Artificial Intelligence has the potential to enhance the human experience, reaching every aspect of our lives. As the technology continues to develop, so will the way people and organisations use it.
At this year’s
Build conference, Microsoft highlighted the need for AI to be made as accessible as possible to consumers and business audiences. In particular for marketers, AI will be an essential evolution to search. It will, and already is, adding important layers to the consumer journey, bringing to life new potential to leverage this insight and provide consumers with relevant and timely content.
To leverage the benefits of AI, marketers must first work to bridge the gap between human ingenuity and intelligent technology. Having an interface which is accessible to consumers is essential in allowing AI to be fully embraced and used to its fullest potential. As AI continuously absorbs personal data, marketers have the opportunity to understand audience nuances and target them more directly. By embracing these tools marketers can reach new realms of engagement, enabling them to truly understand behaviours, map patterns and serve relevant content.
This potential of both an effective user interface and personalisation first emerged via digital personal assistants. With the likes of Microsoft’s Cortana, everyday consumers can use AI to organise their day to day lives. Cortana can access a broad range of information, so it is as if every consumer had their very own PA at their fingertips. For example. Cortana has the capabilities to use location based accuracy to remind me to pick up a pint of milk when I am passing a supermarket, or if I’m walking to a friend’s house, when to leave, helping to make every day activities more productive and time efficient by eliminating the possibility for human error.
AI is the next stage for the application economy, representing a huge array of opportunities to every sector and it should be widely accessible to all. Developers in particular can use the tools to empower them to bring to market new technologies with AI capabilities, quicker and more efficiently. At Build, Microsoft also announced the next wave of its Cognitive Services, a collection of APIs and services that allow developers to use a broad suite of AI Services. Developers now have the ability to tap into vision, speech recognition, emotion and language services, seamlessly adding them to their applications.
Eventually, AI will change the way humans interact with machines, acting as the ever-present, invisible interface helping to make our lives safer, easier and more productive. Everyone and every brand now has the capacity to create even more meaningful experiences and instil healthy competition into the industry. Marketers have a role to shape this and guide companies through this transformation.
At Microsoft, we have been advancing AI capabilities for 25 years, amplifying human ingenuity with intelligent technology infused into every product and experience. Ultimately, AI will become the lynchpin between the way people interact with machines in the future, as applications merge and begin to inform each other. We are shaping the future of marketing with AI, and that future is now.
This was first published in the Drum:
Re-shaping the future of marketing with AI