employing chatbots to answer people’s questions, artificial intelligence has become a fact of life inside the 21st-century office. And even on weekends, the apps you use to stream music, play games and connect with friends are harnessing the power of machine learning to give you a personalized user experience.
Want to go even deeper? Check out " It's an AI AI AI AI World," our complete guide to mastering AI and marketing.
Here are 8 ways marketers are using
artificial intelligence
right now ...
(keep scrolling)
Why It's Considered AI:
For instance, Google uses an AI system called RankBrain to guess what users mean when they’ve entered a query the search engine is unfamiliar with. Through machine learning,
RankBrain is able to translate words and phrases that Google has never seen before into more familiar phrases that have a similar meaning.
Why It's Considered AI:
If you’ve ever run a programmatic advertising campaign, you’ve taken advantage of computational advertising—a series of algorithms that allow marketers to deliver
the right ad at the right moment, based on factors like the user’s demographic information, their past online behavior and the content they’re looking at when the ad appears.
This past October, the lingerie brand Cosabella actually replaced its marketing agency with an AI platform created by the technology company Adgorithms. The platform optimizes campaign spending autonomously based on real-time results, and it can even make creative recommendations when certain ad units outperform others.
This technology also allowed the ad agency Saatchi & Saatchi LA to show Facebook users customized Toyota ads that recommended they take up weird activities based on their specific interests. For instance, people who were both martial arts enthusiasts and barbecue fans saw ads suggesting they try out a hobby called the “Tai Kwan Tenderizer.”
Why It's Considered AI:
Contextually relevant, in-image advertising relies on a machine learning technique called a neural network, a series of learned mathematical functions that process information in a manner similar to the human brain.
By feeding millions of labeled images into a neural network, GumGum has trained its AI technology to identify all kinds of objects, people, colors, concepts and brand logos. This way, the technology can place an appropriate ad inside every image. For instance, a parent might see an ad for notebooks within a photo depicting school.
Why It's Considered AI:
With consumer profiling, brands use large scale data analysis to sort their customers into different groups based on their demographic information, past purchases, offline behavior and online browsing history. Through predictive analytics,
marketers can even identify when consumers are going through major life events—the time periods during which they are most likely to switch up their shopping habits. In one famous example, Target used its customers’ past purchase
activity to send mailers featuring baby products to women it predicted to be pregnant, tipping off one father before his daughter had told him the news.
Why It's Considered AI:
Automated sales assistants use artificial intelligence to hold introductory conversations with a company’s prospective customers. This allows firms to collect contact information, promote product features and weed out unlikely customers
at scale—all without engaging their human sales teams.
For instance, Conversica’s automated sales assistant uses natural language processing to conduct email and chat conversations that feel authentically human. Once the AI has provided the person on the other end with relevant information and determined that they are a potential customer, the qualified lead is passed a long to a human salesperson to close the deal.
Why It's Considered AI:
Online retailers deliver personalized product recommendations via collaborative filtering, an AI solution that links site visitors to other consumers who have similar tastes. If User A and User B both buy the same five products in May, there’s
a good chance User A will be interested in the first product User B purchases in June.
Collaborative filtering is the secret sauce that powers Amazon’s insanely powerful product recommendation engine and the basis for its popular “customers who bought this item also bought…” suggestions.
Why It's Considered AI:
Dynamic pricing uses machine learning to set the optimal price point for a seller’s goods and services at any given moment, based on what people have been willing to pay for the product under similar circumstances in the past. It’s
why airline ticket prices fluctuate depending on when you buy them, and why you’re likely to get hit with a surge pricing fee if you use a ride-sharing app on a Saturday night.
In the e -commerce world, a company called Feedvisor automatically optimizes prices for sellers on the Amazon Marketplace, allowing them to maximize their revenues while remaining competitive with rival sellers.
In the marketing realm, Google’s dynamic price floors automatically adjust the minimum amount of money a publisher will accept for a given ad impression, based on what buyers have previously paid for similar inventory.
Digital publishers provide each user with an engaging, personalized experience through a form of AI known as passive user interface. This method continuously collects behavioral data from consumer devices, using machine learning to tailor the experience to the consumer’s wants and needs.
If you’ve ever used Spotify’s Running feature, you’ve benefited from passive user interface. The app collects fitness tracking data from users’ phones in order to match the beat of the music to the runner’s pace.
Is 8 not enough?
There are many more ways you're using AI without knowing it. You'll find them—and more—in " It's an AI AI AI AI World," GumGum's guide to the many ways marketers can become AI experts. Download it now .
