One of the important features introduced as a part of Sitecore 9 is Sitecore Cortex. In a keynote at this year’s Symposium event held by Sitecore in Las Vegas, Sitecore’s CMO Scott Anderson said:
"Think of Sitecore Cortex as your own personal data scientist, but it’s available to you 24/7, 365 days a year, there to help you identify opportunities, and to avoid cautions and hazard areas, making recommendations to help you to improve the performance of your programs and your campaigns, and to deliver better experiences for your customers.”
What is Sitecore Cortex?
Sitecore Cortex is a technology that utilizes machine learning. It works in conjunction with Experience Database (xDB) and XConnect. XConnect is a new cloud-enabled service layer that can consume data via RESTful API framework from any third-party data source (commerce, CRM, wearables, IoT..). Therefore it provides a more complete and holistic view of the user's interactions with the brand across every touch point.
What are the advantages of Sitecore Cortex?
We already talked about using xConnect and xDB. It has the power to reveal an organization’s highest value audience segments and help optimize website user paths. With Sitecore Cortex, the customer's behavior, decisions, interactions, and outcomes are continuously processed and optimized to unveil new customer segments and revenue opportunities, giving other brands a competitive advantage. Marketers not only benefit from a rich, holistic customer view but can now act on intelligent insights to generate omnichannel experiences that are highly personalized for each individual. This automatically personalizes the experience for customers by delivering the most relevant content.
Sitecore Cortex has a number of capabilities, for example a tool called Path Analysis, which analyzes and predicts a customer’s journey. It also scores content by running multi-variant testing on each message to create buyer categories, which can be targeted through automated personalization.
To break it down; this is what you can expect from Sitecore Cortex:
- Profiling customers based on their content consumption
- Building smart attribution models
- Driving self-learning engagement scoring
- Powering automatic content tagging with intelligent recommendations
As they say it in Sitecore: "This is where marketing is going". This is how your customers want to interact with you.
