From the course: Artificial Intelligence for Marketing

Defining artificial intelligence

From the course: Artificial Intelligence for Marketing

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Defining artificial intelligence

- We've all seen the movies, Skynet from "Terminator," Sonny from "I, Robot," Andrew from "Bicentennial Man," Samantha from "Her," the list goes on and on. And it confuses the conversation about artificial intelligence to where you need to be very clear on one critical distinction. There is general AI, which is the stuff of science fiction, and there is functional AI, which is the stuff of business success and career advancement. I want you to fully understand this difference, so you'll be on the educated side of the conversation, you'll be taken seriously. You'll be identified as one who gets it. General artificial intelligence is the idea that machines will eventually become self-aware. The theory is that the computer learns fast enough. One day, it'll wake up and take over the world. That's great for the movies, but it's fiction. The systems we have today are nowhere near capable of some of the simplest things humans can do. And humans are complex beyond our own understanding. One of the most powerful methods of AI programming is based on how we think the brain works, but we don't really know. But even imitating how we guess the brain works has resulted in systems that are far more powerful than any other programming we've had before. But they are only far more capable at very specific functions. They do not reason, they don't grow wise, they do not even have common sense. Can they do simultaneous translation? Sure. Can they win at Jeopardy and chess and go? Yes. But none of them can do all of these things. So when you use AI to build a model to predict an outcome, or decide on an email subject line, that is functional AI, and it is an awesome tool. But it's only a tool, not a handyman. It's a saw, not a carpenter. It's a paintbrush, not a painter. It can only do the specific task that it was built to do, but it does it really well, really fast, and it gets better over time. The kind of tasks that we're talking about are language, vision, robotics. These are AI's sweet spots. Natural language processing has gotten much better lately. You can talk into your phone and it will translate your voice into text. A conversation bot can imitate speech so we can converse with smart speakers. Computer vision lets you ask your computer for the photos that you've taken of dogs or people who are at the beach or on my summer vacation. Computer vision can recognize your logo on social media, even at an odd angle. Computer vision is getting good enough that we will be getting self-driving cars. And then there's machine learning. This is the heart of AI for marketing. Machine learning is the tool that can help you improve prospect targeting, respond to inquiries faster, determine the next best action for lead nurturing, qualify leads for the sales team. The list goes on. Machines are getting better and better at identifying patterns and predicting outcomes, as long as you have a very clear task for it. So imagine that you've just hired a new marketing intern. What sort of tasks would you give somebody who is smart, learns quick, but doesn't really have a lot of experience? What tasks would you give a fresh recruit? Make that list, it's the starting point to making artificial intelligence work for you.

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