How Sitecore will address the Machine learning challenges
This post deals with what machine learning and artificial intelligence are, including a primer of considerations for marketers, and the direction the technologies are headed. Sitecore’s Todd Mitchell talks about what powers machine learning for marketers, and what it will look like out in the wild.
What marketers could do for a business using Machine Learning on their data?
A: Sure. Marketers will have access to deeper insights and greater speed than ever before. Airlines are a great example—there’s a lot of data, lots of competition, lots of business partnerships with verticals like hotels and car rental. Tons of places for machine learning to discover value and make an automated response.
Just look at what the airline knows about your purchase decisions: When you bought your tickets, how far in advance, to what destinations, your local weather during the purchase, and whether in the end you actually took the flight. This data can let an airline discover really interesting measures, such as how many people are purchasing a ticket within three months of the flight, and actually take that flight. Let’s say you find that people who tend to purchase three months in advance always make their flight, and people who book only one week in advance often miss. You can build marketing campaigns around that specific scenario. You can get highly specific to the individual. You also have a greater understanding to make predictions around overbooking flights, for instance. Sitecore Machine Learning can help you discover these patterns, make predictions, and execute campaigns.
And we’re talking down to the level of detail where you can see your customer’s behaviors. You might discover that gold members always check in at the last minute because they have gold status and can just rush through. Knowing that, you can tune your membership campaigns, your customer service, everything.
Sitecore Machine Learning:
The beauty of machine learning will be finding new ways to tailor your offerings to the individual, based on these harder-to-discover insights.
ML enables incremental learning, letting you update data like this all but instantly. You can incrementally identify new patterns or new customers whose latest action put them into a defined group like “last-minute holidays.” Your systems can “learn” that new information right away and take the new action toward that customer. Sitecore Machine learning is about not only how to better target your message, but finding personas you wouldn’t even have thought of. Marketers are going to be able to tap a lot more unexplored potential.
What challenges should digital marketers prepare for as they adopt technology that’s ML-capable?
First, marketers will need the data. The age-old problem is that all that data is locked up in silos according to the applications that house it. Airline reservation systems have data about flights and passengers; the Uber app has data about rides to and from airports, and lots of other places; the Starbucks app has data about who bought a coffee in an airport before boarding an early morning flight. Your Nest thermostat, and many other IoT devices, have lots of data about your preferences. Marketers—and their IT development teams, frankly—need to be able to integrate all this data into a central place. That’s the first challenge.
The second challenge is building a data model that allows you to understand interactions down to the individual level. Not just for “working men in middle age” but for each individual. That data model must ensure data accuracy, and data cleanliness—once all of this data from different sources is in one central place. And the model has to combine information across any channels or data source. There’s more, but that’s a start to explaining the challenges of managing all the data that ML can take advantage of.
How is Sitecore addressing these challenges?
Some pretty exciting developments in the works for our next platform launch. But you’ll have to wait until October to find out what those are.
Source by Sitecore India
