Get to Know AI
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Explain how AI helps organizations meet customer expectations.
- Describe how algorithms work for artificial intelligence (AI) solutions.
Why Use AI?
Understanding why artificial intelligence makes sense as part of a robust marketing strategy is key to remaining relevant in today’s business world. This video gets to the heart of why it’s important to understand the concept of AI, and put it to work for you.
Our modern world is increasingly interconnected, with technological advances bringing all of us closer together than ever before. At the same time, we’re producing enormous amounts of data every single day.
The face of business is changing, too; customers expect a personalized browsing or shopping experience. They want apps and websites to recognize their needs and suggest solutions that make the buying experience more efficient. In fact, 80 percent of consumers say that the experience a brand provides is as important as its products.
Trying to keep pace with expanding data sources and data points is a challenge for marketers. How do organizations manage an expanding portfolio of data channels, and then put that information to use?
With artificial intelligence.
AI allows organizations of every size to meet and address these new customer expectations, remain successful in the marketplace, improve scale, and increase margins. In a nutshell, it simply helps marketing professionals work faster and smarter.
Now that we understand why AI is so important (and relevant), in the next section we explore what exactly AI is.
What Is AI?
The world is changing fast, and AI is helping marketers make sense of it. AI allows for increasingly complex and customized customer experiences—and lets organizations efficiently use a wealth of data for better insights that drive a personalized customer journey. Get ready to take a deeper look at what AI is.
It’s all about using algorithms to make machines smarter and to solve problems. You might notice when you’re shopping with a grocery app, it suggests additional items you might like—that’s AI, hard at work. It’s improving your shopping experience by trying to understand you better.
You don’t need to be an engineer to understand how AI works (really!). Think of it this way: Machines are fed a mountain of data and given a number of parameters and rules. They use that information to become more responsive.
Deep learning takes the concept even further. This form of AI allows machines their own programmable neural network. It’s the closest that AI gets to human thought. Deep learning uses algorithms and guidelines to make suggestions and decisions based on context.
There are four components to AI: yes-and-no predictions, numeric predictions, classifications, and recommendations. These components can be combined in a number of ways to automate tasks, predict behavior, personalize touchpoints, and scale work.
Now that you understand AI—why it’s so important, and what it is—the next step is to learn how to harness the full power of customer data. In the next unit, discover the ways your business can scale with AI.
