A central question posed by one of Google’s leading AI programs is: “What if solving one problem could unlock solutions to thousands more?” That is what Google is trying to solve with DeepMind.
And DeepMind has been busy answering that question, including by writing AlphaGo, an advanced AI program that has become skilled at playing the ancient board game Go.
AlphaGo is the first computer program to defeat a professional human Go player, the first to defeat a Go world champion, and is arguably the strongest Go player in history.
But what does any of this mean for marketers?
“There are a lot of analogies between how to predict the next best move in Go, when you have potentially billions of permutations of different moves that you can take, and what’s the next best move in marketing, whether to reengage somebody on email, what sort of offer to give them, whether to reengage them on display,” says Dan Stone, senior product manager at Google for Google Analytics.
“One of the ways that the DeepMind team solved this challenge was they simultaneously needed to come up with a way to figure out the next best move, but, before they could even do that, they had to figure out who’s actually winning at any point in time. So they built, as a starting point, a network to predict what is the score at any point in time.
“That’s where we are now in analytics, where we are starting to see more and more companies building these pieces to predict, at any given point in time, what is the user’s value, or where are we in the game so that we can ultimately predict based on where they are now, what is the next best move that we can take to optimise towards incremental predicted lifetime value.”
Stone says he hopes to see a continuation of a trend in which brands are defragmenting their internal corporate structures in order to pool data for their greater good.
This video is part of a series of interviews conducted during Advertising Week New York, 2019. This series is co-production of Beet.TV and Advertising Week. The series is sponsored by Roundel, a Target company. Please see more videos from Advertising Week right here.