Google LLC today declared that the use artificial intelligence has entered a new era, as companies move on from simply conceptualizing what the technology can potentially do to actually using it to elevate their businesses.

This new era is called the age of “Deployed AI,” which Google Vice President of AI Andrew Moore said in a blog post means having a “vision for transforming your business.”

Deployed AI is all about having a clear objective for using AI that can bring entire organizations together, aligning teams and engaging stakeholders, Moore said. More than that, it also means having a deeper understanding of the technology’s risks and benefits, plus the cost of change.

“Once deployed, success should be measurable with clear, objective metrics,” Moore said. “This encourages an ongoing cycle of refinement, allowing you to continually optimize results while reinforcing trust with your users.”

Moore cited the example of Google customer Unilever Plc., which operates more than 400 consumer product brands and boasts more than a billion customers worldwide. It’s using Google’s AI services to develop more personal relationships with every last one of them, he said.

“Using a broad range of consumer insights alongside Google Cloud AI tools such as translation, visual analytics, and natural language processing, Unilever is generating insights faster than ever before and gaining an entirely new understanding of what their customers care about,” Moore said.

One example is Unilever’s use of Google’s Cloud Vision API and Natural Language API services to analyze the metrics of a Closeup toothpaste marketing campaign across South Asia. The campaign involved encouraging customers to submit photos, and Cloud Vision API was used to understand the content of these images. Meanwhile, Natural Language API revealed audience sentiments by analyzing comments posted on social media relating to the campaign.

“Together, these insights continually reshaped the campaign, giving millions of users a genuine sense of participation,” Moore said. “ The campaign reached nearly 500 million people across multiple continents, generating measurably positive uplift in brand engagement and consideration in the process.”

Another example of a successful Deployed AI strategy comes from Meredith Corp., which operates the recipe website AllRecipes.com and other media brands. Meredith built the AllRecipe website using a manual review process that took several years and resulted in content that’s easy to classify and target based on user’s preferences. The company then used Google’s AutoML Natural Language service to replicate this process in a matter of weeks for more than 40 of its other brands, creating a custom, ready-to-use content classifier for each one based on existing data.

“Deployed AI is what’s possible when technologies like machine learning mature, and it’s why we believe the shift from the breakthroughs of AI to the applications of AI will be the most exciting chapter in its history,” Moore said.

Image: Google