After almost a year of escalating hype about AI, the capabilities are beginning to bring real benefits to marketers. While it is still early in the maturity cycle, AI is showing promise according to analysts at Gartner. I recently spoke with Martha Mathers, Practice Leader for Marketing and Marketing Technology, about her perspective on the subject.
According to Mathers, CMOs are beginning to think about AI. “Certainly I'd say a minority of marketers today can actually point to returns or point to significant impacts from these types of tools. But we see a lot of folks experimenting and starting to debate how AI can boost various processes or capabilities. What we've seen so far is three big areas where marketers are making some strides. The first is use of AI to improve productivity. Second is the use of AI to deepen customer understanding. And third is using AI to improve the digital customer experience,” shared Mathers.
“So on the productivity side, one of the more interesting examples comes from a pharmaceutical company that's actually using AI to boost their content production. They are essentially speeding the build-out of content assets using a tool to both atomize and to tailor. The ability to increase your productivity through that sort of capability, it's pretty cool I think,” said Mathers. She also cited an example of Ebay using machine learning to analyze customer reactions to computer-personalized content.
Machine learning and AI have been making an impact in deeping customer insights. The ability to analyze social media conversation and to mine first party and third party data have led to improvements in segment identification, persona development and decision journey mapping.
The area that intrigued me the most was in enhancing customer experiences. Mathers elaborates, “We've seen consumer companies like L’Oreal, Whole Foods, and a membership club in the wine and spirits space, innovating how they can simplify, improve and remove barriers to purchase. L’Oreal has built tools into their mobile app so you can apply cosmetics while standing in a drug store and see whether it's the right shade for you. Whole Foods is using some of their tools with their recipes site so you can pop in a couple of ingredients that you have and it starts pushing you a couple more things that you might want to buy in the store. So, growing basket size or helping people expand their grocery list if they're meal planning. And then this winemaker has talked a lot about how millennials tend to experiment. They try lots of new wines, they enjoy the process of trying those wines, but they don't know a ton about the category as a whole. And so the winemaker is using conversational commerce and experimenting with chatbots to recommend the right wine for them based on a couple of easy questions So, I think a lot of cool opportunities to use AI to ease the buying process on the consumer side.”
Gartner recently published a research note that further elaborates on seven areas where AI will most likely impact marketing. By better utilizing inputs from consumer, marketing and product data, from environmental signals and from creative assets, marketers will enhance the use of applications in seven areas. These include conversational experiences, real-time personalization, automatic content generation, identity resolution, marketing orchestration, process optimization and augmented marketing analytics.
Mathers concluded with advice for CMOs about how to start with AI. “Where I hear the most positive stories is from those companies who have started small. And it doesn't really matter what the outcome is, if it's boosting productivity, if it is experimenting with a specific product brand or a specific portion of the website. It's those folks that start small that seem to have bigger successes. I think the biggest mistake marketers are making is biting off more than they can chew. It's not understanding what they've bought before deploying it is where I see folks get a little bit lost along the way.”
