Inside the black box: AI must be explainable to be ethical

The old adage that content is king remains as relevant as ever. It’s the reason customers come to a website or use a mobile application: to consume content, learn more, make decisions and complete transactions. Optimizely’s expansive built-in analytics provide a layer of insight into knowing how audiences react to content, but it’s taken to another level when combined with automated content and product recommendations. Using this approach, marketers and merchandisers are able to connect the dots as to what content and experiences actually achieve results. 

Knowing what kind of content to produce is a helpful start, but most DXPs offer only rudimentary support for how content is actually created.  Authors and administrators are expected to copy and paste into a web-based editor. Optimizely differentiates its DXP platform in a powerful way. The inclusion of the content marketing functionality (formerly a tool called Welcome) allows content authors to collaborate as never before. They can have open brainstorming sessions, vote on content to be created, track and review the content through its authoring, editing, review and compliance cycles. Finally, they can deliver for actual publishing. 

Personalization is considered to be table stakes by most web site visitors today.  This means organizations must know their customer base and be able to segment them into groups. Content and functionality must then be tailored to each segment to better cater for its needs. Optimizely has the ability to perform personalization using rules-based approaches (visitor groups) and expand even deeper using the company’s CDP offering. The Optimizely Data Platform (ODP) provides an engine that is capable of delivering segment-based personalization down to 1:1 individual experiences, all in a single platform.

Using the tools described above, marketers are able to follow a crawl, walk, run approach to driving more and more detailed segment-based experiences. This is another real point of differentiation for the Optimizely platform: its ability to support simple segment identification, experimentation and insights to more complex customer profiles, numerous audience segments, automatic segment identification and 1:1 personalized experiences. These would be exceptionally difficult to build piecemeal but with Optimizely, customers can start simple and grow into both depth and scale. 

The ultimate goal of customer journeys is to enable the monetization of relationships with customers. Optimizely once again differentiates itself thanks to the integration of full commerce capabilities that can be tuned to B2C, B2B or hybrid B2B2C models, all on the same platform. This dramatically reduces integration work and the work invested in identifying customers and assigning them to audience segments. Experimenting with content and conversion techniques is immediately actionable in the context of commerce, again, all on one platform.

Finally, the opportunity to build upon these fundamentals to scale and optimize results over time represents a significant opportunity for organizations that have invested in Optimizely. The use of Optimizely mature AI/ML engines, found in content and product recommendations and in personalized search experiences, is an example of this. However, the experimentation capabilities of the platform are the real hero. Optimizing conversions over time – building complex multivariate testing scenarios, applied across audience segments at scale – means that companies can deliver on every marketer’s dream: a fully customized experience, tailored to each customer and focused on delivering what will cause that customer to convert. 

It’s quite a lot to take in, but Optimizely’s call to fundamentally reinvent marketing is backed by its bold platform capabilities. It’s truly differentiated in the marketplace, as it offers comprehensive analytics, content creation and delivery, commerce functionality, search capabilities, SEO optimization, content and product recommendations, experimentation and customer profile and personalization capabilities. All of this is in one platform, integrated in one place. That’s quite a powerful punch and is why Optimizely remains the leader in digital experience platforms. 

• Black box AI – neither understandable or explainable – presents an ethical challenge. If we can’t understand why an AI is making a suggestion, we can’t tell if it’s biased or exhibiting signs of drift. Explainable AI offers the opportunity for AI to be transparent, sustainable and ethical.

• Organisations are responsible for ensuring their AI is explainable and so can be both ethical and sustainable. They will soon be able to demonstrate this through an ISO framework, which will certify development is ethical and undertaken with constant human oversight.

• Frameworks and guidelines will guard against bias by ensuring AI is both understandable and explainable. We are already seeing this with the EU’s AI Act which could become law in the latter half of 2024.

This article originally appeared in Thread, Edition 2. Thread is Kin + Carta’s quarterly magazine that cuts through the complexity of digital transformation. Making sustainable change real, achievable and attainable.