Businesses already are using AI to reach customers. The work is about algorithms, not automatons.
You can think of Lucy as the fastest marketing researcher on the planet. Minneapolis-based digital marketing and technology agency GoKart Labs “hired” Lucy in May and was quickly amazed. “When I asked a question of Lucy—it was a specific question about a client’s competitors—it found that information,” says Rob Rosen, GoKart’s director of digital marketing and analytics. “Even Google didn’t find that information in a clear way.”
Lucy can scour the internet and rapidly present marketing data and insights that Google can’t provide. In seconds, Lucy can pull together in one place useful information that GoKart staff would have spent hours tracking down from disparate sources. And Lucy can present that information in an easily digestible way, using graphs and charts as needed. “When I asked a question, sometimes it went a lot deeper than I expected,” Rosen says. “It came back with a lot more ideas and a lot of different types of questions and connections that I was able to make, even though it wasn’t the intent of the question I initially asked.”
You’ve noticed that Rosen refers to Lucy as “it.” In fact, Lucy is a digital “intelligent agent” developed by St. Louis Park-based marketing technology firm Equals 3, an IBM Watson ecosystem partner. Watson is often described as a supercomputer, but IBM refers to Watson as a cloud-based technology platform designed to gather huge amounts of information and digitally gathered data to make it quickly useful. And that means that Lucy is more than just an application. It’s an example of artificial intelligence (AI) that can answer queries, handle tasks and respond to requests—and be able to automatically improve its algorithms as it takes in new information. In other words, it can “learn.”
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