By Dom Nicastro  –

“Most websites you go to today for businesses, a human is writing the rules to say which content to recommend,” Paul Roetzer, CEO and founder of the Marketing Artificial Intelligence Institute, told CMSWire in a CX Decoded Podcast. “What are the related articles? There is some basic tagging system for if they read this, then read that. Most of them are human-powered. They don’t have a Netflix or a Spotify type algorithm that’s actually learning preferences, knows the last 15 articles someone read, and how far along he got into them. It’s not pulling any other kind of behavioral intent data. Most aren’t doing that.”

Therein lies potential, however it’s something marketers and customer experience professionals remain hopeful about: 54% of them told CMSWire researchers in the State of Digital Customer Experience 2021 report they see AI having significant impacts on digital customer experience over the next two to five years. And most of them see “gaining actionable customer insights” (27%) as the area where they see the most potential.

Roetzer said it is hard to find really good solutions to do this out-of-the-box. Noz Urbina of Urbina Consulting agreed, calling the technology nascent.

The bigger question for marketers beyond what kind of tools are out there is do we have the data to support the use case, according to Roetzer. And do we have a strong foundation of metadata, content tagging and content taxonomies, according to Urbina.

“You need enough data, for one,” Roetzer said. “Sometimes the problem is smaller data, not necessarily the cost. It’s do you have enough data to make it worthwhile to try and use a machine learning algorithm to do this better than a human would? Do you have enough traffic coming to your site to justify it?” Read On: