Change is coming. More and more agree that the impact will equal a revolution. As you have slowly become immune to words like juggernaut, paradigm and disruption, your reaction when we say: “revolution” is not necessarily registering on the seismic scale.

But when you honestly feel like the world needs to hear you out you look for a way to quantify and referring to a number is necessary. So how about we call it the fourth industrial revolution? Yes, that’s right, the fourth industrial revolution is upon us all. To refresh your memory, the Internet was the last one.

So what is this juggernaut, this paradigm shift, the major disruption about to happen? It’s AI, artificial intelligence, and it is already happening, changing all industries, introducing new ways of doing things – smarter. I guess you can call that a revolution all right.

As the more than half a century old concept of a computer with human-like intelligence comes of age, machine learning and other disciplines of artificial intelligence are fast becoming part of everyday personal life but also industries like ticketing. Now, you can crunch through and learn from a vast amount of data to predict ticket sales and target segments for events.

So, let’s look at two of the applications…

Sales predictions

In Live Entertainment, people have always worked with predictions. The marketing department has to adjust campaigns, and a promoter needs to see if the event budget will hold up. Traditionally, predictions of ticket sales are made based on gut feeling and by key personnel who seem to have a special nose or extra sensitive fingertips. Some have developed rudimentary spreadsheet models, but mostly predictions are of the “I think we’re ok”-type.

AI takes in many more factors than we or a spreadsheet can. AI, or machine learning will look at all individual transactions, customer demographics, sales channel patterns, campaigns and the previous purchase behavior of every single buyer, to come up with a prediction for the entire sales period, This way organizations can track actual sales against it, cut back on marketing for those events that are predicted to sell out, and act on those that are underperforming.

AI has its limitations of course – it doesn’t know if the artist is releasing a new album next week or will be featured on TV. On the other hand, it will do predictions for all events and update them regularly, even if you’re busy. So consider it your intelligent assistant who will prompt the organization to reflect and adjust efforts, making everybody better at what they do. Welcome the opportunity to evaluate more, frequently adjust your strategy, and optimize other aspects of your operation.

Customer segment suggestions

The ticketing industry is not new to campaign segmentation but it has until now been simple and the process time-consuming, usually based on just transaction history and demography.

With relevant data, an artificial intelligence assisted segmentation matches potential customers based on additional factors like whether they ever make purchases close to an event, if they like big or small events, if they ever engage with email or facebook campaigns, and much more. An AI-based segmentation will, in other words, find much more complex or weak patterns between ticket buyers than any ‘manual’ segmentation can ever achieve.

For users of Activity Stream, this means that from any event dashboard, a custom segment can be ordered from the AI agent. It’ll return with a customer list that can then be used as a basis for a targeted campaign in the media of choice.

The benefits are many. Customers will get more relevant campaigns, which will improve customer experience and reduce unsubscribes, even inexperienced marketing assistants can set up highly targeted campaigns, and with better targeting comes better conversion. All in all, everybody is better off.

You see…. It is the perspective

Machine learning is like nitro for number crunching, like steroids for statistics. Discovery of the hidden patterns, the complete picture, and the decision-ready insights do revolutionize people’s ability to become better at what they do.

So instead of the old-school business intelligence of knowing how much happened, imagine your team, all with a situation-aware personal assistant receiving and constantly analyzing live data and finding what you didn’t know you were looking for by listening to what is happening – everywhere.

Machine learning and other aspects of AI are not a fictional part of a distant future. Like Google, Facebook, Amazon, Siri, Netflix and other landmarks of your digital existence, this technology is available to improve all aspects of your ticketing business.

Like a ticket to a concert, a show or a theme park, the AI-based Activity Stream platform and the associated AS for Live Entertainment industry specific solution are available. As a matter of fact, it is already optimizing the operation of leading ticketing services providers in both Europe and the US.