In his annual letter to shareholders, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos referred to Amazon Web Services (AWS) Amazon’s own SaaS (Software as a Service) offering.
Kyle Tkachuk, CEO at lead gen software as a service (SaaS) company Clickback, fully agrees with this assessment – referencing a recent demonstration of AI used in B2B marketing applications.
SaaS landing page provider, Unbounce, challenged digital marketers to compete against an AI-based technology called “The Machine” in analyzing landing page copy. The goal was to predict whether the copy would deliver an above- or below-average conversion rate.
“The Machine” won due to conducting its evaluation with a lack of biases. Conversely, the human marketers were opinionated on the effects of design and other variables. The Machine demonstrated 80% accuracy of prediction, compared to 50% by the human contestants.
“It is certain that AI [artificial intelligence] and ML [machine learning] are taking a firm position in B2B marketing, which I’m sure we’ll see more of as we move into 2018,” says Tkachuk.
Clickback already utilizes AI in its Clickback MAIL and Clickback WEB products. And there’s evidence of AI and ML is becoming more and more prevalent, per Tkachuk.
AI can be seen in many areas of B2B marketing: it focuses on areas such as finding patterns in existing data, appending missing information or auto-populating through algorithms, automating decisions with increasing accuracy and reducing the manual aspects of many different tasks, says Tkachuk.