As we enter a new year, like many other industries, insurance is in the midst of a tipping point. New models, technologies, and competitive forces that rippled through the market over the years have now reached such an upsurge they are mandating change across the board. Industry experts note that 2019 will be no different, with an uptick in artificial intelligence solutions revolutionizing the way people and organizations interact with and use their data. The message is clear: transform now or be left behind. For consumers and businesses alike, new ways of interacting with insurance companies are disrupting the traditional client/broker relationship.

Artificial intelligence and machine learning are proving to be very useful in just about every business function in the enterprise, and marketing is no exception. AI is already impacting marketing, and it's going to further shape the future of how business is done and how relationships are forged between companies and their clients. As I wrote recently in MarTechToday, most AI in marketing applications are focused on B2C use cases, many of which we're very familiar with as consumers ourselves. Most of us know that the ads that show up on Facebook, on banners or on Google are targeting individual users directly based on past behavior, demographic data, location information and more -- a process that couldn't be done at scale without the aid of AI. For companies that sell to businesses, communication between salespeople and marketing teams is critical. A day in the life of a salesperson is often chock-full of tasks that could be seen as marketing-related.

NEW YORK: Communicators are bullish about artificial intelligence's potential to make their profession more efficient, according to a survey by MSLGroup and Publicis.Sapient. The study, Powered by AI: Communications in the Algorithm Age, surveyed more than 1,846 marketing and communications in-house leaders in Brazil, China, France, Germany, India, Italy, Poland, the U.K., and the U.S. MSL's parent, Publicis Groupe, is rolling out an AI platform called Marcel, which will essentially help its employees better collaborate and form teams more efficiently. MSL CEO Guillaume Herbette said he expects Marcel to be 100% operational by the end of the year. "AI will help us and our clients do better work," Herbette said. "It will add to brand-consumer engagement. They will try more than ever at [maintaining] that relationship."

Microsoft under CEO Satya Nadella has refocussed to double down on enterprise, artificial intelligence and cloud services, and today the company took the wraps a new project for advertising giant Publicis that shows how it is leveraging all three to expand its business. At an event in Paris, the CEOs of the two companies unveiled Marcel, a new platform comprised of multiple apps using AI, social networking mechanics, voice recognition, predictive analytics and more aimed at getting Publicis' 80,000 employees to be more productive and work together better. The first three apps on Marcel -- named after Marcel Bleustein-Blanchet, the founder of Publicis who had an interesting second career as a fighter in the French Resistance -- will be Daily Six, Expert Match and Open Brief, with plans to add more apps over time, CEO and chairman Arthur Sadoun said in an interview this week. They've been trialled so far with 100 employees and will be rolling out more widely from today, with an aim of having its whole staff connected in 18 months. The move is an interesting turn for Publicis, currently the world's third-largest advertising agency, to defragment and improve how its organization works.

Today, Publicis Groupe announced that its much-discussed global AI platform Marcel will be developed with the help of one of the world's largest and longest-standing tech companies--Microsoft. Publicis.Sapient will design the "professional assistant" and structure its user experience, while Microsoft will build the platform itself, according to a company statement and an internal memo from CEO and chairman Arthur Sadoun. Bill Gates' company will help Publicis employees around the world access its "deep technology and AI capabilities" via such products as Azure AI and Office 365. "At Microsoft, we believe that people no longer just work for companies--companies need to work for their people," said CEO Microsoft Satya Nadella in a statement. That's what makes this collaboration so seamless and natural." Marcel aims to help drive productivity and creativity around the global Publicis network in several ways, chiefly by helping bring people with complementary skills and experiences together on shared projects even if their offices happen to be thousands of miles apart. Publicis also claims Microsoft's resources will allow Marcel to collect and organize the holding group's "collective knowledge," thereby enabling the further sharing of data and individual experiences across its team of 80,000 staffers at agencies across the globe. Late last year, the company also launched an incubator called M-Labs, with which it plans to develop "new collaborative models" for serving clients. Publicis Groupe has yet to reveal details about these services, but chief strategy officer and Publicis New York CEO Carla Serrano mentioned "a knowledge-sharing platform that gets tagged and learns with AI" in an October interview with Campaign. "I know that many of you have been curious to know what has been happening since we announced the platform last June.

Industrial revolutions--from mechanization to electrification and mass production to increased automation--have long been about replacing human muscle with machines. For many factory workers who might face the threat of redundancy, that is scary enough. But the fourth revolution, which is more about replacing human brain power with artificial intelligence (AI), presents a change that many more workers are finding difficult to accept.

Artificial intelligence and machine learning are proving to be very useful in just about every business function in the enterprise, and marketing is no exception. AI is already impacting marketing, and it's going to further shape the future of how business is done and how relationships are forged between companies and their clients. As I wrote recently in MarTechToday, most AI in marketing applications are focused on B2C use cases, many of which we're very familiar with as consumers ourselves. Most of us know that the ads that show up on Facebook, on banners or on Google are targeting individual users directly based on past behavior, demographic data, location information and more -- a process that couldn't be done at scale without the aid of AI. For companies that sell to businesses, communication between salespeople and marketing teams is critical. A day in the life of a salesperson is often chock-full of tasks that could be seen as marketing-related.

There is a clear trend in Artificial Intelligence whereby major companies like IBM, Microsoft, and Google are creating the plumbing with layers of abstraction on top such that mere mortals can leverage capabilities such as Machine Learning to build complex systems. This interview offers an excellent overview of the state of the union on this topic. Josh Sutton: I lead Artificial Intelligence at Publicis.Sapient, which is focused on digital business transformation. We have a number of brands that operate as part of Publicis.Sapient. Collectively, we represent a little over a quarter of the Publicis group, which is one of the largest advertising companies in the world.

Sramana Mitra: There's a clear trend of these more complex plumbing of the AI systems becoming available as platforms and then abstraction layers being created such that AI can become a lot more ubiquitous. Where would you start a new company today if you wanted to do something in AI? Josh Sutton: Where I would look at and where I get excited about the investment opportunities is not in a technology play directly, but in a business transformation play. If you think about it simply, the suite of AI tools right now enables you to make better decisions faster, engage with customers conversationally without having the human capital cost associated with that model, and the ability to perform certain tasks and functions that require limited human interactions. Andrew Ng came out with a simplified but still great litmus test of if you can do it, then it's probably a good use case. We take those three things as levers of change and then look at industry problems today and how they're being solved.

For many firms transforming business operations via technology means improving how they interact with -- and meet -- customer needs. In fact, customer experience represents the single best opportunity financial services firms have to deliver on their priorities, according to a survey by Econsultancy. What's more, 45% of respondents indicated that making the customer experience as personalised and relevant as possible is their key focus. CEOs around the world are not asking if digital disruption will occur, but instead, what it means for their business. So the questioned asked in this article, is how can financial institutions leverage digital transformation to advance their competitive position, strengthen customer engagement and improve performance?