Daniel Faggella is an Entrepreneurs' Organization (EO) member in San Francisco and founder of TechEmergence, an artificial intelligence market research firm. We asked him which businesses will benefit most from adopting AI marketing technology―and when. Here's what he had to say.
Just mentioning the words artificial intelligence (AI) prompts a certain anxiety in business leaders. On the one hand, the whole idea seems a little "far out," and business will clearly go on (at least for today) without it. On the other hand, maybe there are advantages to this technology that a competitor might leverage to eat our lunch.
Let's push past the hype to reveal which businesses might benefit from AI marketing applications in the near-term, and which businesses have time on their side before they need to dive in.
There are two primary criteria that a business must meet to fruitfully utilize AI in their marketing efforts today:
Companies looking to leverage AI in their marketing efforts must have a large volume of information with which to train their AI systems. An AI system operates through machine learning and cannot calibrate and optimize results―including click-through rates, opt-in rates, lead scoring and sales script prompting―without a strong stream of information to help it learn "wins" from "losses."
That brings us to the first criterion for deciding if your business should consider adopting AI in marketing now: Can a significant portion of your marketing and sales touch-points be tracked, recorded and organized in digital format?
In other words, can you access a full record of email and phone interactions plus time-stamped touch-points along each individual sales contact's journey? That would mean that most critical engagements with the company―such as content dwell-time, page views, email interactions and sales call results―"leave a trace" from which we can derive a data stream.
Companies in eCommerce and online media or advertising―think Amazon and Facebook―have already benefitted tremendously from AI marketing, giving us evidence that those two sectors will be the technology's first major beneficiaries.
If you have massive amounts of trackable data to "teach" your AI system, you're halfway there.
