Improve your marketing through AI-influenced analytics

For businesses to survive today, they have to embrace new trends quickly.

We’re no longer living in the world where new developments, like airplane travel or television, take decades to reach market saturation. Today’s technology adoption cycle is blink-and-you’ll-miss-it fast, even compared to the advent of computers, mobile devices and the internet, which transformed their respective markets in just a few decades.

We are now living in the age of exponential connectivity. It’s hard to keep up with all the new devices out there that can provide connected data and, therefore, a real-time look at how buyers are making their decisions. Expectations are running high on how marketers can take advantage of this plethora of data streams. With Internet of things devices projected to exceed the 50 billion mark by 2020, do marketers have the right business solutions to keep up?

This is a question I explored during a recent in-house event held in conjunction with the University of Pennsylvania Wharton Customer Analytics Initiative. And the answer is, yes, they do, but they must integrate artificial intelligence into existing analytics.

Before hitting fast-forward on their data efforts, companies need to assess the state of their current analytics.

A guy who knows a thing or two about technology transformation, Jeff Bezos, once said, “if you are fighting analytics, you are fighting the future.” But when you go to describe the state of analytics at most enterprises, the words that come to mind may more likely describe hindrances instead of enhancements.

During the event, I touched on these five — static, reactive, siloed, opaque and rules-based. As data grows, different business units have different data — or different definitions of the same data — making it hard to move, share or analyze. But the data is still there, so expectations of how a company will perform based on its analysis are pegged high.

How can a company measure incremental sales in this disparate data landscape? Getting it all right in real time, to make a real impact with the buyer, is possible by using artificial intelligence as a business solution.

From housing it to gaining insights from it, AI can help businesses deliver on the promise of their data.