Technology has immersed itself into all aspects of our lives meaning our digital footprint paints a more detailed picture than ever before.
Brands today have a wealth of different ways they can engage using this understanding but the key to unlocking future realms of engagement boils down to translating the intelligence into meaningful actions, using this to create new world touch points driven by technology.
Marketers continue to lead companies through this digital transformation.
AI – the ability for software to make decisions outside of the data strategy and rules set by humans, to form new solutions – offers marketers the potential to meet the expectations for novel means of engagement that digital transformation has set.
AI will change the way people interact with machines. It will become the invisible user interface that is always there to make our lives safer, easier and more productive.
Microsoft Cognitive Services
AI is, and will continue to be, one of the most powerful tools born out of search; leveraging both its insights and intelligence to fuel incremental services that help people do more of what they want, the way they want. It also provides marketers with a new way of understanding and engaging their audiences.
By understanding behaviour, mapping patterns, and serving content relevant to the intelligence gathered, AI provides new opportunities for brands. More than half of Chief Marketing Officers (58%) believe that within the next five years, companies will need to compete in the AI space to succeed.
The question is – how is this changing the landscape of search innovation as we know it?
consumer interaction with search has advanced dramatically over the past few years
Consumer interaction with search has advanced dramatically over the past few years – no longer are you sent a list of 10 blue links when searching. Instead, the likes of Cortana, your own personal digital assistant, shares the most relevant content for you, in the most contextually sensible way.
We are also heading towards a time when screen-less interactions will become the norm, meaning consumers will interact with technology through a bot, virtual assistant or other agent.
Voice search naturally encourages people to offer up their emotions to technology. When analyzing voice searches, they tend to be more colloquial than written searches, longer and more structurally complex and packed with intent signals. The rise of this intelligence is powering machine learning that is personal, predictive, and enhancing capabilities in exciting new ways.
People expect their technology interactions to be increasingly intuitive in other ways. We recently extended our development of Microsoft Cognitive Services, a collection of APIs that allows developers to use a broad suite of AI technology to connect brands with their audiences more naturally.
The infusion of intelligent experiences such as vision, speech, language knowledge and search across 29 Cognitive Services now enables developers to create even more meaningful experiences.
Digital Transformation
While the idea of Digital Transformation is a relatively new topic, the challenges facing businesses today are familiar: engaging customers, empowering employees, optimizing operations, and transforming products.
Bing is uniquely positioned to help brands engage customers not only from queries in the search engine but also through the power of its intelligence embedded in conversations, bots and cognitive services.
search is the intelligent fabric that permeates platforms, services and products
Search is the intelligent fabric that permeates platforms, services and products offering not only valuable connections to people throughout their day, but by providing deep insights on customer intent.
Marketers’ approach to search therefore requires greater attention. Search should be one of the primary strategic considerations when CMOs define how they are going to make the most impact created by digital transformation.
Last month at the Build developers conference in Seattle, Microsoft announced that our goal is to amplify and augment business as we know it with intelligent technology by infusing AI in everything we do. Through the likes of Windows 10, Azure and Cognitive Services, we are infusing search intelligence across our product base, to allow marketers smarter connections with their audiences and give the people that make up those audiences the experiences they want.
