Whether a company is sending purchase confirmations via API, segmented promotion emails with tailored messages, or newsletter promotions, every company aims to keep their customers close. Keeping customers close means keeping them engaged with your company, drawn to your brand, aware of your value, and remembering this value when it's time to buy. Artificial intelligence (AI) enhances the activities above because the technology helps complex systems to adapt, learn, and perform--even as the broader dynamics of human communication continually change. We've been on an exciting journey here at SendGrid as we've been building artificial intelligence into our platform. Super big data: At over 1 billion emails per day, the sheer volume of sending activity and resulting data on our platform makes the latest approaches to machine learning possible.

Natural language processing technologies have become quite sophisticated over the past few years. From tech giants to hobbyists, many are rushing to build rich interfaces that can analyze, understand, and respond to natural language. Amazon's Alexa, Microsoft's Cortana, Google's Google Home, and Apple's Siri all aim to change the way we interact with computers. Sentiment analysis, a subfield of natural language processing, consists of techniques that determine the tone of a text or speech. Today, with machine learning and large amounts of data harvested from social media and review sites, we can train models to identify the sentiment of a natural language passage with fair accuracy.

If you've been following our blog, or you've read our Email Marketing 101 guide, you've definitely heard our mantra before: The SendGrid team is a firm believer in sending the right message, to the right person, at the right time, with the right frequency. Adhering to this idea within your email marketing strategy can help your brand's content find the inbox and drive the engagement you're seeking. Our newly-released integration with BlueShift provides our customers a powerful new way to develop the most appropriate message, for the right person. This programmatic email marketing solution brings together the best of breed in Artificial Intelligence (AI)-powered orchestration from BlueShift, with the industry-leading deliverability and scale from SendGrid. In today's perpetually connected world, your customers are creating signals around the clock based on their web and mobile behaviors.

In this special guest feature, Victor Amin, Data Scientist at SendGrid, advises that businesses implementing machine learning systems focus on data quality first and worry about algorithms later in order to ensure accuracy and reliability in production. After graduating cum laude from Princeton University, Victor earned a PhD studying applications of machine learning to quantum chemistry at Northwestern University. At SendGrid, Victor builds machine learning models to predict engagement and detect abuse in a mailstream that handles over a billion emails per day. It's obvious that you need data before you can implement a machine learning system, but project planners often overlook questions regarding training set collection, cleaning, and maintenance. There are so many sources of big data in today's business systems that it seems like getting enough of the right data ought to be easy!