At the Marketing AI Institute, we read dozens of articles on artificial intelligence every week to uncover the most valuable ones for our subscribers and we curate them for you here. We call it 3 Links in 3 Minutes. Enjoy!
Sales Companies are Expecting Major AI Impact This Year, According to InsideSales
InsideSales.com just released their State of AI for Sales and Marketing report and the numbers are… not surprising. If you’ve been following along with us, you’ll recognize a strong correlation in the AI in sales trends we share and those stated in this new report. Let’s review their findings.
Of the 633 sales professionals they surveyed, 90.7% expect artificial intelligence to improve sales performance in the coming year (they must have read our AI and sales blog post!). More specifically, the average lift in performance is expected to be just over 33%.
As for which parts of the sales process AI will impact most, respondents are predicting lead scoring (43.6%), contacting and qualifying (33.1%), and social selling (31.3%).
More than half of respondents reported they're not currently using AI with their sales departments, but 44.1% plan to do so this year. The biggest obstacle AI-powered companies will have to hurdle in selling to these AI newbies? Understanding AI. 25.7% of respondents reported this as the top obstacle to adopting AI.
Want more AI and sales information? Discover exactly how artificial intelligence can supercharge the performance of sales teams and professionals and which products to demo here.
Domino's Dips Its Toes in AI-Powered Rewards Program
Get ready, because artificial intelligence is coming to a pizza near you! Well, sort of.
Domino’s announced a new loyalty program, Points for Pies, and it’s fueled by machine learning. Ahead of Sunday’s Big Game, one of the biggest pizza days of the year, customers will earn 10 reward points for every pizza they eat—even competitors’—simply by uploading a photo of their pie to the app.
The Domino’s team created a tool for their app that uses artificial intelligence to identify pizza in images so points can be awarded. Domino’s chief digital officer Dennis Maloney explains:
"This is the first time Domino's is using AI technology like this. It will be running the pizza identification process and is already smart enough to identify all pizza, even if it is a homemade English muffin pizza, a pizza with a hotdog stuffed crust, or a high-end artisan pizza.”
Instead of advertising in this year’s Big Game, Domino’s will be rewarding all the pizza-lovers indulging on Sunday. Will you be partaking? 🍕
IBM Releases “Diversity in Faces” Dataset
IBM has set out to tackle bias in facial recognition systems. This week they released Diversity in Faces (DiF), a dataset of “one million human facial images sourced from the publicly available YFCC-100M Creative Commons dataset,” and an accompanying report, according to VentureBeat.
This comes after MIT researchers found that popular facial recognition tools by IBM, Microsoft, and Megvii consistently misidentified gender in up to seven percent of lighter-skinned females, up to 12 percent of darker-skinned males, and up to 35 percent in darker-skinned females.
In preliminary tests, the DiF dataset has already proved to paint a broader and “more balanced” distribution of facial images when compared to previous datasets.
Lead author of the paper and IBM fellow John R. Smith believes this is the first step towards reducing prejudicial predictions in facial recognition software: “We believe by extracting and releasing these facial coding scheme annotations on a large dataset of one million images of faces, we will accelerate the study of diversity and coverage of data for AI facial recognition systems to ensure more fair and accurate AI systems.”
Ashley Sams
Ashley Sams is director of marketing at Ready North. She joined the agency in 2017 with a background in marketing, specifically for higher education and social media. Ashley is a 2015 graduate of The University of Mount Union where she earned a degree in marketing.