At the same time, new marketing services are being built around AI. Even though numerous firms are capturing impressive amounts of funding, most of the news regarding new AI marketing applications appears to be focused on IBM’s Watson platform.
According to Tractica, revenue for AI services is expected to grow from $3.2 billion in 2016 to $89.8 billion by 2025. The firm maintains that AI is already being used by consumer internet companies to provide hyper-personalized services. Other industries are still catching up in implementing AI and many firms don’t understand the role that AI can play. However, Tractica reports that real-world applications are helping AI gain traction and the use of the technology is accelerating.
At the same time, funding for AI start-ups has been growing. Chinese AI firm SenseTime recently announced that it raised an additional $620 million from a group that includes Fidelity International, Hopu Capital, Silver Lake, Tiger Global and Qualcomm's venture capital arm, reports CNBC.
SenseTime earlier this year announced raising $600 million in funds from Alibaba, Chinese retailer Suning.com and Singapore state investment firm Temasek Holdings. It also raised funds last year. SenseTime provides technology that can recognize faces, characters and images. The technology can also analyze videos.
As reported recently by MarTech Today, Microsoft is also making a big push into artificial intelligence. It recently decided to expand on its Cortana and XiaoIce services by acquiring Semantic Machines, which provides conversational AI.
Microsoft says its existing XiaoIce AI platform has already conducted more than 30 billion conversations with more than 200 million users in China, Japan, the United States, India and Indonesia. The conversations have had an average duration of 30 minutes.
Electronic payment firm PayPal is also pushing into AI. According to VentureBeat, PayPal is acquiring San Mateo-based Jetlore, which provides predictive analytics technology for retailers. The technology uses machine learning that analyzes billions of data points from customers and products to deliver personalized experiences to shoppers. It is currently used by Uniqlo and Nordstrom.
Jetlore maintains its technology can increase revenue per email by 60% to 70% while reducing customer churn. PayPal plans to add Jetlore’s servicers to its PayPal Marketing Solutions, which is a suite of marketing analytics and A/B testing tools for retailers.
Other firms are rushing to add AI to their product offerings. Shutterstock, which primarily provides millions of professional quality images, has recently tapped IBM’s Watson AI technology to help customers find appropriate graphics that can then be customized for marketing campaigns, reports MarTech Series. Shutterstock maintains that the technology will help marketers increase revenues from campaigns by improving click through rates and other types of engagement.
Toronto-based Qoints is also tapping IBM’s Watson for an AI assisted service, reports VentureBeat. It’s offering technology that helps clients identify the best influencers for their brands.
Marketers are increasingly turning to micro influencers, or those individuals with fewer than 50,000 followers. But manually finding those types of influencers can be tedious, so the new product, which is called AI Social Discovery, seeks to identify influencers and determine the success that influencers will have based on specific campaigns. It analyzes influencers’ profiles and then assess if the profiles are similar to an ideal profile for a marketing campaign.