How AI Will Drive Transformative Change in Marketing

AI will power insight, intuition and scale to help marketers realize the long-held desire of building individualized, contextual relationships with each prospect and customer. Although several years away from being realized by even the most advanced marketers, the long-term effects of AI should not be underestimated.

According to a 2017 Gartner Research Circle survey, most organizations are investigating or developing a strategy for how AI will apply to their business. Customer engagement and digital marketing stand out as top areas where enterprises are running early AI experiments. An array of noteworthy applications used today will grow in prevalence over the next several years:

1. Conversational experiences: Advances in natural language processing (NLP) enable people to have increasingly conversational experiences with computers through text and voice. Current implementations are rudimentary, but as platforms grow more capable and marketers onboard more of their own data, individual conversations based on customer context will be delivered at scale.
2. Real-time personalization: Context, intent and journey stage are extracted from interactions to inform the delivery of tailored content, offers and promotions using propensity modeling, machine learning, machine vision and NLP.
3. Identity resolution: Machine learning algorithms help sift through and map billions of ad impressions and hundreds of millions of device identifiers to provide marketers with greater confidence that the right message reaches the right person.
4. Marketing orchestration: As AI takes on more campaign orchestration duties, the construct of the campaign dialogue or journey management workboard, where marketing specialists connect different triggers, channels and content, may become obsolete.
5. Augmented marketing analytics: Easier-to-use analytical capabilities continue to expand across the marketing technology landscape, including natural language querying, natural language contribution analysis, prescriptive actions and logo detection.