Artificial intelligence is playing an increasingly prominent role in helping marketers in China capture the right audience and engage with existing users, according to an industry veteran.

Fast-moving consumer goods, maternity and baby products, as well as automobiles are among the top three sectors embracing smart data management tools to optimize customer outreach, said Ren Peiyu, chief product officer and president of nEqual, a data technology firm providing such services.

"In China we notice a growing urgency for brands to trace where their marketing budget goes and how well ads are tapping into prospective customers," Ren said.

He referred to the use of the Data Management Platform, in essence a unifying platform to manage, organize and activate any form of data from any source and convert it in a way that is useful for marketers, publishers and other businesses to know their audiences.

According to Ren, the most relevant ways data firms activate data managed in DMP is creating a set of audiences based on a range of similar characteristics like demographics, geography and behavior, creating a unified customer view.

AI has the ability to continuously learn from data inputs and adjust decisions based on evolving patterns, which can help assist the creation and quality of targeted audiences.

Ren referred to one of his clients, who is looking to reach pregnant women as potential customers. Algorithms can pinpoint these people via several gauges, such as family status or if they click ads related to toys or baby diapers, or if online searches include key words such as "delivery process".

"This will reduce the need for marketers to understand every signal and define an audience, amidst an influx of high-velocity and high-variance data," he said.

With new avenues such as the emergence of new social media platforms, AI's probabilistic decision-based process can help marketers adapt to changes in customer experience and target the audience with better precision.