Recommendation Systems: What Future, What Impact?
The Internet, a tool for opening up or creating echo chambers? What role do digital recommendation systems play? These influential algorithms suggest which products to buy, which articles to read, and which social media posts you should pay the most attention to. They’re ubiquitous and highly influential at this point and you really need to learn more about them as AI becomes more and more important. In this article, we’ll explore their effects and discuss their future.
Digital Recommendation Systems
Let’s look at digital recommendation systems. It is all these algorithms that suggest articles to read on the smartphone, posts to watch on Facebook, books to buy on amazon. Their goal, both right now and historically, has been to offer a relevant and personalized enough service that leads to an increase in the use of a service or to enable more sales. Their influence is growing as commerce, information and politics become more digitized. In some sectors, their importance increases, and the quality of their recommendations improves with the quantity of the information available. And this influence is not just that of a technical and commercial nature, it has also influenced how we consume and interact with different ideas.
Digital recommendation systems have simply systematized existing mechanisms. The various newspapers have always played this role for decades: offer content according to political orientation. Every bookseller displays books they know and appreciate. In a way, these merchants segment the real world and each offers their own bubble. Without the digital world, people must choose a supplier (newspaper, bookseller) and do their own sorting (article, book). The systematic personalization of the recommendation almost totally relieves us of these two tasks. As innocuous as it may sound, it makes it more difficult to dive into slightly different world perspectives and find things we don’t already agree with/like.
The Impact of Recommendation Systems on Business Operations
Recommendation systems are going to impact almost any business that interfaces directly with clients. What’s the main purpose of a business? It is to make more profits. How can a business typically make more profit? By selling products and services, typically. These two simple facts mean that almost all businesses will benefit from recommendation systems.
Recommendation systems, aside from the initial cost, don’t carry any risk. They don’t cost you a lot of money. They are not going to impact your business processes. What they will do is encourage customers to explore your product line more and make additional purchases. Even if the system only encourages 10 additional customers to buy an extra product/service, you’ll probably turn a profit in the long run.
In reality, however, depending on the business’s size, you can expect to make way more sales thanks to a smart recommendation system. A lot of large businesses have already implemented such systems and have hired entire teams to fine-tune it. It is going to become an absolute necessity as more and more businesses conduct their entire operations online. If you don’t want your business to get left behind and become less competitive, you definitely need to look into an AI recommendation engine for your business.
