Perceived wisdom on Artificial Intelligence (AI) is largely based on a popular culture that concludes its ultimate purpose is to destroy mankind, generally but not limited to the use of malicious robots. Films ranging from War Games to the Terminator franchise illustrate that no good will come of information technology that can do its own thinking.
However, there is a much more benign and simpler version of artificial intelligence that offers a wide range of affordable business benefits and the chances are you either are, or will shortly be using it on a regular basis.
Narrow AI is actually a fairly simple technology, but it can be used for a wide range of purposes to save time and provide benefits at individual and corporate level alike. For digital marketing it offers great opportunities.
Narrow AI’s significance lies in the logic driven process it uses to condense time consuming human actions into a fraction of a second. Typically it searches through massive amounts of information and accurately extracts only the information needed. It can also provide updates to changing circumstance, and allows users to automatically update third parties.
But one of its greatest abilities is to instantly find and collate multiple relevant layers of contextual information. It is the perfect example, of the 3Cs – context, context, contex. A good illustration is a mobile first business service for iPhone that my company built.
Lowdown works very simply by the user creating or accepting a calendar invitation using any calendar service (Google, Outlook etc). Lowdown automatically generates relevant information around a meeting. It displays travel options, when to leave for meetings, the time it will take, a map, profiles of individuals and companies that will be present, tweets by them, shared personal and company connections, plus recent email correspondence – all in an instant on an app without spending time searching the web, diaries, timetables, maps or asking for directions. Any emails or Tweet updates by meeting attendees can easily be monitored, and responded to.
If this sounds similar to the functionality of social media tracking then you would be right. The subscription packages for these services are expensive, but it costs very little to run them and requires next to no computing capacity. The information gathered is hosted on third party servers across the globe. The reality is that social media tracking can easily be run off a smartphone.
However, rather than just scanning the web for social media behaviour, narrow AI can be used to drill down and find detailed information on individuals, and create massive amounts of prospect data instantly. Obviously this ability, and how information is used is governed by local regulation on the use of data, but nevertheless narrow AI can be used for data modeling on a scale that was never possible before when planning digital campaigns.
For B2B digital marketing, where data regulation comes with a much lighter touch, the possibilities are significantly greater. Narrow AI allows the possibility to identify, segment and target the entire business social media universe.
At the moment this ability can only be achieved by commissioning tailor-made packages. But it is probable that similar to the social media monitoring subscriptions, such packages will become available. What is more, it is also likely that developers will make the break from subscription narrow AI sales models to selling off the shelf DIY packages.
This development will be dependent on demand, and how flexible ready made packages can be in order to suit differing needs. The technology itself is not complex and it is relatively inexpensive to develop. For example, before too long there will be affordable consumer narrow AI apps that will be able to run searches on people and institutions ranging from schools and universities to babysitters and dinner dates.
It is almost inevitable that ready to go narrow AI packages will become available for digital and data marketing.
Narrow AI is also used in social media automated responses. In some regions of the World it plays a very important role. The ability to respond accurately using narrow AI can be enhanced by using the same technology to know more about the individual in the first place. Again this may be dependent on local data regulation.
Inevitably this ultimately leads to the question of strong AI, and when will it be possible to give it instruction and let it perform all of the functions that are currently reliant on humans. The consensus is in about 2035. Informed speculation is the only way of gauging the impact of technology capable of creative thought. It may be our best friend, but if it does turn against us we are more likely to be starved to death than to be chased through the streets by automated monsters.
This raises the prospect of a much less dramatic but equally bizaare scenario. It is safe to assume that like voicemail, individuals will use AI to respond to some social media messages, including commercial messages that are generated automatically. In this scenario AI will talk to AI through social media leaving humans free to get on with activity they find more important. Now that really is progress.
By David Senior, CEO of Lowdownapp.
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