Uberflip will be spending the rest of the year adding more artificial intelligence capabilities to its content management tools that automate recommendations, audience segmentation and rules around when content is shown.
The Toronto-based company, which helps organizations set up blogs, microsites and other digital hubs, announced its product roadmap for AI at its user event, The Content Experience. In a deep-dive session on the company’s strategy, Uberflip CEO Yoav Schwartz said the company worked closely with Bombora, a New York-based aggregator of B2B intent data, to create the AI features based on open source tools for machine learning and natural language processing.
“Before venturing into AI, we were a little nervous, because as marketers, we want control. We do not want to give that up entirely,” he said, likening the process of working with AI to making a meal. “You are the chefs — before they do their thing, they need ingredients.”
For Uberflip and its customers, those ingredients include rules, decision trees, audience segments and third-party data from sources like Bombora.
Although the company formally announced its AI capabilities this week, Schwartz said they are initially limited to making recommendations on blog posts or other related content to a single audience, with simple rules that allow certain kinds of recommendations to be automated or done manually.
“If someone’s on your case studies stream, you can probably make some good guesses on what they’re interested in and want more control,” he explained.
By the end of this year, however Uberflip plans to allow multiple rules that would have content chosen from a specific stream based on specific audience segments. This could include audiences who are segmented by job titles, such as “CMO,” or by accounts, such as “IBM.”
Uberflip beta tested the AI tools with a number of customers, Schwartz said, including Workfront, Pivotal and CareerBuilder. In a press release, several of the beta testers validated the recommendation capabilities.
“We have already seen an acceleration in our sales and marketing pipeline, with the numbers to back it up,” said Carrie Murphy, Content Marketing Manager at Revinate.
As with most other markets, AI is being explored by a wide range of companies in the content space, including Open Text, which recently launched its Magellan offering, as well as Box and others.
The Content Experience wraps up Wednesday.