By Alexander Gu

Dixons Carphone, British retailer, recently used AI to corral shoppers towards their stores with the line “The time is now”. Saul Lopes of customer marketing at Dixons believes that they were successful because they didn’t have the words “Black Friday” in it. They had dozens of potential lines, but they all contained “Black Friday”, it was the AI that had this original idea.

The AI used was developed by Phrasee, a software company headquartered in London. Parry Malm, the creator of Phrasee, built his company with the ideas that technology existed to develop human creativity. Standard copywriting has three steps, editing, argument, and approval. Phrasee does the same thing, but through Deep Learning, using parameters and pre-set limits to give the program guidelines. Phrasee absorbs millions of emails and other data to create good slogans.

The amazing part about AI is that even though Phrasee gets fed a ton of data to base its decisions off of, it still has original and unseen ideas, such as the “The time is now” slogan. “Copywriters shouldn’t fear that AI is about to take their job”, says Mr Lopes, because they are still needed to get the ball rolling. “But the human brain can’t look at thousands of options. Our writing team sets out the strategy for the messages, we haven’t replaced them.”

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