Artificial Intelligence: The Future of AI in Digital Marketing

Start time. So I'm going to get started. Thank you all so much for joining this webinar. My name is Mimi Ahn and I run HubSpot Research. Today's webinar is presented by HubSpot Academy and the IBM Learning Lab. These are both great resources for continuing education that you should definitely check out after this webinar. So as a reminder for folks online, we are recording this webinar and you will all be sent this link later today. So to start, we have two amazing panelists, Alyssa Simpson and Scott Lippman. And I'm going to pass it to Alyssa to introduce herself briefly.

Alyssa, hi. Alyssa Simpson, Director of Product Management at IBM Watson. My portfolio covers what we call these sensory services. So teaching Watson to see and hear speak and the emotional portfolio of feeling and understanding, emotional intelligence.

Thank you, Lyssa.

Scott this is Scott Lemon. I'm the co founder of equals3. We are a very close business partner to IBM and in my past I've had the great opportunity to build marketing services and ad tech companies that have had a great deal of success working with some of the world's biggest marketers on how digital technology is transforming their business.

Excellent. Thanks so much for joining. We're so happy to have you too. So let's start with an easy question and by saying easy, it's not easy. How would you describe AI? And let's keep it brief because we're going to dig obviously deeper into this in the next hour. But you know, when you're talking to someone, you say, I work for Watson, I work for equals three, and we dabble in AI. How do you explain the concept to someone who may not be familiar with it?

So from my end, what I look at is different than traditional computing. There are two attributes we really focus on. One is the ability to look at immense amounts of content and understand it in a fairly human like way. I mean truly the computers don't understand it as a human does, but different than traditional computing, cognitive allows that understanding. And the other is the learning nature of these platforms. These cognitive solutions learn by usage. The more you use them, the more, the more you train them, the smarter they become. And I look at that as these kind of two big differences versus say traditional computing.

Yeah, that's really well aligned with how we look at it. At Watson, we take it a little bit of a step further. Sort of that basis of understanding large amounts of data, reasoning. Right. And understanding what that is in the context of where that information is coming from. Being able to learn by interacting with Humans as there's feedback from that and that interactive piece. Right. So being able to interact and partner with humans who are providing that training data or making decisions from that unstructured.

Data, I love that because I'm not from that space. I tend to say it's about enabling you to be a better marketer, make better decisions, help you be faster and smarter. You leveraging data that you probably couldn't analyze yourself because there's just tons and tons of data being generated. But now I see that using that term enablement can be really, really confusing because it mixes up with all of these existing technologies that are available for marketers today. So what is some of the confusion that you've seen with marketers around the topic of AI? We think robots, we think cars that drive themselves, and a lot of people can't really grasp how marketing can be affected by AI. So when you're speaking to, you know, prospects and customers, what is the message that you give?

I think, you know, the first sort of myth that we like to dispel at Watson is that this is not magic. There's no magic ball anywhere. And that, you know, AI, like anything else, is a technology, and you can break it down into, you know, small pieces to be used for a particular application, you know, such as marketing. So I think the first real hurdle to get sort of folks who are unfamiliar with the world over is that there's not a magic button. There's really exciting companies like Equals3, who have built what appears to be magic and magic buttons on top of a lot of different technologies. But at its core, these are transactional technologies that can be applied in specific applications. So such as personalized marketing and maybe equal, so you can expand a little bit on what you're doing there. But that's the myth we like to dispel here.

Yeah, actually, that's a great setup because we do run into that problem where people see a demo, they see it all work, and it's like, oh, it just magically works. And so one of the things we've had to educate people on is we have found there's a significant difference between a cognitive project and a traditional one. In a traditional world, at least for us, it kind of does all the development, all the backend work, and then the business user waits for the result. But here, because it isn't magic, we actually can implement Lucy very quickly. But then it's incumbent on the business user to train their new associate, their new companion, and they actually have to spend a fair bit of time in training and mentorship so their companion can be effective. So rather than a finished system and then waiting for it to do more, it's actually on the business user to do the training and really do a lot of the work.

Interesting. So out of the box you're not going to get this magical assistant that can automatically sync with all the data sources that you have and give you the recommendations you need. You need a little bit of time to work with the system itself because while it's smart, it's not that smart yet, I want to assume. Scott, do you have anything to add to that?

Well, you know, that's actually will end up being a great segue into the demo because I can actually show how this all works.

Excellent. Well, going back to Alyssa, tell us a little bit about IBM, Watson and the product portfolio that you manage. You've talked about things like emotional elements that you teach Watson. Can you give us a little bit more color on that? Because I think that's something that we as marketers, at least today, without touching the product, know like very little about.

Yeah, absolutely. So Watson is a fabulous part of the broader IBM company. We're like a very well funded startup within IBM and so we're, you know, sort of out on the bleeding edge here. Creating technologies that are at sort of the platform level are a series of APIs that each do discrete functions and each one of those functions serve something a little different. But they are basically like Lego blocks and companies like equals3 are stacking them together to solve a particular challenge in a particular industry. Right. So in this case marketing. What a lot of people don't necessarily realize about Watson, since there's a lot of attention and hype around AI, is that how much it's actually already being used in reality? And you might not know it because it's sort of like this, sort of. I had a friend at one point call sort of AI sort of this digital toilet paper, right. It's something that you don't necessarily know exists, but it's there. Right. So major banks, major insurance companies that you've already interacted with, lots of companies large and small are using this today. And they may or may not, you know, be super clear that they're using it behind the scenes to help automate some of the customer interactions that they're serving you with. You know, we're really big into transparency at Watson and so we like to be really clear and open around, you know, what data is being used to train, you know, why. So in the emotional intelligence space, as you were saying, you know, that's a really fun and exciting area for us. We have sort of three different technologies in that space today. We have tone analyzer, which takes text and analyzes the tone of that conversation. So today, actually, we released a major update in that space focusing on the customer care market. So, for example, if you're interacting with a customer service agent and you are perhaps calling a company because you're frustrated, likely we can understand that you're frustrated and help escalate that conversation faster or direct you to the right place and really be attuned to what those emotions are in the customer care space. Right. That might be a little different from emotions that you're expressing more generally on social media or other venues. The emotion stuff is really interesting because it's not language that we as humans often talk about and reasonable humans can disagree around what emotion is contained in the particular phrase. Emotion is a very sort of multifaceted way of expressing yourself. Right. You have your facial expression, you have your tone of voice. You have the actual words that you're saying, saying themselves. You have the context in which you're coming into the situation. Right. Are you on the phone? Are you on social media? You know, what is that background that's gone on to that interaction that you're having? You know, what do I know about you? But, you know, you may look happy today. Alyssa's pleasant or she's not angry, but maybe I am angry and I'm not telling you. So it's a really tricky space. It's really exciting. We're really proud of what we're doing there. And one I know that equals three is using quite a bit is personality insights, which is taking personalities and understanding intrinsic natures about people. When we say someone has a really strong eq, we mean they're good at reading people and understanding. How can we build suites of technologies that help understand people better and interact better and apply those towards delightful client experiences? Experiences, yeah.

That's fascinating. The minute you talked about scanning for tone, I was thinking of a certain airline that issued an apology that nobody appreciated. Wonder what Watson would have had to say if we had run that text through the system. I wonder if that would have gotten published.

That's actually a pretty classic use case around understanding what people are saying or even, you know, if you've written an email. Right. And you might not be aware that it comes across as really assertive.

Right.

And so you could have. There's companies that have built little widgets that integrate with botsit and say, hey, like.