MARKETING: The Hardcore Era of A.I.

Revolution. This is what has been happening to online businesses, well-respected big brands, entrepreneurs, and to the whole marketplace. Once again, all thanks to Technology. But technology raised the bar like never before lately, by bringing to life something that experts claim that will crush millions of businesses and jobs overnight and change how we operate our lives and businesses.

That thing is Artificial Intelligence (A.I).

Revolution is the word here, indeed.
Because here’s what is happening today. We’re now experiencing an Era where robots are becoming reporters, robots are becoming lawyers while other robots are making MOVIE trailers. Yes. I’m not joking. This is not a game folks. Robots are even penetrating medicine and causing revolutions which will interfere directly in our lives in a more profound way.

But do you think you really know what’s already here?
Ranging from topics such as Intelligence Explosion up to Machine Learning, this A.I. revolution that has arrived has already done so much impact in society that it made Elon Musk himself say that we’ll need some sort of “3rd digital layer” in our brains that will need to work together with it, to help us keep up with the A.I. evolution pace.

That’s right. Now we’ll need Matrix-like technology just to be able to stay on the top of our game in this new business world. All in order to prevent us from being left behind by this such monstrous level of intelligence, automation, and hardcore fast thinking that A.I. displays which humans cannot match.

Looks like a movie to you? Well, it’s not. It’s hardcore reality.
Here’s why: Since too much information is being fed to computers nowadays, humans won’t be able to keep up with that learning speed anymore, nor analyze data as fast as A.I, as well.

Which puts businesses in a tight spot.
Because there’s too much noise but also too much key, game-changing information. All inside of a very competitive business world. Therefore, a Chaotic scenario is being built around the business world once more, raising to all of us one single question as consequence of all this apocalyptic scenario:

WHAT IS THE A.I. APPLICABILITY TO MARKETING AND BUSINESS?

The answer: some hardcore changes for ALL companies. Seriously.
This is what I’ll be addressing here today. The goal is to make you understand what you need to learn next to incorporate A.I. in your business in order to remain a big player in this crowded, highly competitive marketplace.

Here’s what you’ll leave knowing about:

• THE BASICS:
• Artificial Intelligence: Terms & Definitions You Should Know (external link)
• THE GOOD SIDE OF A.I.:
• Artificial Intelligence Marketing: Predictive Analysis
• Artificial Intelligence Marketing: Instant Automated Customer Service
• Artificial Intelligence Marketing: Virtual A.I. Assistant
• Artificial Intelligence Marketing: The Content Marketing Automation
• Artificial Intelligence Marketing: Voice Search Optimization (VSO/SEO)
• Artificial Intelligence Marketing: Computer Vision Advertising
• THE DARK SIDE OF A.I.:
• Artificial Intelligence Marketing: The Death of Content Marketing
• Artificial Intelligence Marketing: The Excessive A.I Usage That Creates Data Chaos
• Welcome to the New World of Business.

Welcome to the New World of Business.

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE MARKETING: PREDICTIVE ANALYTICS
I’m starting off with a top, powerful subject: Predictive Analytics. This is where your marketing begins to change dramatically. Although some won’t consider Predictive Analytics 100% A.I. since it still needs a human interaction to make the decisions based on the data supplied by the A.I. systems, Predictive Analytics is already influencing Marketing and businesses today at a VERY fast pace and at a very large scale.

The why behind this?
Because it can “see the business and marketing metrics of the future”. Yes, you read it right. Predictive Analytics can unveil key metrics, like:

• predict market trends
• predict human behavior
• understand customers in far more depth
• improve business performance
• upgrade strategic decision-making

All thanks to additional, personal data (we’ll get to that).

Things like: “How much traffic will I get next month if I take this marketing action for the next 4 weeks?” can be answered, turning your marketing budget into a more precise sum of money which leads to a higher likelihood of success. It’s indeed, kinda like seeing in the future.

Works. But how? Simple: because humans have habits. And such habits are tracked today by Whats App, Facebook, Netflix and many other tech-oriented companies that we all give a piece of your lives for every day.

But now you may ask: “OK, but even with all this personal data Is such thing even possible? Seeing in the future?!”. Well, part of it is, so to speak. Because by definition, here’s what Predictive Analysis means:

Want me to simplify?
“You’re gonna have a baby in the next months”.
Confused? Then hear this for a minute. A company in the Discount Store industry named Target which worths nowadays almost 50 Billion Dollars, managed to find out that a Teenager was pregnant long before her Father did by using purchased personal data provided by stores, companies and credit card stores.

“WAIT! Do these guys sell my personal data and buying behavior?!”
Oh yes. Didn’t you know? A few credit card companies sell data based on zip code, like Business Insider reported here. Also, companies can buy data from these 12 different companies.

But let’s get back to Target’s revolutionizing and news-worthy marketing story. Target’s intent of applying Predictive Analytics to its campaigns was to build a more precise customer’s profile using hordes of personal habits gained through bought data, and learning a few patterns here and there from it.

The outcome? They were able to send pregnancy-related advertising to that teenager a few MONTHS BEFORE every competitor or person knew she was pregnant. Including her father. Now, that’s impressive marketing. Very impressive. They killed the competition months before they even got a chance to play.

No wonder they got in the NEWS:
VIDEO – Target Knows When You’re Pregnant

REMEMBER: YOU’RE NOW GIVING AWAY PERSONAL DATA TO SOCIAL MEDIA, SEARCH ENGINES, ONLINE STORES AND CREDIT CARD COMPANIES ALL THE TIME, WHICH ALLOWS THEM TO BUILD A VERY PRECISE PERSONAL PROFILE OF YOU.

Not satisfied yet?
Then let’s go a little bit deeper, shall we?
So, with such level of personal data available in the marketplace, let me ask you something simple next.

Question: Do you believe that is possible for a business to capture people’s public
conversations, study its taste preferences, its behavioral patterns and understand people’s context on certain action to craft a more tailor-made product for a target audience? Damn right it is possible. Haven’t you heard of the marketing adventure behind of what Netflix did in France a while ago?

Then watch this:
VIDEO – Netflix Data GIF Campaign

Now, let’s check if you paid attention.
Here’s what was said between 0:14s – 0:24s
“Topics Model. Topics Model is a Natural Language Processing(NLP) System. It can transform a massive, everyday language into significant insights to identify a brand opportunity.”

If you read the basic terms and definitions, you can now tell that A.I. was involved. Heavily involved. The fusion of A.I. and Big Data is turning into one of the most powerful areas of Marketing in today’s marketplace which allowed Netflix to do what they did. Once you put those two together properly, companies and computers can end up knowing far more about your personal life than your closest friends or family.

Companies armed with A.I. systems using Predictive Analytics can know, for instance, that you may be getting a divorce next year or that you’re about to enter a depression. How? Check this out so you can fully understand how this works.

VIDEO – How Big Data Can Predict Your Divorce
Shocking, isn’t? But that’s exactly what is becoming more and more part of the Marketing game that big brands are playing right now. They’re not messing around. They want you. Full-profile YOU. Because with that level of precision, they avoid wasting any money on “guess work”, which helps they stay ahead in this competitive marketplace.

But this that I’ve shown is just the tip of the iceberg. Not joking.
Next, I’ll show you more interesting stuff about Artificial Intelligence and its consequences to the business and marketing that you should know if you want to stay ahead of the competition.

So just keep scrolling and read the rest.

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE MARKETING: INSTANT AUTOMATED CUSTOMER SERVICE
Another famous area of A.I. applicability to Marketing is the use of automated customer service, aiming to generate a better customer experience when clients come to ask a company for information or to simply make complaints. Since many brands don’t respond too well nor too fast to consumers, this has been growing quite a lot lately, making even big players like Google help companies like Occada through its TensorFlow solution, improving Occada’s call center response time.

And then you ask: But what robots have to do with Marketing here? Simple. Because once you deliver a better and faster customer experience, customers get happy. And then, can you guess what happens next?

That’s right.
A good word of mouth marketing campaign takes place, spreading the word about “that brand that has high-precision and instant response time” in its customer service, which improves that brand’s reputation in the marketplace. And we all know that word of mouth marketing is the most powerful marketing of all. Therefore, a brand upgrades its status. All thanks to some very smart robots.

Since businesses are global now, just think for a second here.
COULD YOU (or any human team) handle properly, using only humans, the “small” amount of 500,000+ emails per day? Probably not.

You couldn’t filter properly enormous amounts of customers e-mails, with the maximum efficiency possible like a machine can. Negative.

Because humans get tired, get depressed, get angry, get frustrated with life, jobs, love life and unleash it all on others (your customers). Or else, sometimes they simply misread things, understanding a customer email the wrong way. And the next thing you know, you got an angry customer to deal with. So robots take place by bringing a lot of efficiency to both sides as you may notice.

By simply doing this very fast and with a very tiny error rate:

CUSTOMER → E-mail Contact → A.I.:

• Commercial
• Tech Support
• Complaints

The A.I. learns how customers think on each specific situation by studying its language and request patterns, cross this data with its enormous database and forward the customer’s email directly to the best department. Now imagine this happening at an incredibly fast pace, having a very tiny error rate due to its precision. It can only save time for both the customer and the company. But the customer leaves very happy because he won’t have to deal with someone in a bad mood on most occasions.

But this is EMAILS.
What about LIVE conversations? Say real-time SMS or Chats, for example. Well, this is where things start to become more interesting. Take a look at what Digital Genius is doing right now with its A.I. solution:

VIDEO – Never Talk to A Customer Service Robot Again Thanks to Digital Genius

Did you notice what he said from 10:24min until 10:35min?
The A.I. ADJUSTS the way it responds to the customer ACCORDING with the customer’s tech profile. Nice. For those who had the experience of calling tech support to complain about the Internet with their ISPs, and suddenly had to talk to a dumb (sorry there’s no other word suitable here) customer support agent who knows LESS than you do, knows how this can be irritating at colossal levels. Well, Digital Genius sure handled that as well.

Like masters.

The Marketing result:
“Hey, I never had such a good and fast customer experience.”

Powerful.

THE USE OF A.I. IN CUSTOMER SERVICE WILL NATURALLY GENERATE GREAT WORD OF MOUTH MARKETING TO A COMPANY

Of course, if the company knows how to use it properly to boost efficiency.

This is also being used often on websites as well, but in the form of Chat robots instead, creating that “brand proximity” sensation for customers and with the benefits of very smart automation for the company.

A win-win situation. Besides the advantage of being very efficient, companies also boost their Marketing ROI because they use chats to gather enormous amounts of personal data while chatting with the customer, which helps them improve their own marketing campaigns precision faster.

For instance, a company’s bot can ask for the customer’s email address while chatting, to prevent a customer from being left behind in case of disconnection. Or maybe it can ask more personal questions that relate to the subject or product, like “When would like me to email you with the products’ price list?”. Such question reveals the favorite hours where the customer will prefer to receive an email marketing message. Get it?

That helps businesses a lot.

Such improvements also prevent losing the customer/lead in some degree to a few life situations (customer receiving a phone call, internet disconnection problem etc), while at the same time, through the additional data acquired AND LEARNED by the bot on a chat, this A.I. solution can empower the company’s marketing funnel by pumping smarter data to aid email campaigns.

Makes sense? Of course it does.
That way, the company can send the RIGHT email at the RIGHT time with the RIGHT keywords and the most precise objection-destroyers to the RIGHT customer. Which, obviously, increases email open and conversion rates by far.

Powerful marketing, my friend.
Powerful. And yes, there’s more to give you.

Still, in this Chatbots field, we already have something popular: Facebook Bots. You can now build a Facebook Messenger bot which has been becoming such a popular topic lately that Forbes recommended 10 Facebook Bots you should try, in case you want to know what can help your marketing and your business. In the video below with Zuckerberg, you’ll understand why this has been taking over the spotlights of Marketing and Tech:

VIDEO – Bots Are Coming To Facebook Messenger

The thing is, that for everything that I’ve shown so far, this is one is by far one of the most crucial breakthroughs of all. Why? Because the Marketing of a company will be more efficient. Companies won’t have a human to sabotage their business anymore due to some nasty personal motive, for instance.

Besides, bots in customer service with such level of advancements and data analysis actually can provide a better user experience thanks to its continuous learning process, which improves the experience over and over to customers, by learning their buying habits and language patterns. Just talk to a bot and he’ll have a record of what you like to buy, what you probably want to buy, and what’s your personal taste.

Now let’s get practical a bit.
Can you DETAIL a few actionable marketing actions with chatbots?
Did you have some powerful marketing ideas that can be applied to chatbots?

Don’t worry. I’ll do it for you this time. Just pay attention here. Here’s what bots can also do for companies if they use them with a more creative Marketing mind:

• Bots can create live quizzes
• Bots can create contests between customers to boost brand awareness
• Bots can promote/share live events/videos/imagery with far more speed
• Bots can provide price comparisons in seconds to the customer, saving him time
• Bots can have easter eggs in order to force consumers to spend time improving the bot by giving data, while it makes the customer try to find the easter egg in exchange for a discount

Are you feeling the heat? The revolution is here, my friend.
And these are just a FEW IDEAS that you can use to maximize your company’s Marketing. There’s many more stuff you can play with, to make everything even more powerful, once you involve things such as “Mind Control” Neuromarketing and The Psychology of Colors, for example.

If you got the technology, just put your creative side to work.
OK? And no, this is not over.

Because there’s MUCH MORE to see in this A.I. Marketing universe.

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE: THE VIRTUAL A.I. ASSISTANT
The following incrementation is a MIX of Predictive Analysis and Chatbots which results in The Virtual A.I. Assistant. To start this, just imagine a normal day. You arrive at the office full of energy to work and then the cool stuff takes place.

Your virtual assistant reads your face just like Facebook does when you post photos, and it recognizes you within seconds. Next, it talks to you like a normal person would.

“Hey John. Good morning. We have the perfect weather today: 23º C. It’s nice for a walk at lunch or to go to the gym. Now about work, we got great results from past month’s marketing campaign. We were able to increase our brand awareness by 17% in 3 countries. By the way, do you want to check your conversion rates and all the traffic we got from that influencer’s campaign we’ve been running for the past 2 weeks?”
— Virtual A.I. Assistant

PS: By the way, your name is “John” now.

And John, may answer:
“No thank you. Just show me what to do in the next 10 days to improve my odds of purchase.”

And here’s the A.I. once more:
“Simple John. Just send a 1:1 message to Clark 2 days before the holidays. You could mention something about the next Avengers movie to ease the talk since he’s a huge Marvel fan.”

That’s how a smarter Marketer’s life is transforming into, right now.

More powerful and precise connections through a V.A. bot, by putting together a chatbot and predictive analytics to aid someone’s decisions at work, and save time by learning personal patterns towards the business.

But once more, let’s get practical ok?
For example, GrowthBot is a powerful V.A. that you can already use for quick marketing research if you work with messaging tools like Slack or Facebook Messenger. It’s not that advanced as I just described, but it’s very handy for doing certain kinds of market research.

Take a look at my growthbot which I was able to plug in into my Slack workspace:

But relax, I’m not done. There’s more about V.A. bots to tell. There’s some very interesting stuff that Kit can do to help your automate your Marketing, by cutting off a lot of weight of your marketing budgets by handling several marketing areas with precision. For example, here’s Kit doing E-mail Marketing for you:

VIDEO – Kit Handles Email Marketing

Impressive, isn’t it? A few words and you’re set. Done.
“Are we over with this revolutionary, job-killing A.I. Marketing thing, Peterson?” Well, not quite my friend. There’s one more thing I want to unveil to you in this topic.

Now you deal with Jarvis directly. Not a person anymore. Something even broader on this
A.I. assistant area comes from Google itself:

VIDEO – Meet your Google Assistant, your own personal Google

Computers everywhere, my friend. Now, you need to adapt your marketing and your business to match them. So besides understanding how things work in today’s market, you need to understand how MACHINES work in order to reach to the other human point.

PS: Do you want to see what is REALLY powerful? Just meet Viv: the AI that wants to read your mind and run your life, expecting to become 10,000 TIMES BETTER than any other A.I. assistant. Impressive USP. Check that out.

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE: THE CONTENT MARKETING AUTOMATION
OK, NEW STUFF. Gone are the days where content marketing was one of the most time-consuming activities of a marketer because times have changed now. The A.I. brings some powerful innovations on Top 3 areas regarding content: Generating Content, Content Promotion, and Newsfeed customization. Below I’ll briefly explain each point to you, alright?

Here are the consequences of A.I. applicability to Content Marketing:

• AUTOMATICALLY GENERATED CONTENT — That’s right my friend: Writers are now facing an Era where blogs are run by a few T-800s writers. Thanks to Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing fusion, the likelihood of reading machine-generated content out there is not small anymore. Two areas that have been using them already since its launch are: SPORTS and NEWS. Since both need to grab facts, stats, and other report-like data, putting these pieces together
  via a computer algorithm is not something that we can only see in movies. The future? A.I. will definitely strike in-depth articles like this one that you’re reading right now, as well.
• AUTOMATION IN SYNDICATION AND PROMOTION — Content promotion is one of the best A.I. advantages to marketers since promoting videos, images, articles is too time-consuming, which, therefore, makes you spend money and resources just to give a shout out to the world about a brand/product/service. With A.I. though, this task gets far easier. There’s now the possibility to distribute content automatically AND with far more precision, by bringing variables like mood (yeah, you’re read it right) to the table to aid the campaign’s success rates.
• CUSTOM NEWSFEEDS AND USER-SPECIFIC CONTENT — We all know that Facebook’s algorithm is changing by the day, which puts marketers in a tight spot every time things change. But now, A.I. comes to help ease things a little bit, by recalibrating newsfeeds to users in a way that you can serve readers exactly when they’re needing your content. Because as I said a few paragraphs ago, besides having the ability to read and understand personal data more than never, A.I. can assume when you’re about to enter depression or when your mood changes. Through this, maybe serving you something funny will maximize your user experience instead of serving you work-related content that will only boost stress. Get it? Yes. Welcome to the future.

OK. All these definitions are great.
But let’s open your mind by addressing a few practical examples, just to open your eyes a little bit.

AUTOMATICALLY GENERATED CONTENT
A serious advantage of A.I. today is to gather messy data and put it all together in a readable format human format, just like writers do. Pure smart content generation at large scale. The Sports and News industries are now using A.I. systems to generate content that creates now smarter, far more precise articles and reports, minimizing the likelihood of having a text look like clumsy data that was just vomited by an amateur robot. The content generated LOOKS like it was written by humans.

Example? Let me show you one that The NY Times published on automated content creation. Just read both, and try to find out which one was written by a human. Because the other one was made by a robot.

Want to know if you got this right?
Here’s the answer: The CONTENT NEWS #1 = Robot and the CONTENT NEWS #2 = Human. Some of you, might have guessed right but my point here is exactly that: YOU PROBABLY GUESSED right. Guessed. Because you couldn’t tell the difference yourself.

Recently, The Verge published a news on which The Associated Press was able to publish a financial story on “Apple tops Street 1Q forecasts” which was written and published by their A.I. system, MINUTES after Apple’s report. Minutes. By the time it was unleashed, The AP was already there. Dominating things. Currently, the AP is already doing 3,000 stories per quarter. Impressive.

See the power of A.I. over content as well, now?

This is what I call incredible breakthrough on content creation.
A news website, a data reporting firm, or a sports magazine can automate much of its own work now, cutting it from hours of pure human labor to minutes or even seconds thanks to smarter technology. Simply amazing.

PS: By the way, if you like to really test your “this is a robot” skills, then do the NY Times quiz — Did a Human or a Computer Write this? and I promise that you’ll understand how powerful and revolutionizing this is.

Next utility.

AUTOMATION IN SYNDICATION AND PROMOTION
Once your company’s content starts growing to hundreds of thousands of millions of zillions of articles, images, and videos, it gets harder and harder by the day to share the right pieces that will likely boost your traffic and conversion rates. Some pieces worth re-sharing because they’re assets that steals people’s attention. They’re hooks. Attention grabbers.

But which of your zillion pieces of content are worth re-sharing? Which marketing channel will be better for posting your articles? What type of content will likely succeed if you talk about the Topic “X”? And what frequency should you post next month based on how the market is behaving
right now?

All key questions for rapid growth. Agree?
So everyone knows, that once you grow your content base, it becomes harder by the day to control these important metrics that can define a marketing campaign’s success rates.

You cannot expect to have zero mistakes by putting humans to track so much data, because they can end up following (or producing) misleading information, killing the opportunity of staying ahead in the crowded war-like marketplace. Time is money.

Opportunities missed even more.

That’s where A.I. comes to play again.
A powerful AI-based tool for promotion that handles difficult data is key to success today. One good example for this is Outbrain. They gather all the web’s data that concerns to your business, analyze your ads, your content and they deliver your content to the best audience possible and gives you some real-time insights. Very high-precision marketing.

Here’s how it works:

VIDEO – Welcome to Automatic Yield from Outbrain: Helping Publishers Maximize Revenue

Sounds more interesting, right?
You focus on content creation, in its quality and you delegate to the machine. Done. Finished. The Machine takes care of your PR for you. There are other examples, but none that I found worthy to share now.

Next one.

CUSTOM NEWSFEEDS AND USER-SPECIFIC CONTENT
We already know that Google, Netflix, Facebook and many other brands are using A.I. to maximize user experience by delivering the best content options to its users. Navigate online, and you’ll see that Google Ads are getting smarter by the day, Netflix is giving you more precise indications as well, so this is not a tiny trend. As I said, it’s a revolution.

Therefore, is something marketers need to worry about.
Because if RankBrain is the 3rd ranking factor of Google’s overall ranking algorithm at the date I’m writing this, then machines are something important to understand if you want to provide content that machines promote nowadays.

Think Netflix for example.
Do you think it’s suggestion engines are that smart thanks to its own engineers’ intelligence? Well, to be fair, part of it is. But surely not 100%. Since Netflix has been using A.I. to suggest what you would like to watch aiming to be a better movie referer than your closest friends. Netflix already saved $1 Billion Dollars in 2015 alone using an A.I. personalized feed. That’s what I call optimizing your money while boosting the audience engagement levels.

Now, what about Facebook? Are you aware of what Zuckerberg wants to accomplish? Then just watch the video below from 0:51s – 1:28

VIDEO – Facebook to use AI to improve Experience

OK. Think about this. Seriously.
Because from a user experience point of view, this will be MUCH better because content will ADAPT according to someone’s preferences, mood, and personal limitations. But hey, that’s Facebook.

What happens if you put this technology on a NEWS website? Or in a company’s blog? You could adapt how your content is being delivered because A.I. would modify its delivery process to match that person’s circumstances, creating a VERY personal experience.

People would have a UNIQUE EXPERIENCE on every brand that knows how to read their data through A.I. to put together something that is the best JUST for John. Or for Sara. Or Paul. Get it?

The consequence? Another example that boosts word of mouth marketing. Because if 2 people can have a very personalized experience with a brand, and if it’s creative enough, it can generate some great talks about that brand like “hey what experience did you get when you used the X company’s website?” OR “Do you have anything to recommend from your natural Youtube newsfeed that appeared to you?”.

Just read the USP of a Google’s personal search, for example:

Impressive.
Could I use A.I. then to replicate these results on my company’s blog? Giving a personal homepage for the visitor who is just a fan, another one for the customer, and another for partners? All based on the preferences and on what content they consume the most from my brand?

Oh yes. This is where we live now. Time to deal with it. Learning to use this level of technology decides how you run things.

Alright. Next important point for marketers and entrepreneurs.

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE: VOICE SEARCH OPTIMIZATION
Google and Bing, the top search engines in today’s marketing/technology industry have both incorporated voice search in their queries system. Through A.I. voice search, a human can formulate a question like he would normally do to another human and STILL get the same results (most of the times) from search engines. Just use your voice to search. Simple.

It’s far more practical than wasting time typing something or some brand’s name in order to get the information that you want. With such advancements lately, people are finding it truly awesome, since we already have 55% of teenagers and 56% of adults using voice search for several reasons, like appearing to be more tech-savvy (adults) for instance.

Since 2015,
A rise in the number of search engine queries were all based on keywords like:

• “Who”
• “What”
• “When”
• “How”

Which are all words humans use when they’re using voice search.
Therefore, you can now imagine that this naturally affects SEO — Search Engine Optimization. Because if people are changing how they search, then optimizing for such is a must in order to dominate rankings.

Right?
So as I said before, A.I. is learning to better deliver your results based on previous search queries, multiple-step queries and past user behavior and actions. Put all this spaghetti data together and you got yourself a great search experience where almost looks like you’re speaking to a human being.

So you better deal with stuff like this in your Content Marketing Strategy:

• “What are the best restaurants recommended by users on Yelp in Paris”
• “How much is the price difference between the top 3 services of yourcompany.com”
• “How many products does the ecommerce site has on women’s shoes category”

Are you getting the idea?
Now bring this step further and push this technology to every business and e-commerce website. Would the experience be better for people? Definitely. Just imagine you searching for movies on Netflix WITHOUT typing anything. You would simply say: “Hey, I wanna watch Matrix Revolution. And start from the 1:33min mark”. Amazing stuff.

This is already happening, though. This is not “the future”.
Check out how Apple is already doing this:
VIDEO – CNET News – See How Siri Helps you get around Apple TV

Fingerless. Beautiful, isn’t?
Although the likelihood of EVERYBODY becoming MASSIVELY LAZY people is, well,
gigantic. Just talk to the machine. Talk to Jarvis.

And no, I’m not over yet.
Since I mentioned e-commerce, then I couldn’t leave behind conversational commerce. The mentioned earlier company named Viv, proves that ads fused with proper voice-driven marketing is something crucial for the next business Era. Environments and objects will become sort of like machines. Just see below a fast demo of how people will make online purchases for example:

VIDEO – Beyond Siri: The World Premiere of Viv with Dag Kittlaus

Hotels and ProFlowers are way ahead of the competition here, because who wouldn’t like
such fast delivery service? All the effort the customer has to make is within a sentence of a
few words and BAM!

“Here is a list of great choices for you to spend some money!”
Now, after seeing this, I know what you might be thinking.

Although many may still want to purchase like “a normal person did” before this Era began, the NECESSITY of saving time will likely kill the old process of shopping because we all know how free time is becoming a rare thing in our busy lives.

Thus, people may be forced to use this out of necessity, instead of free will. Example? Sending voice queries to ask for reviews will definitely be huge. Buying what you need in grocery stores too. But hey, that’s just my opinion here.

So this level of A.I. surrounding chat bots, market research and voice search commands will change user behavior, which changes marketing and business strategies. That’s only logical. So that’s what you need to know by now about voice search.

Implement it in your business somehow.
Now, there’s one more thing I need to address before we end this article.

Computer Vision Advertising.
Let’s finish this.

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE: COMPUTER VISION ADVERTISING
The brain process imagery much faster than text and the world is crowded for marketers. We are in WAR for attention. Right? Therefore, what’s the next best move to get people’s to watch your ad? Use A.I. to create advertising FROM or ON videos and images. Period. Go where everybody is paying more attention nowadays and bring A.I. to assist you on targeted Ad delivery.

So let’s cut to the chase and go to the example.
Vox Observatory made a very detailed video on how Computer Vision actually works on Snapchat filters. Great video. The example below has my core highlight on the use of advertising in computer vision at the 4:18min mark, but I’m starting from the point where filters get explained so it can give you some marketing ideas and strategies. Because well, understanding all this tech, may bring you some creative ideas.

VIDEO – How Snapchat Filters Work

I’m not that much big of a fan of filters, but it definitely has its marketing applications. Influencers, for instance, have the opportunity to take advantage of this technology to promote brands on social media by using funny message approaches or other strong emotional hooks that hold user attention.

All that’s required is creativity.
Just mix the video message with the filter and you can start making a very interactive advertising message which can still get attention in the noisy world we live in today. Since filters are trendy, those who put A.I. on the game also to find the best Ad possibilities according to taste, influencer’s reach and more, can gain additional leverage in the marketplace. Use your brain and the computer’s brain.

Now one last thing that I MUST talk about.
The company known as Blippar has done something very special with a simple camera (it’s an App):

A UNIVERSAL GOOGLE SEARCH BASED ON TAKING PICTURES

The goal of Blippar is simple: discover something about what you just took a picture of. From that point, the A.I. takes place and brings you back several ramifications filled with content ready-to-go like the object’s basic info, or some associated videos, some related games, music tracks, exclusive offers, shopping and more for you to consume.

Didn’t understand yet? (even after I used the Google’s example?!) OK. Just think of Wikipedia. You use a search (keywords) there. Right? With Blippar you’ll use pictures. Done. No keywords. No voice search. Just take a picture of it and see what happens.

The “what happens” is where the fun begins. Because next, after you took a picture of something, Blippar delivers related content to it which depending on your field, may be a very useful marketing opportunity.

Also, for people who have some level of deficiency in either speaking or writing, this is a very strong alternative choice to search. This is why people are already calling this the “Visual Google” or “Visual Wikipedia”.

Here’s How it works:
VIDEO – Unlock The World Around You – #DiscoverMore with Blipar

Powerful stuff.
From a marketing perspective, having content placed right away as soon as a niche-related object was blipped is a HUGE opportunity to grab customers. Just to make a point, here’s the marketing campaign that Blippar did together with Guinness in Singapore:

VIDEO – Guinness Launches in Singapore With Augmented Reality!

That’s what I call smarter marketing.
Interactive. Interesting. And Innovative.
Those who are “A.I. qualified” will be able to expose their companies to a much broader audience through these new marketing channels, as you may see from what I’ve shown.

Because if you don’t see the appeal, then follow my lead. Don’t people today ask questions like:

“Where did you buy that shoe?” OR “What this shirt is made of?”.

Now think. What if I could get those answers without asking the person? Because both are A.I.-driven queries that once you take a picture of the shoe with Blippar, instead of asking it to the person directly, the opportunities become endless to brands.

And yes, you can already predict people taking pictures of strangers on the streets. But at the same time, can you imagine the marketing super powers you’ll have if you stay ahead and use all these resources?

It’s amazing. You get traffic and purchases thanks to a stranger who was spotted on a bus stop. And the customer was someone that spotted a guy wearing your company’s T-shirt. THAT’S the new organic marketing.

Is your mind in a creative moment right now? Because mine was at first. All these A.I. stuff is mindblowing, to say the least. We couldn’t picture such levels of advancements in Tech a few years ago.

Anyway….
Now here comes THE BAD PART of all this A.I. trend (that’s right. BAD!). Because it’s not all sunshine and rainbows. Therefore, next, I’ll show the Dark Side of A.I. that all businesses may face which will definitely open your eyes to almost every single consequence to this A.I. Era.

This next part is very important.
Make sure you read, understand all points and meditate about them.

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE: THE DEATH OF CONTENT MARKETING
We are already drowning in content every single day. This is not news anymore. But with such levels of automation, where we are using extremely smart insights from personal data, that even humans cannot bring together as fast as machines, we have become in a way….obsolete.

This A.I. Era is connected to the next Global Economic Meltdown (a warning article). So here’s the logic behind A.I. that is not the “pretty puppy” we all may think it is.

THE LOGIC BEHIND THE DEATH OF CONTENT MARKETING

• #1. MACHINES OVERPRODUCE CONTENT — If human resources are producing huge amounts of content now, then machines will multiply these numbers by far. The Washington Post for instance, has unleashed more than 500 posts on the 2016 US Election thanks to A.I. alone
• #2. THE ROI DROPS — The ROI of content marketing will start to decline due to MASSIVE automation by several companies. Suddenly we have more content by the second than never before, turning the world into a complete digital noise dominated by massive A.I. and AR, which will be constantly trying to push us some product by the second. The cost for becoming an Entrepreneur has dropped dramatically, putting most people who hate corporate jobs into a place where they can compete. But the noise, will be too strong to overcome. Especially with machines involved in such fast pace production.
• #3. HUMAN ATTENTION DROPS DRAMATICALLY — As consequence, people will stop paying attention to content since bots are producing them in large scale, making it uninteresting and impersonal as well. Because we, as humans, want to connect with OTHER humans, and not machines. If every content is being produced mostly by robots, people will stop caring because of this.
• #4. DEATH OF CONTENT ARRIVES — Since humans cannot overcome the noise due to being overpowered by the machine’s production capability, content marketing will become useless for the majority of businesses since high-quality content takes time to create, but the noise generated by A.I. production will suffocate any human attempt in seconds. Humans may produce 4 articles per month while bots may be producing at least 1200 per day (Washington Post). Therefore, content producers who don’t love what they do will abandon content creation and leave it to the machines. And since customers and all the audience knows that it is all produced by machines, they’ll also abandon content consumption.

Makes sense?
The problem is not actually A.I. itself.
The problem is that humans don’t know how to use technology properly. But let’s address the other problematic scenario before I close this.

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE: THE EXCESSIVE A.I. USAGE THAT CREATES A DATA CHAOS
You may think that for some, like those who are starting online, the chances of winning are very low because they lack one thing: Knowledge. A Proper understanding of A.I., AR/VR and everything else necessary to OPERATE or READ this new chaotic data-driven world. Right?

You may think that for some, like those who are starting online, the chances of winning are very low because they lack one thing: Knowledge. A Proper understanding of A.I., AR/VR and everything else necessary to OPERATE or READ this new chaotic data-driven world. Right?

Well, that’s a different discussion, a more profound one. But then, you may assume that if you do possess this level of knowledge, then everything is OK. You are a winner. You can manage things.

Correct?
No. Not quite. There’s one problem here: The Black Box.
You see, the CEO of Viv admitted that working with A.I. is a bit of a black box, which naturally leads to one thing after things begin to escalate: The Inability to operate A.I. machines anymore thanks to MASSIVE chaotic-like data.

Just think for a second.
We have Social media to track. We have organic traffic to track. We have paid ads to track. We have voice search to track. And we have computer vision sources now to track. And now personal data to track.

All these data is being treated by A.I. to deliver more effective marketing and it is all being put inside a pretty little black box, as you can see MIT News report below:

So where’s the problem?
Therefore, there will be a point where even THE BEST humans who know how to operate such levels of technology will be simply 100% LOST and unable to make strategic decisions. Why? Because they’ll be in front of links and connections and data that they simply don’t understand anymore.

Pure chaos. Data chaos.
A few practical examples so you can understand this better:

• EXTREME SELF-UPDATING SYSTEMS — If Google, Bing and other players that drive traffic to brands start updating themselves without humans touching much on the code, there will be a point where areas like SEO for instance, will become a game. Just raw guesswork. Experts won’t understand why the A.I. system changed its rules and source code for that particular topic, putting human strategy to the death. After all, how can you code or optimize something that you simply don’t understand anymore? It’s like coding in an Alien language or giving the source code of Google search to a 1-year old. Because once again, A.I. experts admitted that it all becomes a black box, eventually.
• EXTREME PERSONALIZATION — You’ll have to market to John. And Mary. And Sara. And another John. And Jack. Are you seeing the picture? Great. Now multiply. Try to keep track on such levels of personal data which was delivered by the A.I. machine and make the smartest decisions possible. Just try. You won’t even be able to analyze such data! Just one person will give you A LOT of work in order to you actually burst through the noise and hit her with an impactful message in the middle of the bot-content-world. The A.I. will gather so much data that even if you’re the best analyst in the world, you won’t be able to UNDERSTAND what’s going and what you can do about it to make your marketing more efficient.

That’s the bad side, my friend.

By entrusting the company’s systems to A.I. in order to grab more market share, companies will lose control over its data and its strategic decisions. Because at first, everything will be awesome. Efficiency levels hitting the roof and all that. But once everybody starts playing on the same pattern, then chaos takes place.

Because no human will be able to understand what is going on if A.I. is making most of its decisions by itself, learning things by itself, and putting all its knowledge inside a nice black box.

THAT’S the dark side of A.I.
Now that you know, you make your own assumptions.

CONCLUSION
The marketplace will go through one of the biggest changes it has ever faced and one of the fastest too. By putting machines to work, the scenario can change in months, maybe WEEKS depending on the level of automation we are talking about and how much money is being invested.

Does A.I. have its good side?
Oh yes. Used properly, it can make a solopreneur become a match to big companies. The problem is: Are we all using technology wisely since it arrived?

Well, I’ll let you answer that one. Hope this helps your business and your future in the marketplace, my friend.

Take care.