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AI and machine learning stand to have a huge impact on the world of digital marketing. This is true partly because Google is becoming increasingly more AI-driven, attempting to answer search terms as questions rather than simply trying to match them to keywords used in a post. It’s true as more and more businesses start employing the use of chatbots. And it’s true as machine learning algorithms are applied to big data to better make use of the huge amounts of information that an average website will collect about its users.

But in the not-too distant future, we might see an even bigger paradigm shift thanks to AI. We might see a time where websites themselves are built by AI!

Data-Driven Design

When you build a website, you are often tempted to fall back on the things that you like personally: the designs that you find most appealing and the navigation that seems intuitive to you.

Of course, this is not the correct way to go about web design from a business standpoint. Ultimately, it shouldn’t matter what you find appealing. It should only matter what your users will interact well with – after all, they’re the ones you’re targeting!

More to the point – if profit is your main goal – it should be designed in such a way that it drives sales.

The smarter business owner then will fall back on the advice of their web designer. They will use market research. And they might even use split tests. A split test means creating two or more slightly different versions of the same website, to see which one performs the best. You then adopt the style of the most successful version.

But what if those split tests could occur all around the world and you could collect data from millions of samples?

And what if your web design to adapt and evolve in order to become more and more efficient at guiding the users to that buy button? This is what a machine-learning driven web design promises. It could look at patterns of behavior on your site, across multiple websites, or even for a particular user. From there, it could then adapt your web design to become better at encouraging people to click where you want them to click and read what you want them to read.

The ultimate expression of this would be a web design that would adapt in real time to the user reading it, based on their demographics or their personal history. It would thereby become instantly appealing to that potential customer, and would then employ strategies proven across millions of tests to help encourage them to buy.

This could help site owners to increase their conversion rates to a huge extent, while removing all of the guess work out of web design. Of course, it would somewhat hurt the artistic integrity of your site… but if your main concern is business, then this would be web design’s final and ultimate form.