It seems like everyone is trying to identify how artificial intelligence (AI) can benefit their business. In my circles, executives are asking how AI will impact customer marketing, more specifically data-driven customer marketing. One study found that in 2017, 80% of enterprises had "some form of AI (machine learning, deep learning) in production" and 30% were "planning on expanding their AI investments." The same study found that improving customer experiences motivated 62% of enterprises to invest in AI. Data-driven customer marketing (you might know it as loyalty marketing) is designed to change customer behavior in a positive way for both the brand and the customer.

It seems like everyone is trying to identify how artificial intelligence (AI) can benefit their business. In my circles, executives are asking how AI will impact customer marketing, more specifically data-driven customer marketing. One study found that in 2017, 80% of enterprises had "some form of AI (machine learning, deep learning) in production" and 30% were "planning on expanding their AI investments." The same study found that improving customer experiences motivated 62% of enterprises to invest in AI. Data-driven customer marketing (you might know it as loyalty marketing) is designed to change customer behavior in a positive way for both the brand and the customer.

AI is a booming industry with a lot of noise, thought leadership, and hype. However, as we attend industry events, work with clients, and tell the story of AI for customer data, there's one common trend. Many of the people we talk to only have a loose idea of what AI does, with little or no mind to what it is. This post will serve as an easy to read primer on what AI truly is, and what kinds of AI are being developed/where things stand today in the ecosystem. AI is a form of intelligence - Specifically AI is a synthetic intelligence - intelligence of a man-made yet real quality.

People sometimes think of artificial intelligence (AI) as the natural language processing they saw in HAL 9000 in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey or the chess-playing computer Deep Blue that beat Garry Kasparov in 1997. Others see AI as the synthetic human intelligence engineered into a friendly voice interface and software, like Apple's Siri. By contrast, in the enterprise environment, AI for customer marketing offers a far more practical, personal, immediate and business-oriented application. Effective customer marketing is about analyzing billions of signals and automating analytics on a bottom-up basis. It results in highly personal marketing, pairing the right product and offer at the right time to a defined group of people.

AI in customer marketing is about analyzing billions of signals and automating analytics on a bottom-up basis. It results in highly personal marketing, pairing the right product and offer at the right time to a defined group of people. Questions about individual and group behavior abound. "Like" for those irritating Millennials, what offer would induce a first-time purchase and which product would be ideal as a complimentary purchase? How many and which products are clustered into a typical purchase?