AI, content management and the rise of robots
How artificial intelligence will up the ante in digital marketing
Sept. 13, 2019 | By Dan Goldenbaum, Adobe Practice Lead – TEKsystems Digital
AI is a popular buzzword. While digital marketing teams are eager to see how it can be leveraged to reach their customers, most do not have the tools or knowledge to effectively use it. Although still in its early stages, AI is poised to revolutionize digital—but there’s a lack of understanding and adoption.
What is artificial intelligence? Essentially, artificial intelligence is an umbrella term referring to any technology that makes decisions and demonstrates intelligence akin to human intelligence. Using inputs, AI technology adjusts its learning to perform human-like tasks.
According to the 2017 McKinsey AI Report, 80% of marketing executives predict AI will revolutionize marketing and 26% have a confident understanding of AI, but only 10% are currently using AI at work in the digital realm. While only a small percentage has actually invested and deployed the technology, budgets are increasing and interest is gaining.
Future trends in AI and digital transformation
So what are we seeing as future trends in AI in relation to digital?
- Personalization will drastically enhance
This is significant for the content management space. Right now, personalization is largely rule-based. Personalization will get smarter and use more data (as it becomes available) to make decisions around what customers really want to see. Case in point: your personalized Netflix algorithm. - Enterprise-level content centralization with machine learning
We see clients struggling with content sourcing, workflow and asset management. Currently, content creation is not centralized; people across an organization are creating content—with only a handful of people publishing and attempting to effectively distribute it.
We see AI being used to make logical decisions about what content is available for publishing. What’s the right piece? What imagery do we have to enhance the story? How should it be tagged? These are tasks that can be accomplished with AI today, and content management systems (CMSs) are only in the early stages of leveraging the tools. - Automation of content distribution
It’s already a large effort to get regular and relevant content out on a consistent basis across channels. While CMSs currently try to make it easy to do that, there is a great opportunity for AI to make this process more automated.
AI in action
To illustrate how modern CMSs are leveraging AI to make digital marketing more automated and more effective, we’re highlighting the features available in two major platforms, Adobe and Drupal.
Adobe has their own proprietary platform called Sensei (think: IBM Watson) they use to bolster their entire product suite. For our purposes, we will focus on Adobe Experience Manager. In comparison, Drupal is a leader in the open source CMS space with a strong development community and tends to offer modules that leverage popular third-party tools. Hence, looking at these two covers both the commercial and open source space.
- Smart tagging: Auto-tag images and videos so they are easier to find in the digital asset manager
- Auto-text summaries: Create shorter versions of an article so it can be used in multiple channels
- Auto-crop: Detect focal points in imagery or video and optimize for specific use cases
- Profanity and moderation checkers: Detect and filter spam and unwanted imagery automatically
- Personalization: Leverage Target, Analytics, Audience Manager and other products within Adobe Experience Cloud to return powerful AI-enhanced personalization
Drupal:
- Smart tagging: Intelligent content tool modules create auto-tags and text summaries of content
- Images and video: Google Vision API module scans images and video and returns keywords for meta and alt tags, and uses image detection to flag inappropriate imagery
- Chatbots: Drupal Chatbot module is a simple, lightweight way to create chatbots
- Marketing automation: SendPulse module helps determine the best time of day to send an automated email to subscribers
It’s time to unlock the full value of your martech investments. Build and enhance your use of marketing platforms so you can ultimately reap their full benefits: better customer experiences, integrated omnichannel campaigns and seized market opportunities.
This content is adapted from Dan’s presentation at Drupal Flyover Camp 2019.
Dan Goldenbaum is the Adobe practice lead for TEKsystems Digital. He brings nearly 15 years of agency experience leading content management system implementations for well-known brands such as FedEx, Xerox and U.S. Navy. With a background in software development and extensive experience consulting with clients on how they can best leverage their digital marketing tools, Dan brings a pragmatic approach to solving real-world digital marketing problems.
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