• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, December 9, 2016

Artificial intelligence has become a source of data for advertisers and their agency partners to identify consumer behavior. The idea is that machines can solve complex problems without having to be taught.

Google's artificial intelligence company, DeepMind, and the AI collaboration group of companies like Microsoft and individuals such as Elon Musk, OpenAI, in separate announcements earlier this week said each would make their technology available to researchers and developers or anyone else wishing to use it.

The independent moves by DeepMind and Open AI mark the beginning of a trend in the technology industry that will benefit advertising and media, as discussed at the MediaPost Search Insider Summit Friday in Deer Valley, Utah.

During the panel on using artificial intelligence to support ecommerce and search, Jacob Loban, senior partner and managing director at MediaCom, said the company's been working with Microsoft to gain insights across applications and agents like Cortana and chatbots to gain insights about consumer behavior. 

Connectivity across machine learning and AI remains in its infancy, but when connected the industry will see a significant change in the way search functions, Loban said. He referred to it as "semantic mapping on steroids." Marketers will gain a better understanding of consumers. Search will become more personalized with tailored results.

The tailored results will include personality. The AI data will give personality to chatbots, otherwise they are dump, said Sid Shah, director of business analytics for advertising solutions at Adobe 

Andrew Poon, VP of product management for Search at Yahoo, said marketers can gain a lot of information through conversational interfaces, but they can only add value after getting to know the user better.

Poon said giving the bot personality that matches the user helps to make the connection. "That personality and relationship is important," he said.