Artificial Intelligence and the connected customer

By 2020, the Internet of Things will encompass 26 billion interconnected devices, according to Gartner Group. That’s some 30 times more than the 0.9 billion devices connected in 2009. Analyst firm IDC has stated there will be approximately 212 billion Internet-connected things by late 2020. Others predict there will be over 200 billion connected devices by then, with the amount of collected data doubling every two years.

 

Today and tomorrow’s connectivity is resulting in personalized customer experiences across platforms and technologies. This is made possible by combining marketing, sales and customer service with big data analyses and artificial intelligence. These trends are reflected in increasing spend on tech tools.

 

 

Making marketing smart

 

AI can recognize patterns, analyse sentiments and engagement levels, make predictions and propose following steps. This allows companies to interact smartly with customers and communities, based on their preferences, behaviours and where they are along the customer journey. Besides optimizing the customer experience, AI, especially when coupled with net promoter scores (NPS), for example, can help optimize content, campaigns, publishing calendars and so on. Over 70% of marketing leaders are already segmenting advertising based on data, for example.

 

Last year, a Narrative Science survey found that 38% of enterprises are using AI. This is expected to increase to 62% by 2018. The AI market will grow from $8 billion in 2016 to more than $47 billion in 2020, according to analyst firm IDC. Forrester Research expects investments in Artificial Intelligence to increase by 300% this year. The company’s report ‘Predictions 2017: Artificial Intelligence Will Drive The Insights Revolution’ claims that businesses using AI, big data and Internet of Things to uncover business insights “will steal $1.2 trillion per annum from their less informed peers by 2020.” AI will “drive faster business decisions in marketing, ecommerce, product management and other areas of the business by helping close the gap from insights to action.”

 

It is, however, essential to point out that the data-hungry, bandwidth-intensive technologies required for consumer devices and successful AI marketing call for high bandwidth, low-latency, ubiquitous connectivity.