• by Kristen Findley , Op-Ed Contributor, February 21, 2018

The modern marketer’s world is rich in data, but the only thing these data points have in common is the hope we place on finding actionable insights to stand out from the competition.

The problem is, our industry’s production of data has far surpassed a human ability to process it all.

According to a recent Ascend2 Marketing Technology Strategy Survey Summary Report, 51% of companies say they are using more than 21 different marketing tech tools, when only 9% of marketers say they have all the marketing technology they need and fully utilize the tools they have.

Fortunately, we now have the key technology that allows us to maximize all of the data and tech tools we have access to but have trouble managing: AI.

AI is the best and fastest way to unlock the latent potential of our many data points and do what has never been done before: maintain a single, automatically updating, natural-language-searchable portal for all a brand’s data.

While AI is a huge breakthrough, smart systems are only as smart as the people who use them daily. They require a lot of hand holding and dedicated training to be effective.

Treat your AI solution like a new human hire, since it cannot become a successful contributor to the team without training. Like an employee who starts with one particular job description, the initial use case will direct the AI’s first role.

In our case, we wanted assistance compiling data for digital campaigns to reallocate more time to the strategic thinking that makes a bigger impact for our clients. It took two months of training—our team asked roughly 500 questions—to get a solution by Equals 3 called Lucy, calibrated to the specific needs and desired responses of a particular workplace to make a noticeable difference.

An agency’s cognitive assistant will be uniquely their own and only as good as its data and as useful as it’s been taught to be.

An AI solution’s benefit spreads across the internal teams of an organization because it accesses all of the company’s data (licensed subscriptions, PowerPoints, PDFs, etc.) and incorporates the information into its responses. This level of real-time analysis empowers team members to become more self-sufficient when it comes to getting the answers they need.

When a marketing analyst is able to get the data needed in just a few hours, there is more time to build out plans and take action on what has been discovered.

AI solutions that provide easily-available, action-oriented information allow teams to be more nimble and responsive. It’s akin to adding another member to your team, one who’s constantly learning, growing and augmenting your organization’s overall intelligence. Performing all these tasks quickly means we can switch direction fast, shift a digital campaign in an instant and move messaging around more swiftly than ever before. And it means our clients more fully benefit from the real reason they chose us in the first place: our innovative, creative, visionary human brains.