11 Startups that Prove Deep Learning and AI are Changing Marketing Forever

So far, 2017 has been the year of AI/Machine Learning startups for marketing, search, content and social media. It’s been fascinating to see all of the new companies popping up. Each week on the VentureBeat VB Engage podcast, it seems that Stewart Rogers and I are talking about yet another new startup that is using AI, deep learning, or bots to help it perform tasks that help make marketers more proficient in their campaigns, planning, or content.

Recently at SXSW, Entrepreneur mogul, Mark Cuban, stated that the world’s first trillionaire will be an artificial intelligence entrepreneur. Will he be correct?

Let’s talk about a few startups in deep learning and artificial intelligence that have recently popped up on my radar at VentureBeat.

1. Amplero - Knowing your customer allows you to personalize your messaging. However, understanding customers at the individual level takes more than just a focus group or a survey. Amplero helps modern marketers automatically optimize every customer interaction with its digital intelligence platform through machine learning. The result is increased lift across key customer metrics such as ARPU, Retention, and CLV— beyond what’s humanly possible.
2. Follow Analytics - A key aspect of the mobile mind-shift is the focus on delivering the right message to the right person at the right time and place. Follow Analytics makes it easy to achieve this with comprehensive analytics that help mobile businesses automatically achieve one-on-one engagement with customers. The benefits include new lines of revenue, increased wallet-share, and amplified loyalty across the mobile spectrum.
3. QuanticMind - Digital advertising can be tricky because it’s difficult to know what keywords to use, when to advertise, and where. Fortunately, QuanticMind has everything you need to optimize your digital advertising campaigns so you can always capitalize on the best opportunities. Its machine learning, data science, and programmatic capabilities empower you to avoid keyword guessing games, rolled-up averages that tell you nothing, and slow reporting that misses the mark. The result is advertising that hits the target at optimal cost, every time.
4. DeepSee - We’ve all heard about the problem of “fake news” at this point. DeepSee is a startup in beta right now that aims to fix the problem. Describing itself as a mix between Reddit, Quora, Twitter, BuzzSumo, and GlassDoor, DeepSee essentially does analysis. It combines deep learning, AI, and expert feedback on every piece of content, every publication and every journalist/content creator to give them a rating that verifies and validates their content. Because it is so hard to decipher truth from propaganda in the media, a tool like this will become invaluable for critical thinkers seeking the real story. It’s also a fabulous resource as a content curation platform.
5. Distilled ODN - Search engines are constantly changing how they generate search results. However, the strange science of SEO is a necessary endeavor for online marketers who want to drive traffic and make online conversions. Distilled’s “Optimization Delivery Network” allows your website to adapt its SEO automatically with continuous A/B split testing and data science. Now, your site can grow along with search engines as they continually evolve.
6. Likelihood - Compelling creative that captures customer attention is a crucial aspect of marketing. The problem is that marketers can’t always access the creative content they need, especially if it’s generated in separate silos. Intelligent Creative uses artificial intelligence to produce an endless supply of content without complexity, complaints, or coding. This puts creative content management back under the control of marketers so they can communicate brand narratives without delay or impediment.
7. Influential.co - This is IBM Watson’s only artificial intelligence influencer program. It uses super science like augmented intelligence and predictive insights to identify the most powerful and relevant influencers that brands can engage with. The purpose is to give brands a complete understanding of how they’re perceived in the marketplace so that they can effectively engage customers according to demographics, psychographics, and context.
8. Clickagy - Data is useless if your business can’t act on it. Clickagy helps businesses make better, smarter, and more strategic decisions in digital marketing by collecting, aggregating, and analyzing big data. It achieves this through its patent-pending Natural Language Processing tech as well as its data mining infrastructure, AI, and machine learning engine.
9. Affinio - What’s at the heart of every brand? The correct answer is, “people.” Affinio helps you make emotional connections with the people to whom your brand matters most. It does this by helping brands tie their messaging to their audience’s passions through its marketing intelligence platform. The results are marketing campaigns that are always engaging and on-target.
10. Refuel4 - Being creative and clever isn’t enough to make advertising effective. It also needs to be tested, measured, and analyzed before it’s truly optimized. Refuel4 accomplishes this with human-designed, AI-driven, and fully automated advertising campaigns. It has won numerous accolades for helping brands achieve unlimited creative fuel in Facebook and Instagram advertising.
11. Conversion Logic - With tools and technologies that are powered by machine learning, Conversion Logic’s platform provides a SaaS analytics service that delivers cross-channel attribution and insights across the customer journey—something that has become quite convoluted in recent years. Having a cross-channel, media agnostic view of both offline and online marketing channels helps marketers and stakeholders understand their return on investment and where to focus future efforts.

It’s no secret that artificial intelligence and machine learning are an important trend to keep an eye on. It’s not robots are taking over the world, YET... but more and more over the next 3-5 years, more tasks will be automated and done without human interaction.

With 5G coming in less than 3 years, IoT, AI, Machine Learning, Deep Learning, Robotics, and other major advancements, marketers and company executives need to learn about their implications and how they can positively impact their organization... before their competition gets it figured out.

This can scare you or inspire you to get in front of the trends.