The impact of machine learning & AI on advertising in a privacy compliant age

Sian Williams, Audience Strategy and Planning Director at MediaCom North, explains how AI offers a future of increased automation, faster decision-making and'hyper-personalisation' that will make marketing comms more effective and businesses more efficient. Robots are science fact not fiction, machines may well inherit the earth, and artificial intelligence can actually enhance the way we engage with human intelligence. As more interactions become digitised, the data landscape is only getting bigger and AI, and within it machine learning, will increasingly fuel that growth. The two terms are often used inter-changeably but whilst AI creates the structure of computational human intelligence it is machine learning that, sans specific programming, delivers on how quickly and effectively data will be processed and decisioned against. If AI is the brain itself, full of raw potential, then machine learning is at least one of the'cortexes' able to process information and develop intelligence and skill by using one'experience' to inform another.