Artificial Intelligence (AI/ML) for marketing

[Sreekanth_Reddy]

Recently, I have been looking at a lot of AI/ML based tools or solutions for marketers. Market analysts like Gartner, say AI growth in sales and marketing is expected to grow into than a trillion $ industry by 2020. Currently, there are more than 20+ launchpoint partners of Marketo offering various services based on AI. There are so many interesting use cases these players bring in to marketing. 

There are so many use cases out there, here are some I found really interesting

1. Predictive scoring
2. Autonomous digital ads
3. Sales & Marketing assistant
4. Forecasting success metrics

An important point by one of the Marketo marketer says "These AI features provides intelligence based on our current data and in most cases the data in our databases are messy". 

This brings me to some important questions:

1. How confident a marketer feel about these AI services?
2. If you are already using any AI capabilities in any shape and form for their marketing activities and how confident are you with them that you would recommend to use them?
3. Building these capabilities in-house will bring more confidence?
4. What are those areas you think AI can really help you today?

Would love discuss further and know your perspectives. please send me a note at sreekanth.reddy@adobe.com  or leave a comment and I will revert back to you. 

[Ellie_Lewis3]

I think predictive models are the future of marketing. As a society we're reaching a point of "data maturity" and predictive models are already being monetized. 

You're right that the biggest challenge is data accuracy but if we're honest, no one has 100% accurate data. But an educated guess is far better than trying to choose a course of action with nothing at all.

I'm super excited about AI services and I believe they help significantly with creating a better user experience. Since Marketo is used so widely as a B2B tool, I see the benefits of being able to create a single asset with a few extra steps in order to provide an experience tailored to the user's industry or where they are in the buyer's journey. 

[Sreekanth_Reddy]

Ellie Lewis‌
True! Couldn't agree more. Have you implemented or been part of any such initiative? I am currently working on understanding a few of AI/ML capabilities that we can bring into Marketo. Would love to connect and discuss more.

[Ellie_Lewis3]

Unfortunately not. I did attend JD Nelson‌'s session at summit about web personalization and content AI and got a lot out of it so if you're able to find a recording I highly recommend. I did have an idea for forms in a past role though to change the form displayed depending on if the user was known to Marketo or not. But that isn't any fancy add-on stuff, just form settings if I remember correctly.

Not all "AI" has to be predictive in nature, I think we forget how impressive it is for a tool like Marketo to even be able to look at a user and say "I know you!"

[JD_Nelson]

Thanks Ellie Lewis‌. I do think, too, that there's a level of "no-confidence" in some AI process that has to be expected as well. We can setup the most intricate of process to identify and improve customer journey, only to find that they viewed it on a tablet or phone or work computer that wasn't cookied/tagged/associated with known data we have and "That's OK!" -- I use to have many ContentAI campaigns running trying to capture all the variations of ways people could find us -- and that list would just grow and grow the more I could learn. It took a lot of Human Intelligence to get the Artificial Intelligence to work properly.

Sreekanth Reddy‌ -- I do have your email from a while back that i owe you a response to.... I haven't forgotten.

[Sreekanth_Reddy]

Thank you JD Nelson‌. Let me know if we can connect sometime and have a chat.

[Sreekanth_Reddy]

Hi Guys,

I wanted to share that with all the feedback we got from our customers and champions we have launched our first set of AI features into Marketo as Predictive Audiences. We under closed Beta for US region and onboarding customers who would be interested and be the first among others to use these exciting features. I have attached a community link below for you to know more.

https://nation.marketo.com/t5/Product-Discussions/New-AI-features-in-Marketo-Join-the-Closed-Beta-Pr...