Pension advice and Artificial Intelligence

by Fraser Ingram, 21st September 2010

We've been working with web developers Objective Associates on some new technology that they're proud to launch. The launch site is one of their latest offerings, Now Retirement, a lead generation system dedicated to providing qualified, no risk leads to the financial advisor community from the public searching for pension advice and other financial products. This site, and the related sites that OA have in the pipeline are all very cool at generating leads for financial advisors. But it's the artificial intelligence (AI) technology that really gets us excited.

Amazon have been using AI for a number of years to up-sell products to users, presenting it to customers as "people who bought this also bought these". As you can see from the Amazon financials, along with their other online marketing techniques, it's all working very well for them.

So what about the smaller e-commerce shops, how can they use AI to increase sales in their online stores?

The techniques used in Now Retirement present users with content and calls-to-actions that are appropriate to each individual user based on their viewing history and the viewing history of the other users of the site who have indicated similar preferences. The aim is to improve both the "stickiness" of the website (how long people spend on the website) and of course the conversion rates of visitors into customers.

The technology we've developed with OA can also be used on e-commerce websites to recommend products to your website visitors, again improving the stickiness of your site by encouraging your visitors to explore your product range and improve your conversion and up-selling rates. By tweaking the settings of the recommendation engine, you can begin to influence the recommendations that the AI recommendation engine makes. So if you have high margin products that you wish to push, or products that have been sitting on the shelf for a while - you can change the recommendation settings to let your customers know about these products. It's all very simple to use, but it can make a radical difference to the sales through your e-commerce website.

So how does it work? Well, we can't give away our secrets, but it's all based on Bayesian Artificial Intelligence techniques. The technology is delivered as a flexible web service. If you're interested in trying it for your site, get in touch with us or Objective Associates.