The Watson Marketing Assistant

“When I die, I want to go like my grandfather. Peacefully. In his sleep. Not screaming like the passengers in his car.”

A great joke delivered by my brand new colleague: Watson. Maybe a far out use case of a cognitive assistant for the marketer, but a bit of humour in this professional world does everybody some good (as far as I am concerned at least).

Considering all the latest news frenzy about AI, it is a very interesting topic to write about. Take the news about Facebook shutting down it’s AI. It’s AI bots were trying to simplify their exchange of goods by erasing unnecessary words for their interaction.

Gibberish, but the underlying FAIR system worked. The issue was rather that it was supposed to interact with humans. So they shut it down and changed their requirements back to – English…

Other headlines include changes in simple cloud services ‘AI is taking over the cloud‘ (Box using AI features. Users will be able to search through photos, images, and other documents using their visual components, instead of by file name or tag) all the way to articles about job losses to come: ‘Is artificial intelligence a (job) killer?‘

No AI blog without some quotes of caution and dire warnings by various thinkers out there: Elon Musk made the comments to students from MIT during an interview at the AeroAstro Centennial Symposium, talking about computer science, AI, space exploration and the colonisation of Mars: “I think we should be very careful about artificial intelligence. If I had to guess at what our biggest existential threat is, it’s probably that. So we need to be very careful.”

Stephen Hawking told the BBC: “The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race.”

“Show me a robot that deliberately tells you a lie to manipulate your behaviour, and then I will accept you have artificial intelligence!” says philosopher, Julius Kovesi to James Trevelyan (emeritus professor in the School of Mechanical and Chemical Engineering) as far back as 1970 – as part of an effort to create a sheep-shearing robot…

Based on these type of comments I specifically love the idea of letting Watson create a trailer for an AI horror thriller called Morgan. Hollywood’s imagination seems to be the AI’s worst nightmare…

I guess I like the example of Spike Jonze’s HER much better, which I have compared to cognitive capability in my blog on ‘Cognitive Marketing‘.

Or the fantastic example of the 13 year old genius I was able to meet last month – Tanmay Bakshi – giving an example of his work with AI.

https://vimeo.com/209621395

So let me go back a bit and describe to you, how I met my new colleague and why I consider my new AI colleague Watson a valuable addition to any marketing team.

Earlier in 2017 I was participating at the IBM Amplify conference in Las Vegas. My colleague Melanie Butcher was giving a keynote on the brand new capabilities of Watson Customer Engagement. She introduced the Watson Marketing Assistant (WMA). A cognitive assistant for the marketer.

The WMA is understanding the marketing domain. It reasons towards specific goals. It learns continuously from the engagement with you and it tries to do so by interacting naturally. Given that this capability from IBM Watson Customer Engagement is in so called ‘preview mode‘ – you are already getting an intern grabbing you some stats, a helpful colleague and a smart advisor.

As you hopefully have seen in the video above, some of the existing use cases are already very insightful. I have been asking WMA for a quick comparison of all the campaigns and mailings I did in the last year. Find me the top performing one and review it’s metrics. I can then also have a look at the mail template and even analyse it’s subject line and compare that to other well performing mailings – all of what you have seen in the demo above.

Or, I can just have it analyse the tonality of it’s own joke from the top…

I consider these early examples of the WMA preview ready to be adding value to the daily life of a marketer. Gone are those times where you had to go through reporting solutions to find answers to your performance questions. An example of my question to get me some metrics for my best performing mailing is below and simply asking Watson: “What is my best performing campaign?”

The Watson Marketing Assistant turns into an abstraction layer for the marketer. Plain English can now help you reduce complexity when searching for everyday answers in marketing.

Jeff Dernavich summarised the possibilities of the assistant in the following way:

Quickly understand massive amounts of data
Deliver the ideal interactions to each individual customer via the most appropriate channel
A trusted advisor to help marketers make smarter decisions faster

Very exciting times ahead. I hope you will have a play with it yourselves and please let me know, if you find any value I might have missed. After all – WMA is still growing.

For me the value is already here. I do not start my usage of Watson Campaign Automation via browsing around anymore. Instead I ask my brand new colleague a very simple question: