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Cognitive Computing and the Pursuit of Personalized Digital Experiences

Written by Pete Prestipino | Jul 13, 2015 5:00:00 AM

Marketing automation and analytics platform NextUser is tapping into the power of IBM Watson's cognitive computing capabilities, enabling enterprises to provide more personalized digital marketing experiences to their users. 

 

By embedding Watson services and APIs from the Watson Developer Cloud, NextUser's Decision Engine now offers natural language processing technology and a deeper level of analysis to its platform in order to offer results with "cognitive and social characteristics." The system essentially takes linguistic analytics into account in order to help marketers understand personality and writing style. By integrating data and trigger interactions from channels including email, website, CRM and social media, and processing user activity with history, device, location, campaign, demographic and geographic data, marketers can ensure they are reaching consumers when and where they are most receptive to outreach.

 

"Applying IBM Watson to commerce represents a new opportunity for subscription and content websites to offer more personalized user experiences, which ultimately drives more business," said Matthieu Dejardins, CEO of NextUser. "IBM's strength in natural language processing and Watson's unrivaled cognitive computing technologies will help our business analyze and make sense of unstructured data to meet the increasingly sophisticated marketing needs of consumer websites. We believe that building knowledge about individual user preferences at scale will help revolutionize online consumer marketing."

 

The uses of such an offering are numerous and varied. Ecommerce book seller Alibris, for example, is working with NextUser to explore the writing style and specific traits of their top authors in order to discover new books and interests.

 

"Our mission at Alibris is for our users to find that perfect book they can't put down. We have millions of books, which makes the discovery process one of the most important, but also intriguing, challenges we face as a company," said Ben Bartels, ecommerce director at Alibris.com. "With NextUser, powered by IBM Watson, Alibris can now offer some of the best -- and most unique suggestions that will enhance our customers' reading experience based on their favorite authors' style of writing. The technology behind this is incredibly exciting, and you'll see us continue to evolve this experience."