A conference aimed at the future of e-commerce took place on the 15th of April 2019. It has presented innovative technological solutions in the area of Natural language processing and the afternoon block was about the future of online marketing itself.
The event was led by Martin Vokřál and, after the Jiří Fuchs’s foreword, who introduced activities of our Association for Communication Tools and IoT, six speakers were introduced within two topic areas. The morning programme was focused more technically, more specifically on the text analysis and translation tools. The afternoon block was rather aimed at the future of online marketing.
Vladimír Vacula opened the conference by presenting activities of a consortium research team of CYRRUS ADVISORY and Brno Mendel’s University and their MTA tools used for downloading user review, their analysis and furthermore displaying to users, all of which with a goal to ease shopping and get required product information.
Petr Hamerník from Geneea Analytics presented useful text analysis utilisation for solving user requests or customer feedback. He also showed possibilities of NLG (Natural Language Generation) which is able to transform structured data into, for example, sports articles.
Petr Ondrášek from Lingea focused on new trends in machine translation. Phrase translators are continuously being replaced by solutions based on neural networks where the best outcomes are reached by specialised models which have been trained via machine learning for specialised areas, for instance, travel guides or specific technical texts.
The afternoon block was begun by Petr Ždánský from PeckaDesign with information about suitable service and extension implementations which are currently worth aiming to in order to easily get to know customers and reach better outcomes.
Jakub Rejnuš, also from PeckaDesign, continued with a dynamic presentation of trends in online marketing where currently prevails a chase after technologies and the marketing itself is partly disappearing.
Lukáš Balek from VIVmail.cz presented how is Big Data already used in automatised email marketing campaigns and how it helps to reach better e-shop results and, at the same time, customer satisfaction.
The event ended with an E-commerce 2030 panel discussion where the presenters aimed at what the future holds and what most interesting aspects might be put into practice.
Among many things, the discussion also included a vision of 2030 in which you will not need to have an e-shop and you will only to “feed” Google with data. Similarly, customers will not do their shopping directly in e-shops but rather in the places where they find out the need for the purchase. That implies if a fridge tells you that you are missing a yoghurt, you will order it by a simple button press. The natural language processing will go in the direction of interactive communication with chatbots or devices such as Alexa which will be able to do independent shopping based on the communication. Furthermore, language technologies will present small firms an opportunity to succeed in foreign markets and quickly react to customer requests.
From the marketing perspective, technologies will take over a large part of communication with customers as end-users. Marketers will shift towards supervising whether their whole brand and presentation build up actually make sense.
A large thank you goes to Microsoft for providing us with premises, also to all the presenters and attendees.
On behalf of the CTIT Association Executive Committee
Jiří Fuchs
734 622 331