Thanksgiving in the US is almost upon us, and it puts me in a state of mind of being thankful for many things. But as an advisor to several AI companies, I have realized that they should be giving thanks every day. Here are just a few things they should thank their lucky stars for:
- Digital transformation. Data is the fuel of AI, and marketing had very little actionable data before companies transformed all the marketing to online. B2B companies, in particular, were a marketing desert. Every company is awash in data these days and that is as much what is fueling AI in marketing as anything else. Some companies I work with, such as Converseon, wouldn’t exist without this data.
- Moore’s law. The commoditization of computing has made AI practical. Machine learning has been around for decades, but the reason it is the flavor of the week is that cheap processors, storage, and bandwidth have enabled cloud servers to be spun up to tackle huge problems and spun down just as quickly. Without that cheap computing power, AI would be a much smaller story.
- Open source AI tools. Free, available tools are everywhere, from the entire Python ecosystem to Google giving away Tensor Flow and Word2Vec and many other examples.
- Marketers with vision. These are my clients, who are willing to step out in faith and try something new. Marketing wasn’t always known for adopting new technology, so this has been a huge change–and the martech startups need to hire these visionary marketers, too. Some companies I work with, such as SoloSegment, have marketing experts working behind the scenes that are just as important as their developers and data scientists.
There are a lot of other things that AI companies might be thankful for as well, because any industry this hot has a lot going right. I hope when you carve your turkey this year that you have a lot to be grateful for also.
