Using customer data has always been a key for online platforms to deliver effective recommendations to consumers. Meta AI will further improve this process through a memory feature that “remembers” key features about users from one-on-one chats with the Meta AI chatbot on WhatsApp and Messenger.
The Five Most-Key Takeaways from This Blog Post
- Worth mentioning is that “content recommendations” can include marketing and advertising content, such as tickets to a concert or reservations to a restaurant.
- The “certain details” that Meta AI will remember from conversations are not itemized in full, but are instead parcelled out in a blog post by Meta. Those “certain details” could include dietary preferences, hobbies like travel, and activities like language learning. For instance, a vegan user of a Meta platform would get ads for vegan-friendly establishments.
- Users can delete memories at any time. However, the collection of memories is something that the company currently (i.e., as of this writing) does not offer an opt-out for.
- The feature upon roll-out encompassed users of Facebook, Messenger, and Instagram, in the United States and Canada.
- Overall, this connects to a broader trend in online marketing, which is using conversational A.I. to extract actionable user data that companies can in turn benefit from in advertising and marketing efforts.
The Significance for Business Owners
Obviously, business owners that are looking to reach users on these platforms have plenty to like about this feature.
With Meta AI getting a more-precise profile of users’ interests, business owners have a better chance of their marketing content getting in front of people who are most likely to respond to it.
The nice thing about this for business owners is that it takes some of the burden of consumer research out of the business’ hands.
Of course, that can end up further empowering the online platforms that those business owners depend on for driving online sales.
That, in turn, can increase the businesses’ dependency on those online platforms for online success.
And if platforms like Instagram and Facebook continue to remain at a high level of popularity, then business owners will certainly want to reach users on these platforms.
Conversational A.I. Is a Powerful Tool for Getting User Data
So, what is it about Meta AI that could make it so effective for business owners marketing on the platform?
Most people use chatbots because they want the chatbot to serve them. Whether that is for a particular goal, like making a vegan recipe, or something more freeform, like having an entertaining conversation with a chatbot.
If you have ever had a “chat” with a chatbot, then you know the servile how-may-I-help-you tone that these platforms are designed to chat in.
(These chatbots must be programmed to converse like that, of course. Otherwise, the language would be more unpredictable, reflecting the many “voices” in the agglomerated writings that the A.I. was trained on.) For this reason, chatbots can be quite good at getting more information out of users to inform chatbot responses.
If you are asking the chatbot for a vegan recipe, you may get asked questions like “what kind of dishes do you normally like?” and “do you have any allergies?” and “are there any ingredients that you just do not enjoy?”
There indeed is a legitimate reason for this, because most people who are in the know about prompt engineering will tell you that framing a question correctly, and adding in important details, can get better chatbot responses.
By answering questions like that, users are able to get a chatbot response that is better aligned with the users’ goals for the conversation.For business owners and the online platforms, there is another upside to this. That being, the users are actively sharing information that can serve as useful data
The overarching point here is that there is something inherent in human interactions with chatbots that leads humans to provide information about themselves that is useful data for businesses and other entities to influence those humans.
The Last (But Not Least) Key Takeaway from This Blog Post
The upshot of online platforms’ in-house A.I. conveniently creating customer profiles (the marketing kind of profile, not the social-media kind) is that business owners can see better returns on those platforms.
But the other side of the coin is that some business owners may feel disincentivized from taking consumer research into their own hands, instead letting those online platforms do the heavy lifting.
If enough business owners take that attitude, then those platforms could enjoy increased bargaining power when it comes to setting the terms and conditions—these include the pricing of services rendered, mind you—of marketing on those platforms.
What could follow from there is that the “pay to play” nature of online marketing could end up being more costly for business owners.
However, that of course depends on how costly the consumer research was in the first place. Whether businesses will save more money in the long run by outsourcing a good deal of customer profiling to entities like Meta remains to be seen.
Other Great GO AI Blog Posts
GO AI the blog offers a combination of information about, analysis of, and editorializing on A.I. technologies of interest to business owners, with especial focus on the impact this tech will have on commerce as a whole.
On a usual week, there are multiple GO AI blog posts going out. Here are some notable recent articles:
- For Businesses and Other Organizations, What Makes a Successful Chatbot?
- IBM Watson vs. ChatGPT vs. Gemini: How Will Each Affect Search Engines?
- Using A.I. to Find Resources for Business Owners
- How Would Restricting Open-Source A.I. Affect Business Owners?
- The EU’s A.I. Act Has Become Law: The Implications for Business Owners (Especially American)
In addition to our GO AI blog, we also have a blog that offers important updates in the world of search engine optimization (SEO), with blog posts like “Google Ends Its Plan to End Third-Party Cookies”.
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