Artificial intelligence is already making an impact on myriad products and services used not only by consumers, but also by businesses. Soon, a company’s ability to remain competitive will necessitate that they incorporate AI, particularly those AI tools that improve processes, and save time and money. While human beings will be necessary for a long time to create strategies that are ethical and respond appropriately to never-ending ambiguity, artificial intelligence will be invaluable in automating the implementation of those strategies.

To help you navigate our quickly evolving marketing landscape, we’ve prepared a list of ways that AI tools are currently contributing to the marketing industry. None of these tools has reached peak effectiveness, and some have failed along the way, but a better understanding of what they’re trying to accomplish, and how their strengths and weaknesses are affecting their business today will help you plan for change. The future is now.

Creative Design

  • Tailor Brands builds logos and designs for promotional products and social media campaigns. After sharing your company name, a short description of your business, and your preferred font and colour choices, the technology creates a sampling of designs for you to choose from. You might be wary of trusting image design to AI but if you consider some designs created by humans, you might see that the risk is not too different.
  • My Handy Design on Amazon uses AI technologies to craft images for cell phone covers. As with all Amazon products, the covers can be voted up or down. These votes in turn teach the system which types of designs people like and dislike.
  • Walter Thompson Canada and Thunder use programmatic to create ads that are uniquely suited for the audience at hand. A single ad is designed which is then refined in innumerable ways to suit things such as the local geography.

Customer Relationships

  • Duolingo serves its purpose well. As a language instructor, it offers users a set of scenarios, from restaurants to taxi services to police officers, to help people learn a new language with practical scenarios. By removing major barriers to learning, such as being embarrassed to speak in front of people, Duolingo speeds up the learning process.
  • Microsoft’s Tay.ai taught us an important lesson that AI with zero human intervention can be problematic. This chatbot was created to watch how it learned language but by failing to monitor and impart ethical instructions, the bot learned to be racist. It was a failed experiment.
  • Nadia is a chatbot that has dedicated her ‘life’ to helping people with disabilities. The Australian government built Nadia to help people with disabilities gain easier access to insurance and health information.
  • Sephora AI hopes to improve the customer relationship by offering a chatbot that gives makeup tips and product reviews. It can even suggest products that are uniquely suited to your skin tone, and personal likes and dislikes.

Business Optimization

  • Vidora uses AI to automate and optimize business processes. Data analytics systems respond to your questions and offer suggestions for identifying people who are likely to churn, desired features that should be outlined in an upcoming email, or whether someone is about to purchase a product.
  • CaliberMind helps companies communicate with their clients better through the analysis of sales, marketing, and customer data.

Marketing Campaigns

  • Albert is a marketing platform that drives autonomous digital marketing campaigns for global brands. It acts on insights from massive amounts of data to eliminate manual and time-consuming tasks that were once limiting factors. It conducts media buying, audience targeting, cross-channel execution, testing & optimization, and analytics & insights.
  • Motiva AI creates automatic messages that adapts to each customer. It helps to discover segments, and creates campaigns that learn and adapt.

Business Development

  • fiind helps businesses find customers by tuning professionals into buying signals. The AI system offers predictive lead generation, lead scoring, content marketing intelligence, and sales intelligence.

Website Optimization

  • Adobe Target helps companies with website conversion rates, personalization, and mobile app optimization. It helps them experiment quickly with A/B and multivariate testing to create personalized experiences.

Consumer Insights

  • Affectiva uses computer vision, machine learning, and deep learning to train algorithms that analyze subtle facial and vocal expressions to identify human emotions. They use these tools to help companies better understand consumer perceptions towards products and services.
  • Glimpzit uses AI to analyze unstructured data such as pictures, videos, and text to gain customer intelligence, auto-generate marketing content, and help with customer engagement.

Hundreds of AI marketing tools are currently available to help you automate your marketing strategy, and thousands more are still being developed. Regardless of which business objective you are striving to meet and which tool you choose, success will only result if the accompanying strategy is wise and human oriented. We can help you get there.

Sklar Wilton & Associates conducted an Artificial Intelligence research study, the first of its kind in Canada, to better understand Canadians’ expectations and comprehension of AI, their adoption and usage of AI tools, as well as how they feel about AI. The resulting white paper outlines expectations of and implications for government, businesses, brands, and marketers. You can download the full report by completing this short form.

Click here to download the 2017 Sklar Wilton Canadian Artificial Intelligence Paper

Our 2018 AI white paper is now available. Download it here: The Sklar Wilton & Associates Marketer’s Guide to Successful AI.

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