A new partnership between academics and a local firm is exploring an innovative use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the marketing world.
AI experts at the University of Huddersfield Centre for Autonomous and Intelligent Systems (CAIS) are bringing their knowledge to the collaboration with Trio Media, a digital marketing agency based in Leeds.
The aim of the project is to build a conversational and generative AI tool that will help improve internal processes for the marketing agency, which in turn will help them improve their service to clients and become more profitable.
Objectives for the new tool will be to reduce miscommunications from poor briefings and the need for rework, structuring insights clearly to generate a thorough and accurate outcome and ensuring that the project is done right first time – which will therefore reduce costs and the time needed to deliver a project.
Dr George Bargiannis, Professor Mauro Vallati and Dr Emmanuel Papadakis, of the University’s department of computer science, are working together on the project.
The key innovation will be to combine knowledge graphs with generative and conversational AI to automate and enhance the client briefing process. This will enable the tool to ask the right follow-up questions and learn over time to improve the quality of the briefs being produced.
There is also potential for the tool to be used by other marketing agencies, as well as for the University of Huddersfield team to use the same principles to create further AI tools in other industries.
The partnership itself is through a 27-month-long Knowledge Transfer Partnership (KTP) which is expected to start in September.
Dr Bargiannis commented: “The main idea behind this project is to bring together different branches of AI to deliver a solution that is both performant and explainable. To achieve this, we combine knowledge-based AI, which is the technology behind Google knowledge panels with generative and conversational AI, which powers ChatGPT and similar groundbreaking tools.
“Knowledge-based AI allows us to tap into the collective knowledge and expertise of marketing experts at Trio Media to ensure that they remain at the heart of the tool to be developed. Generative and conversational AI will then allow users of the tool to interact using natural conversation, facilitating the marketing brief process and increasing Trio Media’s productivity.
“The first step is to understand the process at the marketing company, creating a human- understandable and machine-processable knowledge graph. Then in the second phase of the project, we will be building a chatbot that will leverage the knowledge graph we created to make it an expert in marketing, designed to understand and produce text that is marketing related.”
A graduate associate will be recruited by the University to be based at Trio Media for the length of the partnership.
Claire Daniels, owner and CEO of Trio Media, created the initial idea for the KTP project and is in total support of the potential growth opportunity.
She commented: “As a forward-thinking company, we have been keen to understand how we can adopt AI in our organisation in a way that will make us more productive and efficient. Whilst the market is swamped with AI marketing tools for content creation; we’re not interested in tools that are trying to replace our jobs. What we’re really interested in is how we can be more efficient and more effective.
“We looked for issues that were common in our own company, along with in other agencies. We found that scope creep, misaligned expectations and unclear briefs all added up to more hours spent on a project than needed.
“We searched to see if there was a tool to improve this process, and when we couldn’t find one, I decided we should build our own. The size of the opportunity here is huge in terms of our own cost savings and profitability, but also looking at how we can let other marketing agencies tap into this too.
“To develop the envisioned system, expertise in a range of digital and AI technologies is a prerequisite. While we have significant in-house expertise in delivering web and digital projects, we are missing skills, knowledge and expertise in AI, in terms of designing, developing, training, testing and deploying intelligent systems. The University of Huddersfield is uniquely placed to address these skills and knowledge gap, through the collective expertise of the CAIS research centre,” she continued.
KTPs are Government-funded programmes aimed at helping UK businesses improve competitiveness, production and performance, part-funded through Innovate UK. The programme involves a collaboration between an organisation, nominated academic mentors from the University and a recent graduate.
Trio Media is a digital marketing agency which provides strategic marketing support to clients through designing and building websites, Search Engine Optimisation, Pay Per Click and social media.
Based in Leeds, the firm has been operating for over six years, with clients across a range of sectors. They are now looking to innovate by investing in AI in order to increase efficiency and output.