Can Artificial Intelligence Replace Community Managers?

Artificial Intelligence is the 21^st century buzzword and we hear things that already make us cringe: self-driving cars, robots replacing humans, articles being written by machines so why not the extinction of newly created jobs such as community managers?

Even though scary, artificial intelligence opens up an incredible amount of opportunities particularly in the digital marketing industry.

Currently, European small businesses have missed the rise of social networks[1]because of limited human and economic resources, and thus cut themselves off from their customers. In May 2016, I co-founded Artur’In, an AI-powered community manager, to enable small to medium businesses to take full advantage of the power of social networks in a simple, affordable and effective way.

Artur’In publishes content daily on its customers’ social networks and allows them to monitor and analyze their activities through a dashboard. In addition, the solution sends monthly newsletter campaigns and creates a website and a blog for each client. Over 1500 French businesses today beneficiate from the solution at 189$/month.

Initially, AI enabled us to solve three main challenges in order to launch Artur’In:

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1. Content quality
2. Content personalization
3. Low price point

In fact, in order to satisfy our customers, we needed to ensure personalized, different and good quality content at an affordable price.

We thus created our proprietary deep-learning algorithm. It first classifies thousands of contents daily by topic and geolocation. The algorithm then ranks contents based on their estimated performance on social media and selects the top 1-3% quality contents.Next step is formatting the contents to generate social media posts: creating a title, writing the post summarizing the article, adding the appropriate hashtags and selecting an appealing image.The posts are then automatically distributed to the social networks of a client based on his industry, the topics he selected and his location.Finally, the algorithm gathers results on each publication and becomes increasingly smarter in its selection and ranking of content.

Three key technical challenges were solved within 2 years:

• Topic creation in less than 15mn with very few (15) articles as examples
• Local identification: match any article with its corresponding location
• Automatic post redaction: scan the article content and generate a post accordingly

What’s ahead?

The content marketing industry is unquestionably disrupted by Artificial Intelligence, and Artur’In is not the only company benefiting from it. In addition to the Google, Amazon and Facebook contributing to the development of the technology, enterprises around the world use internal AI technology to automatize their marketing (Associated Press uses AI to generate 3000 articles every trimester[2]) and new start-ups increasingly emerge in that field.

Our challenge thus becomes maintaining a competitive advantage. We believe this entails ensuring continuous and up-to-date technological improvement, gaining market share quickly and providing excellent customer service.

“In the next few years, AI will enable us to put a little Artur robot in a client’s office listening to his conversations and create articles based on them” said Thierry Lunati, Artur’In co-founder and CTO.Our product roadmap follows Thierry’s vision as we aim to improve Artur until it completely fulfils the following job offer.

To achieve this vision and ensure continuous AI-development, a strong focus on HR is necessary as data scientists are scarce resources and the quality of that team is key to the quality of our service. Thus, one of the first action we took after our series-A fund raising was strengthening our HR department.

To increase market share and benefit from our first mover advantage we also reinforced our sales team and marketing budget. This enables us to quickly position our company as the main content-marketing solution for SMB and most importantly gain the trust of lead actors within the industries we are targeting.

Finally, investing in our customer service team is also key to the successful adoption of our solution. While AI enables us to automatize the work of a community manager, human interaction is still necessary to educate clients about the potential of content marketing and ensure over 90% customers’ satisfaction and renewal[3].

Artificial Intelligence is definitely changing the digital marketing field. Could it fully replace marketers in the future? Probably not but it will definitely change the nature of the game and make digital marketing more accessible.

Artificial Intelligence open source frameworks and research articles enable the industry, including us, to move forward. Today, our data scientists team made significant improvements to the available technology. Should we, like Google and Microsoft, publish our AI progress to contribute to the field or keep it private to maintain competitive advantage?

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[1]Annual Report on European SMES 2017, European Commission

[2]“Quand les robots nous remplacent déjà”, FranceTVInfo, June 9th 2015

[3]Artur’In Internal company data, November 9th 2018