2018 Predictions: Pegasystems

Robin Collyer, marketing & decisioning specialist at Pegasystems, says Augmented Intelligence will be big in 2018.

2017 was a rollercoaster year in digital marketing and I expect the pace of change to accelerate in 2018. Here’s my take on what to do and what to look out for next year.

Don’t let Artificial Intelligence take your eye off the ball
AI is the buzzword plaguing the martech industry, and rightly so. Its capabilities are truly transforming the world of marketing as we know it. However, companies must not lose sight of how appropriate this technology is for each business case. Do businesses really know what their AI is doing? Setting the level of transparency (as opposed to opaqueness) allows marketers to have full visibility of how AI is producing results.

The merging of martech and adtech will continue in 2018
We will see more disruption of the paid media market – the status quo of how paid media has been commissioned in the past will change. Companies will have an even greater ability to engage and connect directly with prospects and customers in paid channels.

Augmented Intelligence is the real AI
Augmented Intelligence is a term that’s being referred to more and more when people talk about the impact of AI on the human role in the workplace. We are yet to reach the point of complete ‘artificial’ intelligence. However, new technologies will enable CRM systems to apply Augmented Intelligence to any customer interaction, analyse that interaction, and quickly recommend the next step to take with that individual customer – empowering customer-facing staff to engage in an increasingly ‘human’ way.

Don’t be hamstrung by the data
The key to extracting value from data is to be able to access the right data at the right time. By addressing the challenge of customer engagement from the customer’s perspective – empathising with the experience you’d like them to have and designing backwards – you naturally focus on the data that matters. Moreover, you can then employ adaptive models (machine learning) to continually improve your outcomes.

Expect to see truly chatty chatbots
Emerging conversational interfaces with advanced natural language processing (NLP) capabilities will allow customers as well as customer-facing employees to engage – and even continue a conversation – across channels, such as web chat, phone, Amazon Alexa, and more. Using techniques such as NLP, AI interprets these interactions, so each party can understand and communicate with a proper response in the moment.