CANNES — Artificial intelligence may be the technology flavor du jour – but some companies out there have been using AI methods for years.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, ad agency Omnicom Digital CEO Jonathan Nelson defines AI, outlines how his company applies the tech, and casts a note of caution.
“AI’s been in our business for years – it’s just people are talking about it now,” Nelson says. “AI is all over our business, we’re working with all of our partners at Amazon and Google and we use (IBM) Watson,” some of the big sellers of cognitive services.
Nelson says AI is used to optimize media, produce advanced creative, perform image recognition and conduct deep data analysis, leading to more effective creative, better images, better text and better outcomes.
In our specific example, Omnicom’s Annalect division built a chatbot that, in a conversation with media planners, can find and speak back key facts from vast databases of consumer behavior.
“Chatbot helps media buyers, planners, data people… give(s) them insight in to all kinds of data… a chat text-like interface in to all of the data that’s in our networks,” he says.
But Nelson is respectful to growing concerns that increased automation will lead to lost jobs and that consumers may have greater privacy concerns over how their data is processed by AI algorithms.
This video is part of Beet.TV’s AI Series from Cannes Lions 2017, presented by The Weather Company, an IBM Business. For more from the series, please visit this page.
