Actionable Steps for Brands Coming Out of CES 2017

By Paolo Yuvienco, Global Chief Technology Officer, DigitasLBi Every year at CES, there always seems to be one particular theme that weaves its way through every booth, regardless of industry or sector. This year, the most prolific technology – more prolific than any that I have ever seen at CES — was artificial intelligence. From car and home automation to personal assistants, including robots, you couldn’t go more than 3 booths without seeing something about A.I., machine learning, and the technology platforms that extend those capabilities, like Amazon’s Alexa. So, I asked myself: What should brands be thinking about as A.I. continues to transform the customer experience? As audiences increasingly delegate purchase decisions large and small to digital concierges, how does a brand not only stay relevant, but rise and thrive? This CES offered plenty of clues, pointing out the way forward for discerning marketers. A.I. Eats Search First, let’s take a look at the state of play. As the digital age got under way, being a winning brand meant one thing: when a customer used a search engine, you wanted to be the first face they saw after they hit “enter”. Thus was born the arcane art of Search Engine Optimization. Google quickly became the top of the online purchase funnel, and brands soon learned to massage the content of their pages to make themselves attractive to the site’s search algorithms. That was then. Now, artificial intelligence is creating a powerful undertow, taking us away from webpages with neat rows of link results, and instead making decisions on our behalf using criteria that are rarely transparent. These days, a user speaks to her Amazon Echo device, or the Google Assistant on her phone: “where can I get some good Chinese tonight?” And because A.I. has pushed web pages away and replaced them with natural conversation, we no longer get a list of links to peruse. Instead, it makes more sense for the system to respond with a single entry that it has carefully curated on our behalf. The wide-open purchase funnel has been narrowed to a single point. Clearly, new thinking and new tools are required for brands who wish to triumph in the Age of A.I. A.I. Takes the Wheel Let’s turn to a real-life scenario: Your self-driving car will drop you off at the mall, head off to a charging station of its choosing, top up, and then come back to pick you up. (Even Ford committed themselves at CES 2017 to a fully self-driving car for consumers by 2021 – oh, and did we mention that Alexa will be built in as well?) Your smart home will resupply itself (via technology like Amazon Dash) based on general parameters you set, arbitrating on its own between brands of similar quality and price. You’ll ask your phone’s A.I. assistant to make dinner reservations, not caring about the particulars since the system knows you so well – the more you delegate to A.I., the better it gets at pleasing […]

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