All it took for U.K.-based personalized picture book retailer Lost My Name to reduce its cost per acquisition 17% was to automate its Facebook advertising campaign.

While Lost My Name allocates some money in its budget for TV ads in November and December—when the vast majority of its sales occur—it spends roughly 70% of its paid marketing budget on Facebook ads, says Anne Thouas, the retailer’s head of awareness marketing. Until last year the retailer managed its Facebook advertising campaigns in-house. But as the retailer’s business grew and expanded into new markets, Lost My Name reached a point where it either had to hire more staff or an agency to help manage its Facebook campaigns or turn to an advertising automation vendor, preferably one that used artificial intelligence and machine learning, she says. After all, a number of vendors have popped up over the last few years with artificial intelligence-powered platforms that they promise will enable retailers and other marketers to efficiently run a large number of tests, crunch data, and quickly learn and adjust based on those results at a pace that would be near-impossible for a human to achieve.

Marketing offers an ideal use case for artificial intelligence given the large trove of data marketers have to work with, says Joe Stanhope, a Forrester Research Inc. vice president and principal analyst. “Our brains can only do so much,” he says. “They have a certain amount of cognitive capability. The customer experience is moving so fast that humans can’t keep up. We need machines to close the gap between what we can do as people and what we should do to engage with customers.” However, the technology is still in its early days and, for the most part, it is only beginning to help retailers improve their performance and boost engagement.

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