JPMorgan says robots writing credit card ads

Robots aren't just trading on Wall Street, now they're persuading consumers to sign up for credit cards.

JPMorgan Chase said Tuesday it signed a five-year contract with Persado Inc., a firm that develops artificial intelligence for creating marketing messages. The deal follows a pilot program where JPMorgan saw its click-through rates on ads jump by as much as 450 percent with the robot's creative.

"Machine learning is the path to more humanity in marketing," Kristin Lemkau, the chief marketing officer of the biggest U.S. bank, said in a statement. "Persado's technology is incredibly promising. It rewrote copy and headlines that a marketer, using subjective judgment and their experience, likely wouldn't have. And they worked."

Don Draper and his fellow "Mad Men" might be no match for their robot rivals: Persado's system taps into a database of more than 1 million words and phrases to persuade consumers. Lemkau said the Persado marketing deal is "just the beginning," and could be used in JPMorgan's internal communications and customer service prompts.