2020 AI Trends

No matter what your title is, AI will inevitably become a reality in your day-to-day work. Rather than avoiding it, it’s crucial to become familiar with all of the current, and potential, applications of AI technology. Teams with the best understanding of AI will be driving the most successful future marketing strategies.

Creative AI

Technology that enables comping, giving creative team members tools to quickly come up with ideas, falls squarely in the Creative AI category. NVIDIA’s GauGAN, named after post-Impressionist painter Paul Gauguin, creates photorealistic images from segmentation maps, which are labeled sketches that depict the layout of a scene. Artists can use paintbrush and paint bucket tools to design their own landscapes with labels like river, rock and cloud. A style transfer algorithm allows creators to apply filters — changing a daytime scene to sunset, or a photorealistic image to a painting. Users can even upload their own filters to layer onto their masterpieces.

Sometimes, the next big new thing, looks like a toy (thx Chad Dixon). In this Creative AI example, by teamLab in Japan, children are given the power to bring their aquatic drawings to life – with a scan – and then see them swimming around the room.

A good example of Creative AI in training is Google Quick, Draw!. Here, the AI guesses what you are doodling. But you can imagine how the inverse could be true as well – where a light doodle could pull a high-quality comp of what you’re drawing.

Strategic AI

Strategic AI helps teams find whitespace and insight across large data sets. In Spotify’s Out-of-Home (OOH) campaigns, they cull insights out of listener data. This is a great example of how large data sets can be used creatively to inspire and inform big ideas, and bring big ideas to life.

Another example of the potential of Strategic AI is the British Airways Visit Mum campaign. In this campaign, British Airways wanted to increase flights by 10%, but they didn’t know where to find those flyers. Ogilvy’s strategy team mined the flight data and found that the USA to India route was the best opportunity for incremental flights. That insight fueled the Big Idea.

Operational AI

Is Creative AI like having 1000 interns? In this example of Operational AI, you can see how Microsoft is helping The Snow Leopard Trust use remote cameras for estimating the population size and location hotspots of the elusive, endangered snow leopard.

Google AI Experiments are an interesting resource to find code and working examples of components of Operational, Strategic, and Creative AI.

Read more 2020 Trends for Marketers here.