LAS VEGAS — Artificial intelligence will come to play an increasingly important role in the decisioning and consumption of digital content and advertising, according to one of communications agency OMD‘s big thinkers.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, OMD strategy and product development director Jean-Paul Edwards says AI is nothing new – but it is now ready to make in-roads in to media.
“AI’s been with us for 50 years – it’s had a lot of false dawns,” Edwards says.
He should know. Edwards has been heading up future-facing tech strategies for agencies for years. But now he says AI is truly emerging.
After all, The Weather Company and IBM are now using IBM’s Watson AI engine to power conversational ad units.
“We’re starting to see AI in terms of … decisions around content delivery in the digital space,” Edwards says.
“The next step is to bring that to mass broadcast video … fitting broadcast-quality content in to pipes, through to curation algorithms … (so that) a TV set knows exactly what you want to watch. … your brother-in-law’s YouTube videos or a specialist bit of content from a group n Facebook or the big new cop show on NBC.”
But there is no single product called “AI” that agencies can simply switch on. Rather, there is a messy, emergent set of tools Edwards is calling a “cognitive technology stack”, comprising data sources, sensors, APIs and bots.
This video was produced as part Beet.TV’s coverage of CES 2017 presented by 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
