Source: forbes.com
Artificial intelligence (AI) is creating massive ripples around the world. For some, it enhances customer experiences; for others, it reduces costs through automation. AI analyzes large data sets with ease, enabling better decision making and uncovering new business opportunities.
Now, it’s also working its way into content management. We’ve already seen examples of AI powering content processing and analysis, and it’s set to become a crucial part of the content generation process.
My company, Contentstack, was one of the first headless content management systems (CMS) to embed AI into its editor experience. Turnkey integrations with IBM Watson, Salesforce Einstein and MonkeyLearn have allowed our customers to leverage AI to create highly personalized digital experiences that go beyond standard demographics and traditional audience segmentation.
Here are just a few ways AI has already begun to impact today’s content management systems:
1. Text intelligence and analysis: AI can already analyze the tone and sentiment of content and suggest if it is suitable for the intended audience. IBM Watson and MonkeyLearn, for example, have developed intelligent systems that leverage natural language processing (NLP) to provide text intelligence services such as language detection, keyword extraction, profanity detection, news categorization, sentiment analysis and so on.
2. Automatic image tagging and categorization: Image tagging is a daunting and mundane, yet extremely important task. This is especially true for e-commerce platforms or royalty-free stock image sites where hundreds of images are uploaded every day. Success depends on displaying results that are both accurate and highly relevant to the searched keyword.
Until recently, automatic image recognition lacked the precision required for the task. However, the next generation of AI-powered image recognition and tagging tools can analyze images in seconds. Many platforms have started embedding these tools for keyword metadata enhancement, and this trend is likely to accelerate.
3. Voice-controlled platforms and services: AI-assisted voice services have gone from fantasy to reality in less than a decade. Services such as Apple’s Siri, Google Home, Amazon Echo (Alexa) and Microsoft’s Cortana are increasing the productivity of millions of people every day. Many content management platforms provide voice-assisted services, including voice-to-text and voice commands.
4. Personalized content and marketing: AI algorithms are capable of tracking individual users’ behavioral patterns and can use such data to predict future needs and expectations. This capability is helping marketers deliver personalized content to boost customer engagement, satisfaction and revenue.
Targeted advertising based on demographics and past behavior is the tip of the iceberg; individualized offers, highly-relevant product recommendations and dynamic websites that serve pages based on the user’s past purchase data and most recent actions are becoming table stakes in many industries.
5. Accelerated content creation: Artificial intelligence cannot yet create completely original stories. However, its capabilities, including those of NLP and natural language generation (NLG), can help accelerate the process of content generation. Some of the areas where AI is already helping is content translation, video and audio transcription, auto-tagging and metadata creation, grammar check and content protection.
The Future Of AI And CMS
Here are just some of the ways in which AI is likely to change tomorrow’s CMS platforms: 1. Advanced analytics: As companies become more customer-centric, the analytics that your CMS provides will likely become more sophisticated. Enriched with data on past behavior, your CMS will be able to understand the entire customer journey and may be able to predict the type of content that leads to the most engagement and the highest likelihood of a conversion.2. Interaction with other AI systems: We have seen how voice-activated devices (e.g., smart speakers) connect with other smart devices (e.g., LED lights, air-conditioners, etc.). With the pace of development across the AI space, we are not far away from the day when your CMS will be able to connect to these devices. Ultimately, AI will be able to optimize not just the content, but also the user interface (UI) and user experience (UX) for the best possible customer experience and satisfaction.
3. Real-time SEO recommendations: Imagine a CMS that is capable of identifying — in real time — whether your content is better than your competitors’ in terms of search engine optimization (SEO). It might highlight terms that you should or shouldn’t use and provide recommendations to get listed on the first page of target search results.
4. Intelligent digital asset management: When it comes to AI for digital assets, content management systems don’t have much to offer right now except for automated image tagging and categorization. However, with new sophisticated AI tools, you may one day be able to offer intelligent services like searching content within videos, automatic (and accurate) voice-to-text transcription of video content or identifying moments of high interest in videos.
Preparing For The Future
In many ways, AI and CMS are a match made in heaven — at least, for end users of a CMS.
Amidst all the excitement surrounding AI, one thing is clear: There is a lot of real-time development happening, and no single vendor or solution is set to dominate the market. In theory, AI can be applied to almost any domain, but since it learns from past behavior, a special-purpose AI is typically more useful than a generalized one.
For a CMS vendor to limit themselves to embedding a single AI (built in-house or not) into its product suite is foregoing the benefits of all the innovation taking place. Instead, CMS products should be architected to take advantage of any and all AI as they become useful and emerge as best-in-class for a particular domain.
Rather than competing against the global leaders in AI development, CMS vendors should view them as partners and focus their efforts on delivering a seamless user experience through both flexible and extensible product design. CMS developers, meanwhile, should look for CMS architectures that don’t limit what AI they can tap into for the applications and experiences they are creating.
In the world of CMS, the days of the single-vendor suite may be over, but the area of the pluggable CMS AI has just begun.
