Artificial Intelligence is an amazingly powerful tool, with the potential to reach and enhance every aspect of our lives. As the technology around it continues to develop, so will the way we and organisations interact with it.
At Microsoft’s Build conference this year, the mission was made clear that as AI becomes more sophisticated, it is vital to be made as accessible to consumers as it is to big businesses. With the potential to add new depth of understanding to the consumer journey, AI will be an essential evolution to search. This, for marketers specifically, highlights not only innovative ways to capitalise on this insight, but also enhance the consumer experience by providing them with personalised and timely content.
However, to reap the full rewards of AI, marketers must first shorten the divide between human creativity and intelligent technology. Creating a usable interface, which is appealing and accessible to your consumer base, is one of the first key steps in getting the most out of AI. By embracing AI empowered tools, marketing can reach new realms of engagement, enabling businesses to truly understand how their consumers behave, map patterns and share the best possible content with their audience. Indeed, in the future, personalisation will be the rule, not the exception.
AI is going to become an ever-present, invisible interface, set out with the aim of making our lives safer, easier and more productive.
This isn’t a hypothetical future – the bridge between an effective user interface and personalisation first emerged with the digital personal assistants. With Cortana or Alexa, for example, everyday consumers can use AI to organise and benefit their day to day lives – indeed, Microsoft’s Cortana can retain the same amount of information as a human PA. Or Cortana, for example, which can use location based accuracy to remind the user to pick up some more tea bags when passing a supermarket, what time to set out to get to an event on time – essentially, helping to make every day more productive for the user, by helping to reduce human error and assisting with tasks.
The next step for AI innovation will likely be the ‘application economy’. The application economy represents a wide scope of opportunities to every sector. In particular, developers can use the tools at their disposal to enable them to bring to market new technologies with AI capabilities, quicker and more efficiently. These tools are more accessible than ever, with databases like Microsoft’s Cognitive Services, a collection of APIs and services that allow developers to use a broad suite of AI Services. All developers, from experienced professionals to those starting out in the field, now have the ability to tap into vision, speech recognition, emotion and language services, seamlessly adding them to their applications and programmes.
AI is going to become an ever-present, invisible interface, set out with the aim of making our lives safer, easier and more productive. With increased accessibility to AI enabled technology, every brand now has the capacity to create even more impactful tools and, importantly, bring healthy competition into the industry. It is the role of marketers to shape how this technology unfolds and guide companies through their AI transformation.
AI will, and already is, changing the way people interact with technology. Ultimately it will become the lynchpin between how people and machines interact with each other, as applications merge and begin to inform each other. We are shaping the future of marketing with AI, and the future is now.