Microsoft's UK CMO: ‘We’re on the cusp of the fourth industrial revolution’
Brands need to be “waking up” up to the potential of bots and be aware of sensors, the cloud and machine learning as we approach the “fourth industrial revolution”, Microsoft’s UK chief marketing officer told The Drum.
Paul Davies, who spoke on the Advertising Week Europe panel dubbed ‘How smart cities will transform advertising’, explained how Microsoft is already looking to an automated, connected future when designing and collaborating on innovations.
“We have an app experience for people who are visually impaired, which is powered through bluetooth sensors to help them walk around all the way, through an electric car sharing company called Autolib,” he said. “Their mission is to reduce the number of cars in Paris by 25,000 in the next seven years...using data and the cloud to empower that."
Davies believes the world is “on the cusp of the fourth industrial revolution, the digital revolution”. This, he said, will be driven by omnipresence of sensors and devices, the cloud’s ability to link said devices and intelligent machine learning, as well as the increased capabilities of big data analysis.
"When you pull all that together you can create some really exciting and transformational experiences for businesses and consumers," Davies said.
Finally, the marketer said artificial intelligence will probably make the most noise in the retail sector. He added that the concept of bots in particular is “very exiciting”, however failed to bring up his company’s haywire ‘Taybot’ Twitter experiment, which went into meltdown in March.