How marketers are using AI and the rise of MLaaS

By: Amanda Young

Artificial intelligence has three core parts when being applied to marketing; big data, machine learning, and powerful solutions. Big data gives marketers the ability to gather large sets of data within a short timespan.  Machine learning is a great source for locating trends to help marketers come up with well thought out responses to the market.  Lastly, powerful solutions have the technology to interpret natural language data and other content, like social media and email responses.

Artificial intelligence and machine learning are common terms that are used interchangeably. It is important to clarify that artificial intelligence is the science of having computers imitate the acts of humans, while machine learning is that actual method of how machines acquire knowledge from data.


Back in 2018, 84% of marketing firms were either using or growing their usage of artificial intelligence and machine learning. So why is machine learning so important in transforming the marketing of different industries? In marketing, artificial intelligence is best used for:

  • Sales forecasting
  • Customer analysis
  • Personalized pricing
  • Voice recognition
  • Content creating 
  • Ad targeting 

In the past, marketers always had to make extremely well educated guesses when making decisions when it comes to the parts of marketing listed above.  Nowadays marketers have access to artificial intelligence that can make these decisions for them and since AI has the capability to hold so much data, there is less room for error when companies need to make big decisions.  Dataversity shared how in 2020, it is going to be more common that cloud service providers will offer MLaaS (Machine Learning as a Service) without actually having a data management center on site. Companies such as Amazon, IBM, Microsoft and Google have already implemented using these cloud service providers.