What are some of the most important contributions that artificial intelligence will make to business?
Ask ten people, and you’ll get ten different answers. But sometimes we get notions of how this is going to work, through presentations from people who have had a front row seat to the process for years.
A History of Innovation
One of those people is Ed Baker. He started out in the late 90s as a student at Harvard, and completed grad school at Stanford. He worked at Facebook, and then at Uber, and then on something called Whoop, a Fitness app. He started Friend.ly, and Datesite.com, and an app where people could “send hotness” to rate friends and classmates.
Along the way, he learned quite a bit about engagement and conversion, and something he calls the ‘viral loop.’
In a recent TED talk, Baker went over some of his creations in his college days, mainly consisting of dating sites and social apps (see below).
Some metrics, he pointed out, can show stakeholders more about how their inventions are catching on in an audience. There’s the K-factor, and detailed analysis of life cycle activity showing how many users are converting to secondary engagements.
Businesses, in turn, can use this data to craft better results for the delivery and sale of products and services.
Trial and Error, and Cultural Tendencies
As Baker went along describing how to measure customer engagement, he gave us two examples of business decisions that took a lackluster result and converted it into a more significant success.
The first one is in Facebook’s Japanese audience, where he said people just weren’t inviting each other to join.
When they looked into the issue, they found that Japanese culture has a stigma around invitations, and so, as he pointed out, they changed the copy, and engagement soared.
The second example was Uber’s activities in India, showing that users didn’t want to enter their credit card information. When Uber changed the form to allow for cash-based rides, the numbers went way up.
Artificial Intelligence Analysis Can Help
What does this have to do with AI?
Well, without concentrated human decisions, and the resulting research and exploration, those successes wouldn’t have been implemented. Somebody had to figure out why people weren’t converting, and experiment with fixes.Artificial intelligence, on the other hand, can do this without any human involvement at all.
The programs of the future will be able to make all of these adjustments, keep trying new things, new angles, and approaches, and figure out which one is more successful. It might not have the same inhibitions that humans have, as in the case of Uber’s CEO, who Baker quoted as reportedly saying, at the end of a successful gamble “I hate you guys, and I love you guys,” referring to the team’s derring-do.
With AI, there’s not going to be any hedging on getting out and trying new things.
In fact, you could argue that businesses have been doing this for years, in the form of A/B testing. A/B testing, where marketers take two different results and measure their success, encourages this kind of exploration in a way that wasn’t previously articulated.
In other words, A/B testing brings a level of sophistication to contact marketing.
AI will do the same across all industries and business levels. It’s going to be a game-changer in a significant and profound way. And it has to do with Baker’s explanation of engagement – that it rests on complex factors and tendencies in human behavior. We don’t have to be experts in focus groups if we have AI to figure all of this stuff out for us. We just have to know how to use the tools, and then we can sit back and watch them do their magic.