The internet is flooded with numerous opinions, reviews, suggestions, making brands need a way to categorize them into the good, the bad, the ugly, the emergency and the neutral sections. To prioritize whom to respond to first, and understand how the consumers feel about certain services or products. For this, businesses need the right metrics to understand why customers react positively or negatively with their brand. Hence, brands are paying more attention to sentiment analysis, which basically uses AI and machine learning to study customer feedback. Sentiment analytics tools help in measuring the brand health by analyzing KPIs like brand awareness, brand reputation, and brand's share of voice.

Are you sick and tired of hearing about'killer robots' or vague conjecture of what AI could mean for us all? The truth is, there's a lot of conflicting information floating around on what AI can or can't do when it comes to marketing, and we wanted to set the record straight. In the latest installment of Meltwater's London Biz Breakfast series, the global media intelligence firm aims to tackle the subject of how AI in marketing really works – in partnership with leading technology authority, Katie King. Commenting on the rationale behind these morning sessions, Meltwater's area director for the UK and Ireland, Matt Barclay, remarked: "We want the industry to thrive as a whole and the Biz Breakfast sessions are a good place to regroup, look at the reality and keep fostering a best-practice approach to how we view innovation in marketing. They've been designed to bring tech, PR and marketing professionals together for knowledge-sharing, because these disciplines should work in sync in an ideal world." And for this particular session, Meltwater has enlisted the perfect mentor to shed some extra light on the subject.

Media intelligence firm Meltwater is opening up its AI platform, Fairhair.ai, Fairhair.ai is an open data science platform originally developed to power Meltwater's media intelligence and social analytics products. It is designed to make it easier for businesses to gain a real-time pulse on everything from market research to risk management, the company said. "We quickly realised our AI platform had far more potential, beyond Meltwater's core products, to democratise competitive insights created from real-time online data. "In spite of being the most valuable source for forward-looking indicators, online data is the biggest blind spot today in corporate decision-making.

In the quest to become data-driven, companies are increasingly investing in Business Intelligence software to gain a competitive advantage. Yet the insights generated by those tools are mostly fueled by data from within a company's walls, instead of the real-time market signals found externally online – from consumer opinions to corporate filings. This outside data can unlock key indicators about an industry or competitor, but harnessing the volume and variety of global data is a time-intensive task. And although advances in artificial intelligence have made it easier to capture and analyze this data to create powerful insights, most commercial AI tools are one-size-fits-all models with limited capabilities. Keeping this in mind, Meltwater is opening up its AI platform, Fairhair.ai,

Tech is a concentrated industry, and a recent study by CB Insights illustrates the extent to which this is the case. According to the New York City-based machine intelligence-supported research firm's latest research into artificial intelligence (AI) startup acquisitions, Google and Apple have been the top buyers of AI startups, with 14 and 13 acquisitions respectively between 2012 and 2017. They're followed by six other well-known tech giants, which have each acquired between four and six startups during the same period: Facebook, Amazon, Intel, Microsoft, Twitter, and Salesforce, with media monitoring and business intelligence software-as-a-service (SaaS) firm Meltwater rounding out the list of top nine. In its analysis of the data, published on Feb. 27, CB Insights noted that Meltwater was not only the smallest company on the list, but the only private one as well. "Meltwater is strategically using AI to monitor digital media and analyze brand sentiment and competitor activity," the organization said.

Before delving into the nitty gritty of exactly how sentiment analysis works, let's break the concept down into something a little more tangible, shall we. Have you ever wondered what the South African public thought about, let's say, Iceland's football team defeating England in the Euro 2016? Well, that right there my friends, is why sentiment analysis software exists – to make vast quantities of data easily understandable at a glance. Think of it like a snapshot of the emotional response to a given topic. You might be asking yourself, but what about online surveys and polls, isn't that their purpose?