How Artificial Intelligence in CMS will take Personalization to New Heights?

Setting the context – CMS, AI and Hyper-personalization

Content Management Systems (CMS) take unstructured data and extract meaning from what is any company’s most prized possession – information originating from target markets. The next step is to ensure automatic extraction of information from unstructured data, giving it a structure and plugging it into various processes of an organization for better use.

The introduction of Artificial Intelligence (AI) helps refine the structuring of data quickly, doing away with long drawn processes, reducing the chances of error or omission and basically speeds things up. The success of this has led to the next step – the creation of headless CMS, where AI can be easily incorporated with the latest versions, without the worry of compatibility with plug-ins or other limitation of out-of-box suites.

This introduction of AI has resulted in the personalization of digital retail experiences, primarily matching an audience to offers that they are hoping to find. AI is being used to analyze the behaviour of a visitor, their preferences as well as the context of their purchases. This kind of hyper-personalization is a step towards ensuring that irrelevant experiences are eliminated and there is a faster fruition to each search.

This brings us to effective content management which is the primary path to personalization. AI in CMS facilitates this. Gartner has predicted that AI will become intrinsic to all new software products in the next three years. At the same time, retailers have clearly understood that their CMS will have to enhance customer experience with hyper-personalization.

What can AI in CMS do Right Now?

So let’s look at what AI in CMS can already achieve for an organization:

Analyzing tone and sentiment of content: AI in CMS ensures text intelligence and analysis. It can go through large amounts of data and make suggestions on the suitability of content for the target audience. In fact, there are organizations that have developed intelligent systems that utilize natural language processing (NLP) to enable services such as language detection as well as keyword extraction, a profanity detector, categorization of news and also sentiment analysis among other functions.

Automating image tagging and sequences: Tagging images is a thankless yet important task. Particularly for e-commerce as well as royalty-free platforms, image tagging is absolutely essential. By automating this process AI has simplified the task no matter the volume of images uploaded in a day. This has enhanced accuracy in keyword searches, and ensured appropriate displays. Automation has also tackled the problem of precision, and tagging tools now work in a matter of seconds. Most platforms have also begun embedding these tools in relation to metadata enhancement based on keywords. 

Voice-controlled platforms and services: AI-assisted voice services are a reality and have become so in a relatively short period of time. Just look at the likes of Apple’s Siri, Google Home and Amazon Echo (Alexa) and how they have increased the productivity of millions of people globally. Several CMS platforms offer voice-assisted services including voice-to-text and voice commands.

Targeted Advertising and Content marketing: AI algorithms track users’ behavioral patterns to help predict their wants and desires. This form of targeted advertising that is done on the basis of demographics and past behavior is just the beginning of what AI in CMS can achieve. It helps content marketers to deliver personalized offers, provide relevant product recommendations and ensure dynamic websites are placed before a consumer with specific pages that are based on past purchase data as well as recent actions.  

Accelerated content creation: While AI currently cannot create completely original stories, what it can do, besides its abilities of NLP and natural language generation (NLG), is that it can speed up the process of content generation. Where AI works already in this sector is in the fields of content translation as well as video and audio transcription, auto-tagging and the creation of metadata, grammar checks and protection of content.

Practical Applications of AI Capabilities in CMS

Let’s examine how AI has enabled better content, better interaction abilities and swifter decision-enabling information. Here is a look at how it has already changed the way digital interactions take place across several popular platforms:

• A significant portion of Google’s millions of search requests goes to the AI system known as RankBrain. This in turn works on interpretation and processing of the search terms or the questions that are asked in searches. This AI system works then on understanding the semantics of the search and teaches itself to give you better answers along the way.
• The Associated Press (AP) has increased the number of stories it produces from 300 created by humans to more than 4,400 that are automatically generated over each quarter. In fact, a Gartner estimate pegged over 20 percent of business content created by machines in 2018.
• Website creation sites have used AI to interact with customers on the kind of website they want and have produced functional sites that did not need any manual coding or management in terms of overseeing a project.
• Bots on social media can be used to promote and propagate content and this enables marketers to publish as well as push content automatically across the platforms they want.
• Services such as those of airlines, flower delivery services etc., make use of AI to predict customer choices –  for everything, from flight destinations to possible choices of food and drink on board. The information collected is used to throw up the right recommendations for customers.
• Enabling conversions is what AirBnB does through its AI tool, which helps home owners set the price of their house each day based on what would make it more rentable. The right pricing will show up as green on their dashboards or red, in case it’s too high. Making a profit thus becomes easier.

While these are ways in which other organizations have made practical use of AI in their daily operations, here is a look at how AI has impacted popular CMS:

Impact of AI on Popular CMS

Besides automating actions to streamline processes AI has the ability to scan a large amount of data, detect patterns and put together information for various purposes based on patterns it sees. This information can then be placed in buckets and sent to various end points in the organization to help make swifter, more impactful decisions. Here is a look at how personalization abilities have been impacted with three major CMS providers.

Increase in Episerver’s Engagement and Online Revenue

With AI, Episerver introduced four key structures to their service – Content Recommendations, Product Recommendations, Triggered Messages and Product search. The right content recommendations help increase engagement. A natural result is that bounce rates decrease thanks to personalized recommendations to consumers. AI enabled this capability with recommendations based on real-time behaviour patterns.

Being able to also get personalized product recommendations has helped clients increase their online revenue and up order values as well. The use of AI to search and navigate has allowed Episerver to help their customers get to products faster, thus ensuring quicker sales. AI has also enabled personalized messages to be triggered and sent to customers, through a range of options enabling interaction with new customer as well as re-engagement of previous customers.

With AI, Sitefinity Boosts Quality of Personalized Content Based on Digital Assets

Sitefinity boosted its personalization approach by incorporating add-ons which enables its CognitiveServices module to sift through digital assets like images and analyze them. This helps Sitefinity to quickly create relevant metadata such as tags and alternate text, weed out inappropriate text and provide for personalized content for customers. Here AI helps content generation and its analysis directly by looking into context, sentiments, creating hashtags as well as auto-created summaries. With good quality content, customers have a quicker, smoother purchase journey and content marketers can make swifter decisions based on client activity patterns.

With AI, Sitecore Automates Personalization at Scale

Sitecore AI uses a machine learning framework to provide marketers with insights that aid prediction. This in turn helps automate delivery of personalized digital experiences. It is an add-on that helps Sitecore automate the process of identifying trends, creating customer segments and modifying page elements where needed in order to provide personalized experiences. With contextual experiences, customers are able to receive content that proves useful and pushes them towards action. Content managers can now have intelligent insights that helps them optimize their approach to create content and more importantly scale it up as and when required. Sitecore’s AI-Auto Personalization helps remove operational bottlenecks that may prove an obstacle to personalization, helps identify customer segments as well as provide the base for a special 1 on 1 digital experience.

How AI Can Transform Content Management

With such impact, let’s examine AI’s potential to transform content management:

• Spotting Gaps in Tasks: It can happen that editors miss gaps in content such as the request to ‘create new tree’ or ‘populate a sub-page’. AI can be triggered to identify such gaps and generate tasks for them ensuring that the loopholes are closed. It will also be able to, in the long run, determine whether your competitor has better content than you and will help you in making the right kind of changes. This will help a site feature increasingly on the first page of searches.
• Looking After Site Health: AI in CMS has the potential to identify non-performing pages that bring in no traffic. It can then flag broken links and send out alerts to content managers when images and video have stopped displaying properly.
• Ensuring Governance and Good Practice: While parameters for things like video and image sizes are currently rule-based, AI will have the ability to make recommendations based on interactions.
• Speeding up A/B Testing: Conventional A/B testing can be a long drawn out affair considering the number of permutations and combinations one has to go through, plus the analyses involved. AI tools can ensure the responses are achieved faster and several tests can be conducted simultaneously, rather than one following the other.
• Chatting and Messaging: Chatbots for customer support are common and can get a good deal of specific jobs done. The same can be introduced in AI for CMS, so you can consider triggering a chatbot to interact with content to optimize and support the tech teams.
• Interacting with Other AIs: AI holds the potential of possibly heralding the next innovation in spyware and business intelligence. Considering that they are usually placed in closed environments, they hold the potential of being developed to possibly interact with one another. Think of voice-activated smart speakers being the first step. Going forward, AI will be able to work not just on content but even on the optimization of user interface (UI) and user experience (UX) as well.
• The Ability to Upscale Analytics: With the focus being on customers, AI in CMS enhances its potential to become more sophisticated. With information on past behavior, it will understand a customer’s journey and be able to predict content that can lead to better engagement and more importantly, conversion.
• Intelligent digital asset management: While currently the AI ability for digital assets is limited to automated image tagging and segmentation, it will grow to be able to search for content within a video, automatically and precisely do voice-to-text transcriptions of AV content and even spot and display specific moments of interest in videos.

How Can You Prepare to Achieve the Most with AI in CMS

For the users of CMS, its combination with AI is the best thing that can happen to its end-users. It is clear, from the several ways in which AI and CMS are used that there is a great deal of innovation going on that is happening in real time. This is an advantage because it ensures that there can never be a monopoly of single brand as things go.

Based on the fact that AI can be used in just about any domain, and that its development is based on past behaviour, it proves more useful than any generic CMS. It is also important that CMS vendors work on creating suites that take advantage of AI as they develop, and work on being the best in the particular domain.

It is important for CMS vendors to work with global AI leaders, not in competition, but rather as partners and focus on creating seamless UX that is flexible and scalable. For this, CMS developers, will have to work on creating CMS architectures that don’t set a limit to what AI can do for them in terms of applications and experiences. As things stand today, in CMS, the single-vendor suite no longer holds water. The days of plug-in CMS AI are here and have just begun.

Read more: 5 Predictions for AI’s impact on Customer Experience in 2020