Eagle Eye’s Jonathan Reeve weighs in on AI Appreciation Day

The role of AI in business and society is still finding its place. Since the emergence of ChatGPT, the world's eyes have been transfixed by generative AI without fully understanding how it will be applied or where it should be positioned.

Gen AI vs Predictive AI

There is a difference between generative AI – the term on everybody's lips – and predictive AI. Generative AI engines rely on existing data patterns to create something new. In contrast, predictive AI uses patterns in historical data to project future outcomes. In other words, it can support strategy formulation and decision-making. Retailers already make data-driven decisions, but predictive AI's emergence can take it to the next level.

Biggest opportunities for the year ahead
The big opportunity in our area of personalised marketing is for AI to accelerate the transition to truly real-time marketing that reflects each customer's preferences and what is happening around them at the time, what we call 'marketing in the moment'. We think this will be as transformational for marketing as 'near me' has been for search.

AI challenges and opportunities

We see a lot of businesses struggling to see a positive business impact from AI, either because they lack the internal capabilities to capitalise or because the benefits from introducing AI were not as high as predicted. 

Our experience is that it is best to start by using AI to improve an existing repeatable process, as this is the most straightforward opportunity, and it's likely that third-party vendors may have already developed a solution. For example, we have implemented a third-party tool called Glean to help us improve how we search for information on our internal systems.

Why celebrating AI Appreciation Day matters 
Given all the hype and headlines about the impact of AI, AI Appreciation Day gives us the chance to step back and reflect in a meaningful way about how AI can help us as individuals and help the organisations we work in.