The Italians first invented pizza roughly 1,000 years ago. We can only assume the first developer meeting was scheduled for ten minutes later. Otherwise, whatever did they need the pizza for?
Now, seriously, it’s fair of you to ask what in the world pizza has to do with AI and digital strategy. A lot more than you might think. Here’s why.
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Facebook is having a terrible week. After experiencing a barrage of trouble over the last few months, they’ve finally crossed a line Apple won’t tolerate. They made available an app that gave themselves a scary amount of access to your device. It’s opt-in, but Facebook seems aware that it’s invading privacy — and appears to be preying on young people.
This year has started off strong on my end, but we’re also looking ahead towards what’s next. I’ve spent a fair amount of time talking to digital marketing professionals about what’s important to them, sharing some of our product roadmap, and seeing where there’s alignment and where there may be market opportunity.
January is a special month in AI history. Because in both the novel and movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, January 12 is when the HAL 9000 sentient computer — (spoiler alert!) the story’s antagonistic artificial intelligence — goes live. Depending on whether you date HAL to its “birth” in the film, the novel, or when those media originated, HAL is anywhere between 22 years to 51 years old now (For trivia buffs, of which I’m one: The book and film were released in 1968, making HAL’s conception over 50 years ago; if you go by the dates given in the film or the book, respectively, HAL is either 27 or 22 years old). HAL is then placed aboard the Discovery One spacecraft to participate in a journey of, well, discovery to the planet Jupiter.
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Is the dream of the visitor journey dying? How do we make journeys more functional without using data people don’t want us to have?
Even back in 1942, there were dreamers about what the days of artificial intelligence would look like. Futurists like Isaac Asimov were considering the risks of new autonomous technologies. It was during that year that Asimov wrote a short story entitled “Runaround” in which he unveiled the three laws of robotics.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic
Arthur C Clarke
It seems like AI has been on everyone’s minds lately. It definitely has been on ours, as Tim Peter and I spoke on AI on our latest podcast. AI has been particularly hyped up, with plenty of big ideas emerging about what it can do for website owners. But I’m fearing, that like blockchain, we’re heading for Gartner’s fabled Trough of Disillusionment if we’re not there already. AI can’t solve all your business problems, though there are those that are well suited with the tools that are available today. But like any solution you have to have a valuable problem and the right approach to applying the solution.
Marketers are always focused on rearranging priorities to yield the greatest return for business. Increasingly, something newer is added to that priority list: site search. Marketers are finding more hidden value in this capability than they’d previously realized.