TheHuman-In-The-Loop with H+ Intelligence

JoeNguyen, Senior Strategic Advisor, H+

15 October 2024, Singapore

‍

With all the buzz about artificial intelligence (AI) in the last few years, the focus has on how computers will take over many tasks from humans – not just the menial, manual tasks but also the knowledge and even creative tasks. We have marveled at what ChatGPT and Dall-E have been able to do from writing content to generating fantastical images, while at the same time asking ourselves if we will soon be jobless. However, if we look deeper at the core of many AI-enabled processes, most of them advocate a framework in which there is always the“human-in-the-loop” (HITL).

‍

Having the human-in-the-loop along with artificial intelligence aims to even further optimize what machines can do. For example, AI systems that have been trained on millions of X-ray images have been found to be more accurate than doctors, but rather than replacing radiologists, these AI systems are deployed as an aid to physicians so that the accuracy rate is even higher than AI can do alone. Having a HITL also ensures that AI systems do not go off on some wild direction as there are always a person/s in the workflow to keep things on track.
‍

At H+, we believe that it is essential to have the human-in-the-loop. Humans are better at understanding humans than anyone – or anything – else. This is rooted Hakuhodo’s corporate philosophy of sei-katsu-sha, in which we see people not just as consumers, but as humans with different wants, needs, desires, and aspirations. We look holistically at consumers as individuals with distinct lifestyles that can be catered to. With the rapid embrace of technology, the internet and now AI into people’s lives, there is now so much more data that we have been able to harness, with AI systems, to power our sei-katsu-sha understanding. However, just like the AI-enhanced X-ray imaging solutions, human intelligence must be in the loop. This is why we have launched “H+Intelligence” to enable future planning.

As we become more dependent on AI and other “black box” solutions, we need humans to be a part of the process to make corrections and look out for biases. AI systems are trained on existing content from the internet which is majority inEnglish and is also culturally Western-skewed. This becomes an issue when consumers’ native languages are Japanese, Thai, Indonesian, or Vietnamese.Natural Language Processing (NLP) platforms have been trained in English but will need to be adapted and corrected for local languages by native speaker.Language is tied to culture and cultural norms, and sentiment analysis in a local language needs native-speaking humans-in-the-loop to continually train and check the output of these solutions. This is very important in social media marketing efforts, content marketing and customer reviews.

‍

With so much data available from so many different sources, any company will need to formulate strategy, frameworks, solutions and workflows if it wants to truly leverage the information flow into useful, actionable understanding. H+Intelligence combines our sei-katsu-sha thinking with our INSIGHTOUT planning system to produce human-centric insights with more depth and breadth than was ever possible before.

Our creative, strategy and data sciences teams work collaboratively to integrate and orchestrate the data and analytical systems to reveal personas and brand archetypes that are more detailed and more accurate than ever before.

‍

For example, there was a beauty care client that is launching a new product to the Malaysian market last year. Our research team used sei-katsu-sha insights from our proprietary research data to build personas. We then applied our INSIGHT OUT process which encompasses a partner data ecosystem; we were then able to create the Brand Archetypes which provides additional characteristics and gave us more insights about who may be interested in the product. These Brand Archetypes are then applied directly to third-party solutions that have targeting and segmentation capabilities which means that we have an estimate of the size of the audience of each Brand Archetype. Additionally, these personas are immediately targetable with available inventory on programmatic platforms. So in short, with human oversight, we were able to derive insights, develop personas, create a media plan and target audience with media – all within one platform.

While sei-katsu-sha has been our guiding principle for our insights and creative processes for dcades, the recent availability of data from many sources including clients first party data and partners’ data has allowed H+ to apply Analytical Systems to extend beyond creative and into media. So as we build out Brand Archetypes for a client, we are also able to see the size of each audience segments that can be targeted. This means that H+ Intelligence bridges the gap between the creative process and the media buying function. Sei-katshu-sha data and our Analytical Systems allow our teams to understand and optimize creative and media together in our H+ Solutions in Commerce, CRM, Owned and Advertising. H+ Intelligence functions as the core of the H+ Growth Ecosystem, which harnesses Hakuhodo's proprietary data, first-party data from client companies, and data held by platforms. H+ brings these Solutions out to our network across Asia Pacific to serve our clients and help them grow.

H+Intelligence enables our teams to enhance and productize our sei-katshu-sha philosophy with data and data science tools by placing the “human-in-the-loop”. The “H”stands for “Human” and allows us to use information and advanced analytics tools to amplify our collective human intellect, not replace it.