Why AI’s Marketing Applications Are Narrow

AI is being used in recommendation engines. Marketers are also using it within predictive analytics. And there are several companies aiming to use it within a real-time bidding infrastructure.

I’m talking about applying a specific score to an impression opportunity. Right now, most companies are dealing with broad buckets of inventory. So they want to use hard constraints on a specific campaign. They want to target people in specific geographies or specific types of locations.

That’s a big topic right now as marketers consolidate the number of demand-side platforms that they are using. The rate at which marketers use AI to determine auction type or to figure out header bidding, the jury is still out on those specific issues. But it can definitely be applied if it’s set up properly to understand the broadest possible sense of data sets.

AI is limited in everything that it does. It's inherently narrow.

Oh, definitely. Blockchain is on my periphery in terms of its ability to use network integrity, but that's going to take awhile and it's going to be even more fragmented than the utilization of AI.

Everything is actually overhyped. But for those same people that call something overhyped, I challenge those folks to contribute to the discussion in ways that are going to deconstruct what is being overhyped. So I'm kind of the wrong person to ask that. I still think that AI is overhyped, and blockchain is as well.

Exactly.

Probably. I definitely am bullish about AI, yet at the same time when people call it overhyped, I'm not the one that's going to call it overhyped when everything is overhyped.

If you think about it, any new technology is going to be a double-edged sword. This goes back to the discovery of fire. The same thing that helped us cook food was also used to burn villages.