Nowadays we can see many discussions happening around Artificial Intelligence but do you know how this is going to change our day to day lives? I am sure you would have heard about OK Google, Siri and Alexa but have you heard about CoreNLP project, IBM Watson, Ubank project and RoboChat? If you want to know all about these projects and impact of Artificial Intelligence and it is an impact on our personal lives than you have landed on a right page.

When you meet new people, why do you remember some names but not others? It is an example of a question that psychologists working in cognitive research seek to answer through their research. These analysts spend most of their time studying human thought processes and the capacity for understanding, interpreting and retaining information. They may choose to work in one particular specialty, such as memory or learning disabilities, or they may focus their career on a specific health issue or population.

Now we have a way to apply that research into marketing, sales, support, and entertainments. We are doing much experimentation with voice-activated assistants and text-triggered chat-bots since 2010, and this comes from mainstream media In 2011, When Watson competed on Jeopardy! Against former winners Brad Rutter and Ken Jennings. Watson received the first place prize of $1 million.

Another example from recent times is Taco Bell; They are enabling users to order from Taco Bell using Slack’s messaging interface and another UPS, You can check the status of UPS packages and so on.

What are the limitations of artificial intelligence as it exists today?

Artificial intelligence is at an inflection point due to the new advances in deep learning that have achieved in areas like computer vision and language processing. However, still, there are some AI problems where we need more research to solve them. Let’s take an example of Uber, They are leveraging research in cognitive psychology and has become an essential part of a life for many around the world. Uber uses an artificial intelligence algorithm to fuel surge pricing model in real time. Surge pricing model is the heart of a Uber business; it is used to manage customer orders and ensure a steady flow of vehicles through its Gigantic economy model. This algorithm is quite brilliant but completely lacks human context; in the first few hours following the recent terrifying attack on London Bridge, increased the demand because everyone wants to go away from the place at same time. Algorithm considered these increased orders an opportunity to increase the revenue, so Artificial intelligence increased the trip price by 300 percent. The increase in price was corrected by Uber immediately with manual intervention, was an example which shows we need to train our algorithms for empathy by adding more human context, sentiments. We have to teach the algorithm about us, I know this will be possible in future, may be in our lifetime.

What is the future potential of artificial intelligence in marketing and sales?

In Digital Age, Marketeer and sales professional are realizing that to stay on top of their competition they need more information(relevant) about their prospect/customers in real time to make an informed decision about the marketing strategy, a communication plan. Now they are taking the keen interest in NLP technologies to automate and improve their workflows. We believe that by making NLP accessible for non-technical users, we can make a huge impact in these areas. When technologies are democratized and made massively available, that is when you see exponential growth and improvements. There is much potential in automating manual, non-scalable and time-consuming processes in marketing and sales workflows.

As per “Our belief is that we can create ML and AI capabilities to ship sophisticated things around the world and get the documentation just via a conversational approach.”

Capital One plans to upgrade an app it built to allow customers to command’s Alexa virtual assistant to make payments and get answers to such queries as for how much they spent at Starbucks the previous month, says Capital One.

“Our business is, so data intensive and so rich with points at which you are making decisions where adding more intelligence to those decisions and refining them through more data and sophisticated algorithms has many potentials,” CIO Rob Alexander said.

Ideally, a FedEx worker could tell Alexa how much a package weighs and where they want it shipped rather than looking through long lists of commodity tables and commercial invoices.

Success Stories like this explain that Chatbots and virtual assistant are future. Now you must be wondering what this Chatbot is? We know chatting and bots but chat butt eh! Well, A chatbot is a computer program which conducts a conversation via auditory or textual methods. Such programs are often designed to convincingly simulate how a human would behave as a conversational partner, thereby passing the Turing test.

There are many examples in this category of Chatbots and virtual assistant like OK Google, Alexa from Amazon and IBM Watson.

 Ok Google: Google defines it “An appropriate, contextually aware smart suggestions for quick replies” and it learns how you prefer to respond, to tailor the responses to make them more personal. Persolanisin the responses includes adding more options in the predictive text replies or making more of spoken answers.

Alexa: This is an intelligent personal assistant developed by Amazon, Capable of voice interaction, music playback, making to-do lists, setting alarms, streaming podcasts, playing audiobooks, and providing weather, traffic, and other real-time information, such as news. Alexa can also control several smart devices using itself as a home automation system. Maybe in future Amazon can enable Alexa to do something even more impressive: create the world without work meetings?

Watson: Watson from IBM, you have the AI platform for business. Uncover insights, engage in new ways, make decisions with more confidence and do your best work with Watson, this can be used to power robot that could make your next smartphone.

Stanford’s CoreNLP: Stanford’s CoreNLP for natural language processing – it is free and has terrific performance. A great initiative to learn and use it as open source, A competition to propriety products.

Moreover, for image processing, there’s always Google Image – it does not exactly match up with WDC’s AlchemyVision, but it is an alternative, and There are companies like MediaTrac that provide sentiment analysis technology that might be an alternative for WDC’s AlchemyLanguage.

You would Have seen the news about NAB subsidiary UBank. Ubank has launched what it claims is Australia’s first AI chatbot for home loans.

UBank’s ‘RoboChat’ is based on IBM’s Watson cognitive computing platform and has been trained on data derived from customer questions submitted via a LiveChat facility on the bank’s website.

Advances in artificial intelligence tend to provoke polarizing reactions for most people. One, a dystopian anxiety where humans huddle in fear of their metallic overlords. Alternatively, two, a utopian futurist society where people are free from mundane labor, and complex challenges are solved by machines. So Wherever you fall on the AI anxiety spectrum, the fundamental truth is that we are entering a major transformative cycle across nearly every industry.

In a recent Wakefield/Demandbase study, 80 percent of marketing leaders say that AI will “revolutionize” marketing by 2020. Meanwhile, IDC Research forecasts worldwide revenues for cognitive and artificial intelligence (AI) systems will reach $12.5 billion in 2017, an increase of 59.3 percent over 2016. Also, global spending on cognitive and AI solutions will continue to see significant corporate investment over the next several years, achieving a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 54.4 percent through 2020 when revenues will be more than $46 billion.

On the other end of the spectrum, you have billionaire Mark Cuban said at SXSW that “the world’s first trillionaires are going to come from somebody who masters AI and all its derivatives and applies it in ways we never thought of.”

Every enterprise from Google and Netflix to Walmart and Nordstrom is making significant investments in AI. However, why the shift now?

The proliferation of customer data volume via mobile devices, Internet of Things (IoT) technology like FitBits, beacons and smart appliances, and even open, public data sources have far outstripped human capability to process, generate insights and drive action. Meanwhile, today’s consumers increasingly expect highly contextual, fluid interactions with brands, which traditional marketing automation and personalization tools cannot provide at significant scale. Data may drive the train, but marketers are laying the railroad tracks.

Although companies like Netflix, Google and Uber are often cited as the disruptive AI vanguard, traditional industries are increasingly adopting AI technology to help bridge the digital transformation gap and compete against industry outsiders threatening to grab market share.

How Predictive and Prescriptive Analytics can help Sales Professionals Focus more efficiently?

Research in advanced cognitive science can provide better analytics insights which can help sales professionals concentrate in some ways:

  • By analyzing large data sets of win and lost opportunities, using predictive analytics, sales opportunities are prioritized by a new propensity model in a manner that has never been possible before.
  • Designing sales enablement software that overlays predictive analytics on top of funnel opportunities (pipeline patterns), using the historical win and loss models, and continuing to learn (machine learning) as the business dynamics changes, offers sales professionals an increased opportunity to focus more efficiently on the best patterns to win.

In 2017, some of these tools will not make the cut while others will proliferate across consumer and enterprise sectors, creating new workflows, operational efficiency, and opportunities for improved customer service. The early signs that Amazon’s Alexa, though positioned as a home product, is poised to become the go-to platform for voice-based assistants for consumers and businesses And IBM Watson as a premier program of Chatbots(live supports and services). AI will help us save our time by automating mundane tasks which will give us some free time to spend with our families and loved ones.


Amit Kumar

Results driven Adobe Certified Architect with extensive experience managing and implementing marketing Strategies to drive business growth. Enjoy optimizing the customer experience through the use of data, futuristic thinking + channel mixing – e.g., using creative combinations of traditional methods + shiny new toys like automation platforms.

1 Comment

Ankit · August 13, 2018 at 4:14 pm

Amazing post!

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