Artificial Intelligence

(Jeremy Vale coauthored this post.) Brace yourself: Computer vision is coming. “The Long Night” is finally over, and enterprises see the opportunity more clearly than ever. With AI replacing biological rods and cones, computer vision is now a must-have weapon in every firm’s arsenal. Computer vision solutions are spreading like wildfire. While use cases such […]

I focus a lot of my research on marketing innovation and have been working on mobile (first as a marketing guy at a telco in 1998, then as an analyst) for more than 20 years. However, it is still fascinating to me to see how many marketers wrongly think their company has fixed mobile basics […]

Today, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development announced it is suing Facebook for violating the Fair Housing Act. It accuses the tech giant of “encouraging, enabling, and causing housing discrimination” by allowing advertisers to block real estate ads from race, religion, country of birth, and other protected characteristics. Advertisers could effectively red-line by […]

It’s early February. Punxsutawney Phil predicted an early spring this year, and there is hope (and warmth) in the air.[i] But it’s not always rosy for you as a data, analytics, and insights leader. You tirelessly toil to get value from your enterprise data and try to apply those insights at scale to impact business […]

Machine-learning models may occasionally suggest an undesirable action. The action might be either biased or unethical — or just bad for business. Most of the time, the suggestion won’t be wrong. How can developers protect against these bad outcomes? It’s Simple You don’t have to do what the model tells you to do. If someone told […]

AWS just announced Amazon SageMaker Ground Truth to help companies create training data sets for machine learning. This is a powerful new service for folks who have access to lots of data that hasn’t been consistently annotated. In the past, humans would have to label a massive corpus of images or frames within video to […]

Over the last five years, most large enterprises have slowly but surely matured from being data-aware to data-driven. They all collect data from operational and transactional applications; process the data into data lakes, data hubs, data warehouses, and data marts; and build business intelligence (BI) and analytics applications to understand what the data is telling […]

I’ve always been attracted to the power of empathy. That being said, I’m a longtime fan of “soft” skills — skills that are helpful in relationship-building, making me a better friend and (presumably) a more tolerable colleague. Empathy clearly fits squarely there. But a more savvy marketer? A more insightful executive? A veritable customer whisperer? […]

Automation will be central to the next phase of digital transformation, driving new levels of customer value such as faster delivery of products, higher quality and dependability, deeper personalization, and greater convenience. Last year, Forrester predicted that automation would reach a tipping point — altering the workforce, augmenting employees, and driving new levels of customer value. Since then, […]

At its TechEd 2018 Barcelona event last month, SAP announced that it is adding robotic process automation (RPA) to its software suite, starting in early 2019. Two aspects of this announcement are particularly interesting. The first is that SAP has chosen to build its own RPA capability instead of partnering with any of the existing […]

I am very excited to have been invited for the third time to give the opening keynote speech at One to One, a great marketing conference taking place on October 10–12 in Biarritz in the southwest of France. To summarize my talk in a few points, I have shared some global marketing trends and how […]

Artificial intelligence is a big deal in marketing technology. Forrester sees strong potential in AI as an enabling technology for marketing, and it’s great to see many vendors embracing AI to enhance existing offerings and as the basis for new solutions. But for vendors, mastering AI technology alone isn’t enough to get to the top. […]

The use of artificial intelligence (AI) in specific marketing applications such as programmatic real-time bidding is now commonplace. Although marketing has yet to adopt it more broadly, new use cases are gathering momentum. My latest report, “Leverage AI To Improve Marketing Efficiency,” covers the nine AI marketing use cases that have the potential to deliver […]

It’s been 30 years since the internet made customer self-service and automation the watchwords of business. But most of you are still in the starting gates of digital transformation. Only 15% of companies have kicked it into digital high gear. And even these advanced incumbents fall way behind digital pure plays in harnessing the full power […]

For Artificial Intelligence In Healthcare, The Quadruple Aim Isn’t Just A Goal — It’s A Requirement There is enormous excitement around using artificial intelligence in healthcare, and at the same time, there is growing consensus among healthcare organizations (HCOs) to focus on the “quadruple aim.” This includes improving the customer experience, driving better outcomes, lowering costs, […]

Marketing technology (martech) vendors are heavily pitching AI. However, AI per se is not new and won’t solve CMOs’ problems overnight. In fact, many marketers use AI without even knowing it, when they use AI-powered algorithms for programmatic ad buying! The reality is that AI will scale existing data-driven marketing approaches and give modern CMOs […]

This week, Uber announced that it would close down its self-driving trucks business unit to focus on autonomous passenger vehicles.  In July 2017, we predicted that logistics and shipping firms would replace human-driven double- and triple-freight trailers with human-directed platoons of autonomous trucks and fully autonomous trucks as quickly as practicable and legally permitted. Does this […]

This week, Uber announced that it would close down its self-driving trucks business unit to focus on autonomous passenger vehicles. In July 2017, we predicted that logistics and shipping firms would replace human-driven double- and triple-freight trailers with human-directed platoons of autonomous trucks and fully autonomous trucks as quickly as practicable and legally permitted. Does this […]

I’m really excited to join VentureBeat today for the webinar: “AI-powered location: A step closer to the future?” This isn’t my first foray into the spatial and mapping world. In fact, I’ve been a big fan of maps since my days in Africa, where my map of the world was the only decoration I had […]