A Texas-based auto dealership says sales leads and service bookings are up significantly since it brought in AI-powered email from Conversica.
Conversica offers an AI assistant solution that uses AI-generated writing to engage in email conversations with customers.
Beck & Masten Buick/GMC used the AI assistant technology to chat-up old sales leads via email.
Plus, it used the AI-generated writing package to score more service bookings.
The result: Beck & Masten’s AI assistant “Anna” mined 200 hot sales leads from a database of 20,000 lost leads, according to Joe Pierce, the dealership’s general manager.
And Beck & Masten’s AI assistant “Grace” triggered 114 new repair orders in 60 days.
“I can’t think of anything that we’ve spent this amount of money on and gotten the results we got with Conversica,” Pierce says.
In other AI-generated writing news:
*Marketing Language That Works in a Coronavirus World: AI-generated writing company Persado says consumers are looking for marketing language with a different emphasis in the Age of Coronavirus.
Persado offers a software solution known for its ability to auto-write winning ad slogans and similar snippets of marketing copy.
“The name-of-the-game is balancing empathy and performance,” according to Susan Li, director, content intelligence at Persado.
Li says Persado analyzed 408 recent AI-generated campaigns and found that marketing slogans currently working best are those that accommodate the unease we all feel towards the virus.
“What’s impactful now is less attention-grabbing language and more care-focused language,” Li observes.
Specific phrases hitting home with customers include, “Welcome to shopping, couch edition” and “We will take care of you,” according to Li.
*AI-Generated News Service Makes the Case for Writer-Friendly Automation: AI news service Hoodline insists writing automation is not a threat to human writers.
“A common fear is that automation will replace human journalists,” observes Rose Garrett, head of content, Hoodline. “But Hoodline’s stories are designed to supplement the offerings of our partners, including CBS, Hearst and ABC — not to replace them.
Hoodline is an AI-generated writing news service that auto-writes stories on weather, local crime, high school sports, small business openings and the like.
Data for the stories is mined from public databases.
“In short, we want to cover local topics that newsrooms just aren’t focusing on, but that readers want,” Garrett says.
“And we aim to bring much-needed coverage to so-called ‘news deserts,’ where local news is threatened or nonexistent.
“In fact, our data-driven approach could one day enable us to cover thousands of cities.”
*Supergraphic Detailing Overview of 8,000 Tech-Powered Marketing Tools Released: Chiefmartec.com – a popular marketing technology blog — has released its annual supergraphic illustrating its overview of marketing technology tools.
It’s a whopper.
This year, 8,000 tools – including a number of tools featuring AI-generated writing — are featured.
“Forget shiny object syndrome,” observes Scott Brinker, editor, Chiefmartec.com. New marketing tools chase marketers “more than the other way around.”
Bottom line: This is a great supergraphic to check-out for a quick appreciation of the state-of-the-art when it comes to the latest in marketing technology.
*Tomorrow’s Journalism Jobs: A Fusion of Writing and Computing: Journalism school students looking for jobs in AI-driven newsrooms should do best with a mix of journalism and computing in their academic backgrounds, according to Viktoria Samatova.
She’s managing director, Applied Innovations Team at Reuters Technology — and featured in this wide-ranging Q&A on how Reuters is exploring the use of AI in the newsroom.
Reuters, like many news outlets that have embraced AI, often uses story templates to auto-generate articles from news databases, Samatova says.
In practice, an AI-driven news outlet will create a baseball game template, leaving data fields open to note who won, who lost, who hit home runs, who made errors and the like.
Once the template is forged, generating a story is simply a matter of filling in the empty data fields — using info from a just-finished game.
Says Samatova: “Today, many journalists are a little bit like aspiring computer scientists.
“One thing that they are involved in is templating work so that it can be used to create sentences via natural language generation.
“In practice, this means setting up a template where you indicate to the machine things like: ‘When you see this, create a sentence that looks like that.’
“The skills that are needed to effectively create the template are as much journalistic as they are computer science-y.
“That’s the combination of skills I would suggest an aspiring journalist to aim for.”
Samatova says another skill news outlets will also be looking for is the ability to use computer software designed to auto-generate charts, graphs and similar visualizations from databases.
Current day software capable of generating data visualizations includes Microsoft BI, Microsoft Excel, Microstrategy, Qlik, Spotfire, SAP and Tableau.
For an in-depth look at how many businesses are using this same method to auto-write and auto-illustrate business reports, check-out “Company Reports That Write Themselves,” by Joe Dysart.
*How AI Has Changed the News: Nick Diakopoulos, a key player in the introduction of AI in newsrooms, offers an in-depth look at AI-driven news in this 50-minute podcast.
An assistant professor in communication studies and computer science at Northwestern University, Diakopoulos is currently working with the Washington Post to find ways to automate coverage of the upcoming presidential election.
Says Jeremy Bowers, lead for the new Washington Post AI-driven lab: “We’re incredibly excited to kick off the R&D lab and create novel tools to benefit our readers and our reporters.”
*AI Poised to Revolutionize Journalism: “In two-to-three years, journalism will be ripe for disruption at an unprecedented level,” observes Przemek Chojecki.
A self-described AI entrepreneur with a PhD in math, Chojecki is on the Forbes 30 under 30 list and author of “Data Science Job: How to become a Data Scientist.”
Chojecki has already built a semi-automated publicity Web site, focused on interviews and coverage of business startups.
Currently, he’s tweaking Contentyze.
It’s a site designed for media agencies, news outlets and marketing companies looking for automated news.
*Key Benefits of Legal Document Automation: Automation of legal documentation offers a number of key benefits, according to the Woodpecker blog.
Woodpecker’s platform enables lawyers to auto-write frequently used legal documents using standardized templates – all from Microsoft Word.
Key benefits of automated legal documentation, according to the blog, include:
~Document Version Control: With documentation, frequently used documents are turned into easily accessed templates.
~Standardization: Relying on templates enables a law firm to standardize language use across all the legal documents it generates, greatly reducing the risk of errors or unfortunate manipulation of language.
~Clause Libraries: These ‘stock phrases’ storehouses enable users to standardize frequently used language and contract clauses.
~Conditional Logic: Such logic – relying on an if-then-else format — enables users to embed all the possible options for a document.
*Personalizing B2B Web Site Content for Each Visitor: CliClap CEO Yonatan Snir says his online solution takes a different approach to personalizing content for potential B2B Web site visitors.
Essentially, the company specializes in using AI to serve-up the right marketing content – text, images, audio, video – at the right time, to B2B customers looking to make a purchase.
“We start by looking at the right data,” Snir says. “Our machine learning weeds-out the irrelevant traffic.”
Instead, the AI focuses on learning from visitors who are relevant to a business, Snir says.
Unlike many other AI content management systems, the online software also homes-in on how a visitor behaves on a Web site, according to Snir.
“The majority of AI platforms that deal with content use natural language processing,” Snir says. “This concept limits them to support only specific languages.
“CliClap uses behavior data to track engagement with content across the entire journey.
“Therefore, we can learn about the correlation between articles and the value they provide the visitor — without needing to scan and analyze the text.
Plus, CliClap offers Web site owners at look at how previously untrackable content – like PDF-formatted marketing pitches – perform on a B2B Web site.
“We are able to measure how much time people spend inside a PDF and how many pages they viewed,” Snir says. “We are also able to continue the content journey inside the PDF.”
*AI Writing: A Smorgasbord of Implementations: Forbes offers an updated rundown of AI-generated writing in action, including implementations at The New York Times, the Associated Press and Yahoo!.
Other examples of AI installs include Commerzbank, which uses AI to write equity research reports, as well as a number of financial institutions, which use Narrative Science’s Quill to crank-out 10-15 page financial reports.
*Special Feature: Company Reports That Write Themselves
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–Joe Dysart is editor of RobotWritersAI.com and a tech journalist with 20+ years experience. His work has appeared in 150+ publications, including The New York Times and the Financial Times of London.