Only the best agencies know that public relations are a cognitive industry that is always growing. And by "cognitive" we mean that it generates information and knowledge through the experiences analysis or material previously presented.
This isn't new; in fact, it's something that our brain does every day. It learns from experience and during sleep it classifies all the knowledge that we acquire to incorporate it into our memory. If we want to see it that way, public relations professionals are like a great brain that works to achieve goals working with our clients. Always in an innovative and disruptive way to avoid repeating the same experiences of the past.
We have done all this process of knowledge generation in a natural way through many years of professionalism, but what if we could be helped by machines? How would our daily work look like?
In this article, we'll analyse what is artificial intelligence (AI) and how it could be useful to change the face of public relations as we know it.
Artificial intelligence, an answer for the future?
Surely when you think about artificial intelligence, robots, Terminator, Ex Machina or even Her come to your mind. You don't have to go that far nor everything is a matter of fiction: artificial intelligence is in our present and our reality.
Watson is a good example, developed by IBM (the same company that created the first computer that won against the world chess champion), this artificial intelligence managed to become the champion of the contest Jeopardy! at the beginning of this decade, this means that it achieved its purpose.
But Watson wants to go further. IBM seeks to help in other fields that work with information intensively, such as telecommunications, financial services or government.
How do Watson works? Artificial intelligence is a way in which machines can learn how humans work, in other words, it generating new knowledge from previous information. The interesting thing is that machines generate this knowledge without the human intervention, and not only that, but they will establish relationships between concepts, creating semantic fields that will allow them to distinguish between areas of knowledge. For example, a normal computer does not know what to do with the word "wave" until a human gives it a context. An artificial intelligence will use the word in different contexts to give it a concrete meaning, based on previous information. Thus, it would distinguish if it is a wave (a wave in the ocean) or an expression of courtesy with your hand.
The present advances in artificial intelligence go far beyond the simple explanation above, which is why Watson can, once it "reads" the context of the answer, formulate the correct question of Jeopardy!
But don't be scared! To develop artificial intelligence in a machine, it still needs a human manipulation to enter the correct information to have a real context to based on it and formulate logical reasoning. The human decides (for now) how much information is given to the machine to "feed" it. This is how, mostly, artificial intelligence works.
Uses of artificial intelligence in marketing
Here are some concrete examples of artificial intelligence uses in marketing, a profession close to public relations because it deals directly with people, either with the client or the consumer. In addition, marketing has shown significant advances in the use of AI.
Nearly 40% of marketing professionals believe that AI, automatic learning or deep learning will transform everything in the years to come. Likewise, Rubikloud believes that this technology will have a greater impact on marketing during this year, specifically in the retail sector, since it will be used by more than 50 percent of businesses in the area.
Most of AI use in marketing is related to the client, with their behavior, wishes, and needs and with the response time that companies must use to satisfy their clients. In this way, some specific actions of the AI are: