As the weekend routine of the “Better CMO” involves reading, amongst other little pleasures such as training before sunrise and meeting like-minded people at art gatherings, last Sunday I was chilling out on the pool side enjoying the FT weekend edition, and I came across a fascinating article by Professor Yuval Noah Harari about the power of data, and how algorithm could soon take control of our lives. All for good, as “most people don’t know themselves very well, and most people often make terrible mistakes in the most important decisions of their life”.
Can really data, algorithms, and ultimately Artificial Intelligence, make our lives better? Can a system help us to be better humans, better leaders, better marketers? Today, at IBM (my current employer) Artificial Intelligence is a big thing, and we are proudly ahead of many players with our cognitive systems. Cognitive computing, or the technology revolution that is literally change everything, is the combination of three capabilities: a system that understands natural language and human style communication, with the ability to autonomously generate and evaluate hypothesis based on facts, and finally adapting and learning from training, interaction, and outcomes. Companies are using IBM cognitive systems across a wide spectrum of use cases: from helping doctors to determine the best treatment for the rarest types of cancer, to directly engage with customers over a variety of channels like chat, IVR, social media, by answering customer inquiries.
Within a wide range of services available through API in IBM cognitive platform, Watson Personality Insights is the one that helps addressing the key point of Prof. Harari: if we know ourselves better, we can take better decisions. If we know our customers better, we can serve them better. If we know our team and our peers better, we can be a better leader.
The Personality Insights service is based on the psychology of language in combination with complex algorithms. On this ground, the service infers personality characteristics that are summarized with three models.
The first model is the Big Five personality characteristics, used for describing how a person engages with the world. The model includes five primary characteristics: agreeableness (a person’s tendency to be compassionate and cooperative), conscientiousness (a person’s tendency to be organized and thoughtful), extraversion (a person’s tendency to seek stimulation in the company of others), emotional range (the extent to which a person’s emotions are sensitive to the person’s environment), and finally openness (the extent to which a person is open to experiencing a variety of activities).
The second model is about Needs, and it includes twelve characteristics: excitement, harmony, curiosity, ideal, closeness, self-expression, liberty, love, practicality, stability, challenge, and structure. In marketing literature, the twelve categories of needs reported by the service are described as desires that a person hopes to fulfill when considering a product or service, and therefore have a direct influence on consumer behavior.
The third model, values, describes guiding principles and motivating factors that influence a person’s decision making. The model includes five dimensions of human values: helping others, tradition, hedonism, achieving success, and openness to change.
While the minimum requirement is of 100 words to activate the service, more text will make the service more reliable. With 3000 words sourced from either Twitter, email, blogs, wikis, and forum posts (the system was trained on specific online media), you can have in seconds a thorough personality portrait. It’s really fascinating, and the number of potential applications is absolutely mind blowing.
I will explore more about this in the coming blog posts, other than testing the service on myself, and sharing what Watson Personality Insights is reporting about me. Stay tuned.
