Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

"The camera is already starting to replace the keyboard,” asserts Netra CEO, Richard Lee. The content that will dominate digital information flow will be visual, and for that reason image recognition is becoming a key component of marketing.His company derives insight from visual data, fostering understanding of how consumers engage with brands through engagement with images. 

Netra is a leader in visual intelligence and search that uses machine learning to help marketers make sense of imagery on social media.

Some brands are already using image recognition to connect with and effectively market to their customers.

They include Neiman Marcus. The upscale retailer offers its customers the Snap. Find. Shop  app that enables them to use their phones to snap pictures of styles they like and find similar styles carried by the store.  The app is demonstrated here:...

What are the main ways AI/machine learning will impact marketers and their work in the next year or two? 

While AI has tremendous potential, I believe we are still a few years off from having it solve “real world” operational problems at scale. But in the meantime, marketers are benefitting from the speed and breadth of the insights afforded by AI. Early success examples have focused on creative – we've started to see the optimisation of creative using AI, such as improved digital product experiences (see Olay's skincare app as an example) and of course much better media targeting (such as Demandbase's new AI product). Both B2C and B2B marketing stands to gain from AI.

In summary, what will be the long-term impact of AI/machine learning on marketing? 

AI and machine learning will enable full personalisation of the customer experience, driven by the real-time integration of media, creative and analytics. Marketers will be more efficient, and customers will receive more relevant information in the right place at the right time....

..."Law enforcement agencies are increasingly interested in trying to detect plans for disruptive events from social media, and also to monitor activity at large gatherings of people to analyze security," the study argues. "There is significant work on crowd simulations to determine how crowds can be controlled. At the same time, legitimate concerns have been raised about the potential for law enforcement agencies to overreach and use such tools to violate people’s privacy."

And when it comes to employment and the workplace, the study sees AI as replacing tasks rather than jobs, while also helping to create new kinds of jobs.

The authors conclude by saying they’ve found no cause for concern that AI poses an imminent threat to humanity. No machines with self-sustaining long-term goals and intent have been developed, they write, nor are they likely to be in the near future....

Robots, though more specifically virtual robots or chatbots powered by artificial intelligence (AI), are transforming the way brands do business with their customers. Domino’s was one of the first companies to dabble in AI, allowing customers to order pizza by tweeting a pizza emoji to @Dominos. On the backend, a bot scans to confirm the tweet was not a hoax and processes the order.

More recently, Taco Bell unveiled its TacoBot within the Slack messaging platform that allows busy workers to chat with a bot to order a taco. And at Facebook’s F8, 1-800-Flowers, CNN, Spring — a retail shopping startup — and others released chatbots for Facebook Messenger. These bots offer new ways to shop, make purchases, read the news and more within the Facebook platform.

While all this sounds exciting, what does it actually mean for consumers, and what’s to become of the “humans” on social media?...

Those using AI use it for range of reasons, the most frequent being to get news or information. Here are the tasks consumers utilize artificial intelligence to help them with most often:

35% -- Information, news, weather, stocks

21% -- Read, write, text, phone call

17% -- Play music

9% -- Set timer or reminder

5% -- Make purchases, shopping lists...

The funding landscape in AR/VR has been defined by large rounds to the exceptionally well-funded Florida-based startup Magic Leap, which has raised nearly $1.4B in venture funding. After raising massive Series B ($542M) and Series C ($780M) rounds, the stealth AR company’s financings tend to distort industry funding trends.

To identify well-capitalized AR/VR startups that aren’t named Magic Leap, we used CB Insights data to see which companies are raising big financing rounds and building war chests to help build out the AR/VR ecosystem, which some theorize could become the next major computing platform.

Topping the list of big AR/VR rounds was Laguna Beach, California-based NextVR, which focuses on virtual reality broadcasts of live events. NextVR recently raised an $80M Series B round.

The next biggest deal went to Palo Alto-based cinematic VR platform Jaunt. The company raised a $65M Series C in September of 2015.

In third was UK-based Blippar, which produces a mobile AR visual search app. Blippar last raised a $54M Series D in March of 2016.