Jack Dorsey Says Twitter’s Getting An AI Makeover
By: D Wise One
Tags: Artificial Intelligence, Jack Dorsey, Chip Monks Stories, Twitter, AI

Twitter 2.0?

People keep saying Twitter’s on the verge of extinction. Other’s say it’s almost impossible to save Twitter (“it’s way past it’s tipping point”).

Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter disagrees, definitively.

In fact he promises that Twitter is not shutting anytime soon.

This issue was raised recently when Dorsey and Twitter’s COO and CFO Anthony Noto were on stage at the Goldman Sachs Technology and Internet conference in San Francisco. They talked at length about the company’s missions, current performance status and increased use of Artificial Intelligence to combat user-growth problems.

Fact is, Twitter still is the world’s foremost bugle of breaking news. A lot of people have over the past few years begun to use it as their primary source of information, relying on it’s superfast and brief nature. There’s another reason — people are more expressive in the virtual world on social media platforms like Twitter than in the real world. Be it sports, politics, entertainment, world affairs, anything and everything finds place on Twitter and starts trending.

Dorsey emphasised this fact and reiterated that the micro-blogging platform still sticks to its task of being the real-time information platform it has always been.

Instant news coverage on Twitter acts as its USP and the live broadcast strategy has ended up working wonders for the company.

Statistics yield that more than 5.1 million visitors were hooked on to Twitter during Grammys.

Would you believe, the company also saw a surge of 30% in adjusted profit margins from the company’s sally into NFL broadcasting, along with live tweets!

Since Twitter has been able to mint money out of its live streaming feature, it aims to double its efforts all through 2017. This, in turn is expected to entice advertisers, which would further contribute to Twitter’s revenue stream.

However, this is not something that will happen very quickly — it is a gradual process that will take place in stages over a period of time, say six to twelve months, as the company is known to hold a higher standard than its competition.

Twitter has always managed to set the bar for themselves much higher, which has translated into better quarterly earning reports.

Twitter is also a technology company — in fact one of the biggest ones in recent decades. So it’s intent to embrace Artificial Intelligence should come as no surprise.

Dorsey aims for a larger user pool by widespread application of AI-driven personalisation, so that using Twitter becomes easier for everyone.

During the above-mentioned discussion, Dorsey claimed that the company is increasingly relying on machine learning to customise the experience based on the user’s interests.

Jack Dorsey said Twitter is, “still the best place to get a sense of what’s going on in the world … but as we get better and better at applying machine learning and AI to our system, which we really haven’t done in the past — it’s been very mechanical — it gets easier and easier, and we believe that topics and interests are a big part of that future to make it easier.”

Dorsey also pointed to the recent addition of “Explore” tab in the mobile app which can be seen manifesting the beginning of more personalised, tailor-made experience around some definite topics. “As you exhaust your timeline you can go to explore and you can actually see topics. And the goal there is eventually to become a lot more topic-based and interest forward”, said Dorsey.

However, Dorsey was quite vague on the fact as to what exactly a more AI-driven approach means in relation to the timeline, though in terms of personalised experiences, this year has lot to offer is pretty evident.

“I think for the majority of our life we’ve been fairly mechanical and that manifests in making people do the work and now we have a much stronger machine learning artificial intelligence discipline within the company where we can do things for people. We can be more predictive and it allows us to create more experiences; a few are magical and feel like ‘Oh, Twitter is showing me something I wasn’t expecting and it’s great”, Dorsey said while dwelling on his AI-driven approach for Twitter.

Other than the aspect of AI, Dorsey has also made it a point to make the service more attractive to investors by buying USD 7 billion worth of stock himself. This act in itself echoes his focus and commitment towards the micro-blogging platform, which hopefully wouldn’t have to go under the hammer anytime soon.