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ChatGPT, Dall-E… AI is making a lot of global noise, especially taking over the advertising and marketing industry with great hopes of making it better. At Albert, we believe that AI isn’t about fully replacing us humans. Instead, it’s about empowering marketers with tools that help with some of our tasks, and free us to focus on business driving strategies, that take our efforts to the next level. 

Albert was developed based on the notion that you can simply get much more done and see immediate results in less time than you could expect. It’s the AI platform that combines marketing departments, plans advertising strategies in advance, executes campaigns, and optimizes along the way. 

To provide an idea of what’s possible when advertisers join forces with AI, we decided to pull the curtains for a behind the scenes look at our customers’ campaigns. Check out these 4 case studies: 

1) A Retail Brand Increased Return on Ad Spend by 30% with Better Efficiency and Insights 

Challenge: Crabtree & Evelyn has been pampering customers with home spa products and fragrances, among others, since 1972 in over 200 stores across 65 countries. Its advertisers managed campaigns manually and kept reaching the same audience. The company wanted to reach new audiences, yet lacked necessary insights. 

Solution: Albert gained data from all previous media campaigns initiated by the brand, understanding what’s working via multivariate testing, and only then, cautiously, used the company’s budget to run new and smarter campaigns on social and search platforms 

Results: The company welcomed new personas data and, with Albert’s insights, understands its customer journey better. That contributes to both branding and product development. Return on ad spend quickly increased by 30% – without increasing media spend. 

Read the full case study here. 

2) A CPG Brand Gains a 20% Revenue Increase during the Most Competitive Time of Year… in Previously Considered Lackluster Geographies 

Challenge: A high growth CPG brand, with thousands of products, needed to grow its margins for established distribution channels as well as its developing eCommerce presence. It needed to do so in a crowded market. Moreover, it decided to let go of its agency and needed in-house help. 

Solution: Around Black Friday, the country was split between the agency and Albert, the latter getting less valuable territories. Albert combined previously connected campaigns into one prospecting machine, and discovered profitable customer micro-segments. It autonomously strategically shifted budgets between channels. The scale it reached was more than a human could do. 

Results: At the most competitive time of the year, in geographies the brand discounted, Albert generated a 20% revenue increase for the brand. 

Read the full case study here. 

3) FMCG/CPG Company Reduces 72% of Costs After Quickly Testing 11,340 Options 

Challenge: A global snack food company wanted to increase registrations for its loyalty program. 

Solution: Using all the historical data, Albert targeted the most obvious customers and reduced the cost per lead from $10.75 to less than $3 – within a week. Then, it started testing other audiences and gave them more signup options. It created 30 ad sets, tested them out, paused the low performing 15 creative assets, and autonomously shifted the budget to high performers. Then, the company was able to produce more accurate new assets. Albert used them to create 30 more ad sets. 

Results: After quickly testing 11,340 variations in strategies, channels and audiences, Albert had 35 ad sets it created, which, together, delivered 87% of the budget. The added bonus? The company discovered their audience doesn’t respond well to the character-focused messaging it had been using. Instead, their audience prefers promotions while getting shown a range of options. 

Read the full case study here. 

4) Global Insurance Firm Increases ROAS by 130% Within 30 Days, 200% Within a Month 

Challenge: Siloed marketing efforts and lack of data kept a global agency from scaling. 

Solution: Albert took over the company’s advertising. It discovered new insights, such as when there was a need for more visuals, as well as new audience segments – all within a week. 

Results: The goal of 130% return on advertising spend was met within 3 days. 200% within a month. 227% year over year conversion increase. 

Read the full case study here. 

Skyrocket Your Campaign, Too 

When advertisers work with Albert, you give it your KPIs and creative assets. And access to your data, of course. Albert takes over all the time consuming stuff – planning your strategy, executing your campaigns, restructuring creative assets in a large variety of combinations, optimizing audience targeting and budget allocation… you name it. It has over 200 skills. 

That said, Albert is, of course, a software. A very smart AI software, but still not a human being. Therefore, anyone who works with Albert also gets an account manager and a campaign monitor, who verify Albert doesn’t make some embarrassing mistakes. Advertisers get lots of automation without giving up campaign control. 

Make your next campaign (and the one after that) a success story. Check out Albert here. 

An interview with Sagi Weinberg, Sales Director at Albert

We completely understand why people fear the recent uprising technology. “As ChatGPT, MidJourney and other AI tools gain popularity, people hear about their phenomenal capabilities, yet aren’t familiar with these technologies. Therefore, they tend to think that, just like AI-based robots have replaced employees in large logistical facilities, they’ll replace content writers, programmers, designers and marketers,” says Sagi Weinberg, Albert’s Sales Director. Sagi, a long-time digital marketer with background in Sales, has vast experience in leading brands to great success. Sagi is highly experienced in planning and executing holistic marketing strategies aimed to drive measurable and sustainable bottom line results by identifying the business’ structure and needs, considering online and backend flows, creating a healthy marketing mix, devising a full funnel, channel-customized approach and implementing the right technologies.

With the latest talk about AI, many online publications are capitalizing on this trend, as amplifying fears means amplifying clicks. Before we know it, a range of professions seems to be on the edge of extinction. But for marketers, at least, it’s not the end of the story. As the following interview clarifies, AI won’t replace marketers. 

Why AI Makes Marketers More Valuable 

It’s true, Sagi says – “humans have inherited limitations. They take vacations, take weekends off, get sick and need to sleep. A machine doesn’t. It also doesn’t tire or get confused by processing amounts of data humans simply aren’t able to.” So again, marketers’ fears are understandable. But “that’s exactly where humans can capitalize and use machines to enhance their capabilities,” Sagi says. 

Set the Foundation for More Efficient Campaigns 

“AI helps you connect the dots between online and offline marketing efforts,” and between top and bottom of the funnel, Sagi says. “It closes the loop on the whole funnel,” he says. 

Therefore, he explains, marketers can focus on a coherent, unified strategy that leads to better growth, more efficiently. 

Simplify and Deepen Market Research 

… and do so at a greater speed, Sagi says. AI can find low hanging fruit audiences that us humans never would have considered, like Americans buying gifts for an Australian holiday because they have loved ones in Oz. It can also let you know how to communicate better with your existing, but lower performing audiences. 

Test A Wide Range of Creative Assets 

There’s only so much campaign managers can do manually on a daily or weekly basis, but there’s no limit for what AI can do. In our platform, Albert, for example, you can automatically test a wide range of copy-visual combinations to quickly find the best fit for each audience segment. It actually does it for you, without the need to set anything up. With one time setting and uploading of assets, Albert creates new creative sets for either search or social platforms, knowing the limitation of each platform (creative wise). 

Free Up Your Creativity 

Even though AI takes the mixing and matching of creative assets, humans are still the ones creating the assets. In addition, according to Sagi, when AI does the heavy lifting on time consuming activities, such as massive testing and data analysis, marketers have more availability to delve into and express their creativity – not just in copy or design, but in strategy, too. 

As Joe Hart, president and CEO at Dale Carnegie & Associates, reports, “creative companies are 1.5 times more likely to command a greater market share” and 67% of “the most creative companies… had above-average organic revenue growth.” Meaning, AI won’t replace marketers because companies need the marketers that combine forces with AI tools. 

Make the Most of Your Budget 

Sagi says that, with AI, “you can manage budgets in an unbiased, efficient manner. AI tools don’t have a platform preference. They can look at your whole activity from a bird’s eye view, and automatically shift budgets within the channel and across channels, toward the best performing activities.” 

Optimize 24/7 

“Campaign managers, and CMOs use tools like Albert to perform optimizations 24/7, even when they sleep,” Sagi says. “AI can analyze huge volumes of data at any given moment. Tools like Albert are capable of simultaneously analyzing stats of multiple ads, across multiple campaigns in various platforms, and across different channels,” he says. 

“Plus, rather than looking at last month’s best performing ad, keyword or audience, which us humans usually do, AI can do it live, while also exploring new audiences,” he says. “It uses one set of logics that make all the decisions unified and persistent, without compromising KPIs,” he says. 

And it keeps you in the loop. Albert, for example, “plugs into your ad account, manages the activity and later shows the number of calculations that were made, the amount of actions that were taken, the best performing ad variations and geographies. It breaks down the most relevant audiences and provides in-depth insight on every step of the marketing funnel in every channel respectively, as well as the whole paid media activity holistically, to help marketers make the right decisions in terms of brand-level creatives, localizing creatives for specific markets, and all the way down to adding keywords they could never have discovered otherwise to a landing page,” he says. 

Before AI, “humans could only dream of such efficiency,” he says. 

How AI Helps Marketers Prove Their Value to the C-Suite 

As a late 2022 LinkedIn and YouGov survey revealed, “77% of CMOs globally feel under pressure to prove greater short-term ROI on their marketing campaigns.” 

Sagi agrees. He thinks that, not only AI won’t replace marketers – but it will also help them keep their jobs and thrive professionally. “A clear view of results is essential for decision makers,” he says. Thankfully, “there are many ways to test the efficiencies of humans vs. machines. Efficiencies can be measured on many levels, including saved time, growth and other success metric improvement,” he says. 

You can even measure the machine’s success directly vs. your best PPC marketers. But be aware – every time we did this here at Albert, the machine won. So be prepared to share that alongside the achievements your human team accomplished thanks to more time, better data processing and deeper audience targeting. 

AI Won’t Replace Marketers Because AI Needs Marketers to Succeed 

According to Sagi’s insights, today’s popular AI tools are great for amplifying marketing, but marketing management still requires the human element. Marketers are still needed – and will be needed for a while – to develop and manage the vision, goals and business model. They need to decide how they measure KPIs, and take all the above into account, in addition to the company’s limitations, when reviewing actionable analytics and deciding on next steps, he explains. 

Therefore, it’s marketers who “decide on appropriate budgets, determine dates for time-sensitive or seasonality related promotions, etc. Those are strategy level decisions humans will always be necessary for,” he adds. 

And there’s more. Marketers are the ones who understand their brands best – on top of industry regulation, sensitivities and brand safety. “They need to make sure they adhere to those requirements,” he clarifies. 

“This is how Albert was designed,” he says, inviting you to get in touch for a free demo with his team. “It was designed to work hand-in-hand with humans. Humans are the ones who set the guardrails, define guidelines, and have a confined framework configured to the AI to work within,” he says. “It’s your brand, and you’re still its leader.”

With ad creative optimization subject to user biases, like preferences for bold headlines, images, and colors, etc., Zoomd-owned Albert AI technology enables true creative optimization driven by real-time creative performance across products, ads, campaigns, and market segments.

One of the last areas of marketing to benefit from AI-driven optimization is ad creative.

The actual creation of ads will probably be the last area of marketing to benefit from AI-driven technology, even with the recent breakthrough of technologies like Chat GPT-4.

But the optimization of ad creative is very well-suited for AI technology today because of the subjectivity people apply when optimizing ads. While it’s easy to compare the performance of two distinctly different ads, optimizing creative performance to determine the optimal size and color of the font for the ad’s headline and other subjective creative elements is difficult for people because of our inherent biases.

“A creative director who has succeeded with bold headlines or has a preference for certain colors and color combinations will bring these biases to the ad creation and optimization process,” said Nir Huberman, VP Product at Albert AI, part of the Zoomd marketing and publisher platform. “But Albert is more methodical, breaking down each potential parameter that impacts performance, testing each one by one. That’s why Albert’s technology can improve creative performance by optimizing ad parameters from among the options provided which enables exceeding client KPIs. Albert also provides a lot of value for marketers by knowing when to refresh or replace an ad’s creative.”

And by determining which ad creative performed best using Albert, marketers are in a better position to create new ads that will perform.

An e-commerce company contracted to work with Albert AI with the stated KPI of increasing Return On Ad Spend (ROAS) by 500%, a KPI that Albert’s team believed was realistic. A few months after the conclusion of the onboarding process, Albert achieved an 800% improvement in ROAS. And in subsequent years, this e-commerce company, now in its fourth year working with Albert, is still achieving improvements in ROAS that are between 10-20%.

For this e-commerce company, Albert was able to optimize ad creative by creating the best-performing ads for each target segment and each ad platform/channel. Albert’s technology creates the optimal ad by selecting the best images, colors, fonts, and texts that will generate the most cost-effective performance for the target audience. Finally, Albert’s technology was able to efficiently determine when to refresh and then change ads to ensure optimal ROAS.

Albert is an advertiser and an agency’s autonomous marketing ally. The technology leverages AI to create ads that optimize campaign performance, from keyword, audience, platform, and device selection and bidding to creative optimization across search, social, display, and cross-channel. Albert assists marketers and agencies – from defining campaign strategies and messaging to the creation and optimization of ads across audience segments and platforms. By working 24/7 to continuously optimize campaign performance, Albert AI complements marketer and agency teams, giving them the insights to make them smarter as well as more efficient and effective.

We’ve been hearing about robots taking over humans’ jobs for decades in almost every professional specialty imaginable, including industrial factories, the legal industry and, of course, advertising. 

Yet here at Albert, we believe in human-machine collaboration (AKA advertising technology). There are some tasks that only humans can do, so outsourcing the rest to machines helps us do them better. But what makes a great collaboration? You know, the kind that generates significant results, that make advertisers the new stars of their companies? 

To find out, we talked to our very own Product Solutions Manager, Nir Huberman. Nir has been in the industry for about a decade and a half. At Albert alone, he spent the past 12 years climbing his way up from head of optimization to head of product and, then, to VP of product solutions, so he has tons of behind the scenes knowledge. Here are his top requirements for machine-advertiser collaborations that will increase your bottom line in 2023. 

1) Create a Holistic, Omnichannel Marketing Operation 

If your marketing departments work in silos, you’re not alone. Too often, companies separate teams per channels, platforms or strategies. They have different departments for Google, TikTok, direct marketing, digital marketing – you name it. It’s understandable, as every part of marketing requires its own specialization. But no channel or platform exists on its own. 

What you do on one platform impacts how customers experience your brand elsewhere, online or off. Just as importantly, the data you generate on one platform can help you optimize results everywhere else you operate. 

Therefore, after working with leading brands from across the world, Nir suggests unifying your entire marketing operations. This is especially useful when working with machines. You already have a machine that can process lots of data, plan and execute a complex strategy… You might as well make the most of it and let it optimize your entire marketing results across channels. 

2) Combine Paid with Organic 

Nir recommends taking your holistic marketing collaboration even further by combining paid with organic into one plan. 

“As a strategic business, you want to use your paid efforts to empower your organic efforts – brand awareness, direct communications, loyalty programs, email, etc,” he says. “When you strengthen your customer base, you create a business that’s objectively healthier,” he explains. 

3) Plan Way Ahead 

“If I give my machine a $100,000 budget in November and don’t tell it there’s this thing called Black Friday, it’ll likely blow the entire budget before Black Friday. The same goes for annual planning,” Nir says. 

“Look ahead at your entire year. This is my budget, these are my KPIs, these are my strategic dates, milestones and promotions across the year. Strategize on an annual level, and your advertising machine will work much more efficiently,” he says.  

4) Set Undisputed Success Metrics 

The most critical part of collaborating with machines, according to Nir, is getting clear on your KPIs (key performance indicators or success metrics). Often, we want… 

=> Leads, but also to… 

=> Limit how much we pay per click, but also to… 

=> Determine our lead to sale conversion rate, but also to… 

=> Use multiple tools to measure the same metrics, but also… 

… it’s a sure way to set ourselves to fail, or at the very least, leave ourselves without an accurate measurement we can use to strategically predict future success. 

“Understanding what’s actually essential for the business and being specific are prerequisites,” says Nir. “When I tell a machine to rely on Google Analytics, it pulls all the data and studies the process there. If I change things a week later, I lose everything the machine has learned and need to start training it from scratch,” he says. 

5) Conduct Ongoing Monitoring 

Another key requirement when choosing and working with AdTech is your ability to monitor its activity and impact how it will move forward. “Don’t just set it and forget it, or come back a month later,” Nir says. 

Sure, your advertising machine relieves a lot of your previous duties, but your help is still needed. “Look at how your campaign is going at a high level, and if something looks off, talk about it with your account manager or make changes in the software. Maybe you need a specific integration, for example. Either way, without your feedback, it’s hard for the machine or its providers to help you, because there are things only you and your team know,” Nir says. 

6) Choose Great Tools 

Nir stretches the significance of choosing tools that actually support your goals. Once you figure out your long term and short term KPIs – remember to be specific and consistent – make a list of everything you want to accomplish with the type of tool you’re looking to add to your toolbox. 

“There are many tools that help you run campaigns. Usually, they recommend what’s best to do, or you set a test and use the tool to better understand your audience. We built Albert to both plan and execute campaigns. Among others, it builds a budget, manages your creative assets, stops what doesn’t work, continues what does, and so much more,” he says. You need to understand what’s missing from your current arsenal of team members and software products, and only then go out and get it. 

7) Trust the Process 

“Think about autonomous cars. There are many driving aids, but there isn’t a car where you get in, tell it to take you to the office, and that’s it. You still have control over the car. You can still make changes. But you need to trust the car to take you where you need to go. Yet people are scared. And it’s hard for them to let go of control in campaigns too. For some, there’s a big fear to let go of a large media budget. For others, they think they can drive the campaign better than other humans or machines,” Nir says. 

“We see this with Albert. Sometimes, people don’t give it enough creative materials to allow it to efficiently optimize, or give it too many restrictions,” he says. Again, it’s important to stay on top of what your machine is doing, to monitor it, give feedback and make adjustments when necessary. You’re in charge of teaching it how to serve your campaigns best. But simultaneously, you’ve got to let go and let it do its thing if you want it to thrive. 

Is There Really a Robot You Can Trust to Combine Departments, Plan Ahead, Execute Campaigns, Optimize as it Goes and Leave You with Full Control? 

Yep. It’s called Albert. 

We built it to be an AI marketing solution that’s basically your self learning ally – with over 200 skills. To give you an idea of what you can expect with Albert: 

=> You give it your KPIs, creative assets and analytics. 

=> It plans and executes your advertising strategy. You don’t have to choose which one to automate. 

=> It takes your creative assets and restructures them in a wide range of ways, so it can run countless tests across channels. 

=> You get protection mechanisms – both an account manager and a campaign monitor – to prevent unwanted mistakes. 

=> You get lots of automation, but still maintain control to verify Albert focuses on what matters most for you. 

It’s like getting more time, or an extra team member. Click here to learn more, let go of day to day tasks, and focus on business driving moves. 

What is Cross-Channel Marketing?

Hubspot defines cross-channel marketing as “blending together your various marketing channels in a way that creates logical progression for your target audience to progress from one stage to the next.” In other words, cross-channel marketing involves using different channels to make sure consistent, holistic, and seamless messaging is reaching your target audience across devices, technologies, and platforms.

The Importance of Personalized Marketing

Cross-channel marketing is the best way to reach more people, build better audience connections, and drive ROI. According to last year’s Salesforce State of Marketing report, 84% of customers say being treated like a person instead of a number is very important to winning their business. It’s so important that 69% of buyers even expect Amazon-like buying experiences – like very personalized recommendations – that only a truly cross-channel approach can deliver. Marketers have realized this need by noting it as their #1 priority; however, it’s also their top challenge. Only 49% of marketing leaders report providing an experience that completely aligns with customer expectations. High performing marketers stand out by delivering personalized messages to the right people at the right time on the right channels.

Solving Cross-Channel Complexities

Delivering personalized messaging is daunting, so many marketers avoid coordinating across paid search, social and programmatic channels due to the complexity and speed required to execute. With so many moving parts to keep track of, it can be nearly impossible for even the most sophisticated marketing teams or agencies to break down silos, sync up, and maintain consistency across audiences, campaigns and promotions.

So, how can marketers execute effective cross-channel campaigns to keep up with the rapidly changing demands of consumers? Intelligent, cross-channel marketing AI software is proving to be the only way.

Machine Learning: The Cross-Channel Answer

There are inherent limitations when people manually optimize campaigns, try to align messaging across paid channels, and aim to inform other teams about insights gleaned from campaigns. Artificial intelligence tools can manage the complexities of personalized marketing involved in cross-channel campaigns at a pace and scale not humanly possible.

Autonomous AI software can conduct time-consuming, data-intensive tasks required to compete in today’s digital advertising channels. The technology can ingest and precisely measure mass amounts of structured and unstructured data from multiple touchpoints and interactions across channels. It is technology that can learn on the fly and execute on marketers’ behalf in ways that were previously impossible. Marketers suddenly discover that it is possible to master the challenging digital advertising landscape.

Successes With AI

Albert, the world’s first autonomous marketing AI, manages cross-channel, paid digital campaigns by using a complex, multivariate approach to relentlessly evolve and optimize towards the goals marketers provide.

Within the guardrails set by an agency or brand, Albert will optimize bids, shift budgets, and test creative combinations 24/7. The intelligent machine gathers valuable insights about the customer experience in a way that has never been possible before. For example, AI can uncover ad variations that are resonating with segments of consumers at a certain stage, identify which creatives are outperforming, and unveil prospects that brands can target to increase conversions in other channels.

Additionally, Albert’s technology aligns to each brand’s source of truth to inform marketers about the contribution that each channel delivers during different customer journeys, as well as impact on total conversions. Ultimately, an AI tool like Albert helps marketers understand the most efficient paths to conversion, achieve greater visibility, and drive greater ROI.

Marketing AI isn’t just the future of digital advertising; it’s already here and is proving to be the ideal way for marketing and advertising teams to achieve cross-channel success and stay ahead of the competition.

To learn how one marketing team tied real-time insights to cross-channel digital ad campaign orchestration using Albert, read this case study.

Creativity has always been the crux of advertising. So while artificial intelligence (AI) has been routinely used across digital media buying and ad campaign automation, why haven’t marketers fully embraced AI in the creative process? A recent report by Forrester Research reveals why AI is a critical piece of the creative puzzle and offers steps brands can take to inject AI into their creative processes.

AI Will Enhance Creativity 

Using AI for creative purposes doesn’t mean robots will be writing poetic prose or designing ads. AI’s role as a key player in creative teams is to provide the insights that stimulate thinking and inspire human creativity, enhancing a creative professional’s ability to develop and execute creative ideas.

According to Forrester’s survey, 74% of creative respondents reported spending more than half of their time on tedious tasks. Leaving mundane tasks to AI will allow them to shift their focus to making creative breakthroughs by experimenting with new methods and emerging formats.

Likewise, AI’s involvement can solve bandwidth challenges. Consumers are typically exposed to hundreds of digital ads in a given day. It’s crucial to optimize content and adapt creatives for different formats to effectively connect with target audiences at every journey stage. However, marketing and advertising teams simply don’t have the time or capacity to create large volumes of content. Enter AI as a new teammate, pitching in to customize and automate the creation and distribution of mass amounts of content that marketers can then use to effectively personalize their digital campaigns at scale.

Using AI in the Creative Process

Implementing AI early on adds more data-driven analysis and measurement throughout the rest of the process. When AI is incorporated in earlier stages, CMOs can improve the creative brief and reduce guesswork for their teams.

Brands need a deep understanding of the customer journey to deliver personalized experiences for customers. This requires two things: customer journey analytics and correct signals. Armed with these two tools, marketing teams can create always-on creative content across channels, formats, and devices. CMOs who rely on powerful data and technology to fuel their insights will have more opportunities to surprise and delight their customers – especially during critical moments.

AI Surfaces Real-Time Insights

Ads with an emotional pull tend to drive greater conversions, and creativity spurs the development of engaging, emotional ads in a saturated digital ecosystem. Because the rate of creative fatigue is so high, the ability to quickly see new creative insights – and learn what is or isn’t working – can make or break digital advertising campaigns. 

For Telenor, a global telecommunications company, this ability to glean creative performance insights in real-time was a key reason why they achieved a 423% increase in ROAS. Telenor worked with Albert to run multivariate creative and media testing across its digital campaigns. Telenor’s team could continually see fresh insights from Albert to become better informed about their audiences, understand what creatives were working, and learn strategies to incorporate in future campaigns.

Deliver on Your Brand Promise

By including AI in the creative functions of marketing and advertising, CMOs can leverage AI to foster better connections with consumers, surface previously hidden customer pain points, and deliver on their brand promise. Download Forrester’s report to get recommendations for applying AI into your creative process. 

People may never be able to fully understand how AI thinks, but transparency is still needed to build trust with users and optimize the productivity of these platforms.

How important is it to understand the technology we use? Practically everybody uses a computer on a daily basis, whether at work or at home, but relatively few of us know how that computer stores files or connects to the internet. The fact of the matter is that nearly all devices today operate at such a high level of complexity that understanding their inner workings is completely impractical. What really matters is that we produce results in partnership with that technology.

But artificial intelligence is different. A huge reason behind lagging adoption of the technology is the simple fact that it is misunderstood, engulfed by numerous myths and misconceptions that cause many people to worry that it will radically change their day-to-day work processes or even take their job.

Combatting those myths will take a degree of comprehension on the part of users, despite how complex the technology may be. Though AI may be too complex for anyone to fully grasp, even a rudimentary understanding will build trust with a skeptical public.

Can Humans Really Understand Machines?

A growing school of thinkers, including technologist David Weinberger and Facebook’s head AI scientist Yann LeCun, argue that understanding an AI’s thought process is not only unnecessary, but actually detrimental to the efficacy of the technology.

The main strength of AI, Weinberger argues, is that it makes decisions based on more variables than humans are capable of considering at any given time. Since the complexity, speed, and nuance of these decisions are beyond the scope of human understanding, rendering the technology understandable or explainable to the average user would require simplifying the process in such a way that would limit its efficacy.

Optimization Over Interpretation

But of course, this doesn’t mean that AI-enabled tools should be black boxes, completely illegible to their users. Though marketers may not be able to fully understand the technical details of how AI works, it’s clear the opacity of AI makes them worry about control — our recent customer survey revealed 25.5% of marketing AI users felt they had little control over their platform’s activity. Instead, measures of transparency should be introduced that allow users to at least understand the AI’s end goal in making a decision.

No technology is perfect, and at one point or another, any system will need to be calibrated. By giving their operators a certain degree of transparency into what inspires its decisions, AI algorithms can facilitate active collaboration with humans, which will only help build trust and dispel common myths about the technology. 58% of agencies responding to our survey said they discovered new audiences with their AI, but those kinds of insights can’t happen if marketers don’t trust the information they’re getting from their autonomous partners.

That’s the motivation behind tools like Inside Albert, which we created to grant users transparency into the world’s first marketing platform built from the ground up on AI. Instead of limiting the scope of the platform, Inside Albert gives marketers the information they need to calibrate and recalibrate the way they use Albert. Any understanding of how the platform works, even if it’s limited, gives professionals the opportunity to see AI as a tool that augments their work, rather than a threat that replaces it altogether.

Before AI adoption can really surge, some degree of transparency needs to be established. The real value of AI isn’t in its algorithm or its computing power — it’s in the relationship between that power and the human operator that understands how to leverage it. But that relationship has to be based on trust, and that trust has to be based in transparency.