Spike Jonze is a visionary director and in his film ‘HER‘ he foresaw an interesting future for cognitive assistants. If you have not seen this all time favourite of mine, do yourself a favour and watch it. No matter how far away (and crazy) the notion to actually fall in love with a virtual assistant may seem – let me explore how close we are to make them very useful in our daily job – in this case – as marketers. So let’s start working with a new colleague.
https://youtu.be/Z6fKqKHG9eY
Kareem Yusuf and Melanie Butcher introduced him at the last IBM Amplify Conference in May in Florida. Last week I had a chance to meet him ‘in person’ – my new virtual colleague – Watson.
It may still be a concept in the IBM Design world, but what I see happening is powerful and it is going to change how marketers work. Soon. Very soon. After all – virtual assistants are on the rise. But are they ready to help? Let’s see what is happening in the market first.
Just last week Mossberg published an article with the interesting title: ‘Why does Siri seem so dumb?‘. In his review of Apple’s assistant Siri, he comes to the conclusion that the coming AI ‘wars’ will demand that the personal assistants will have to get smarter. In his words: “The AI revolution will demand that.”
This review comes right after Apple has integrated Siri into the new macOS Sierra. So all of us will be talking to our work machines sooner or later. Apple was missing from another news story end of September though – the formation of a new AI partnership: IBM, Google, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft have come together to form a new partnership to ensure that AI is developed safely, ethically, and transparently.
So the AI revolution is forming, but how do all of these developments now apply to a marketer?
Let me start by introducing just 2 to ready-to-use capabilities Watson offers today: Personality Insights and Tone Analyzer. You can try both of them yourself: here and here!
Personality Insights let’s you gain insights into how and why people think, act, and feel the way they do. The API service applies linguistic analytics and personality theory to infer attributes from a person’s unstructured text. The results are impressive. Just from analysing 726 words of my last blog entry on how Wayblazer is changing the travel industry (here), Watson was able to come up with a personality profile. So let me introduce you to me:
“You are expressive. You are philosophical: you are open to and intrigued by new ideas and love to explore them. You are energetic: you enjoy a fast-paced, busy schedule with many activities. And you are authority-challenging: you prefer to challenge authority and traditional values to help bring about positive changes.
Your choices are driven by a desire for discovery. You are relatively unconcerned with tradition. You prefer activities with a purpose greater than just personal enjoyment. And you care more about making your own path than following what others have done.”
I like the result (and it is actually frightening how spot-on Watson is), but it is of course not perfect. It is getting there. I like to think that I actually like taking pleasure in life – but that’s just me… More words as input would probably help, but just imagine how powerful this insight can be in personalisation. A very simple use case could be the change of messaging in the call centre based on these results, or the change of content on a digital endpoint to factor in my curiosity. A simple idea that can enrich your marketing personalisation with unstructured data. Information that was not available before. And to make it even better – it is available today and ready to go with our IBM Marketing Platform.
The second feature is called Tone Analyzer. This service uses linguistic analysis to detect and interpret emotions, social tendencies, and language style cues found in text. Plugging in the same blog entry, it comes up with a sentence by sentence result on how my text delivers various emotions.
I probably have to work on delivering less anger and more joy. Apply this capability to your marketing messaging (emails, sms, push, etc…) and make sure that you deliver the right tone to the right audience. Again – very easy application of these cognitive services.
Enter my new colleague. As Melanie has shown in her keynote, Watson helped me to create a new social media ad. It understood the relationship in the data and it’s relevancy, was able to combine results from various input sources and run the whole thing for me. A concept still, but a very powerful one.
It will be key though to deliver these concepts into the world of a marketer. The importance of the application of these services is also something KPMG has picked up. Let me quote an article by Rohan Pearce: “KPMG believes cognitive computing will play a key role in its future, as well as the future of its clients as they grappled with technology-driven disruption to their industries.”
The new KPMG partners Rod Bryan, Raphael James and Jon Stone have launched Solution 49x, a new practice to help clients harness the power of cognitive and artificial intelligence (AI). Solution 49x brings together expertise in cognitive computing, big data, analytics, digital business design and anthropology. A strong partner in delivering these game changers, I am very to happy to work with.
So – the cognitive services are ready. The use cases are there. The partners are there to deliver them. Let’s see where this is going. I am sure the coming months will shift and change the way we work. A good time to be a marketer.
And me? I could not end this blog without quoting my favourite joke from ‘HER’:
Theodore: What does a baby computer call its father?
Samantha: I don’t know. What?
Theodore: Data.
