Big Data and AI: The promise of revenue and engagement

In the opening session of the 7^th Big Data & AI For Media Conference Carrie Seifer, Chief Revenue Officer for IBM Watson Advertising, set the tone for the entire conference when she said “over time the rate we need to move to do something with all this data is too fast for humanity”. “Today we do have a lot of data coming at us but that ain’t nothing, your kids are going to be talking more about zettabytes than anything else,” she said.

According to Seifer, artificial intelligence is a set of technology and tools that help us understand the world around us. People today need to get faster and smarter, and AI will help us do so, she said.  Among the business functions that will be improved by AI including hiring and managing talent, and customer service.

She illustrates the advantage AI can provide companies when she begins talking about the application of AI she is most excited about: talent management and human resources. There is so much time and money lost on hiring and managing talent. There is always turnover in an organization and you don’t want valuable information walking out the door with them, she said. She explained that AI is uniquely equipped for managing talent because just like a person it can reason and interrupt, it learns, it interacts with information and its environment, and it can remember what it has learned.

AI-driven customer service also is a strong opportunity for media companies.

“These abilities will allow businesses to enhance their customers experience”. A customer will only put up with one bad experience before they move on to your competition. There is no margin of error when it comes to your customer so you must provide the best customer experience every time.”

In her work at IBM, is only seeing about 50 percent of companies actually adopting AI. Carrie believes that in about 12-18 months there is going to be a “have and have not” based on AI and its going to even out playing fields like we have never seen before. If you are not using AI you will be in the have “not” category. Only 20 percent of the world’s data is searchable, and 80 percent is not “googleable”. Most data sits inside an organization and thus is unsearchable, but with the aid of AI, an organization can access this data. This goes beyond just plain old text. The way AI is being implemented by organizations is through the use of APIs, most commonly categorized as discovery, conversation, visual recognition, natural language, speech-to-text, document conversion, tone analyzer, and personality insight.

Carrie closed her presentation telling the audience to go out and use AI to enhance what they are already doing. “Stop throwing people at the mass of data and throw technology at it, AI is the technology that can elevate your entire staff and enable them to tackle problems in an insightful way”.