To me, she was the smart PR flak spruiking Fuji Xerox photocopiers to printers, but you know her as the red-frocked Shark in TV's Shark Tank.

Now Naomi Simson has a new 'balloon' to fly, and a new business structure with which to do it. Her new Big Red Group - which she owns with chief executive David Anderson and is a non-executive director - has announced it has exclusive rights to "world first" AI digital marketing platform Albert in to Australia and New Zealand.

RedBalloon - the online experience retailer Simson thought up in her PR days... and went on to make her fortune from - has been using the technology for the last couple of months. On its first day on the job, Albert had apparently been able to identify and execute more than 6400 keywords to improve performance across the RedBalloon business, something she says would take a human SEM expert up to a year.

Now she's ready to take the "fully autonomous, enterprise-level artificial intelligence marketing platform" to ANZ business. The technology created in 2010 by a start-up called Adgorithms (now Albert Technologies) drives digital marketing campaigns "from start to finish" for leading brands and has been credited with driving 40 per cent of Harley-Davidson's New York city sales, influencing lingerie brand Cosabella's decision to replace its digital agencies with AI, and creating so much demand for Dole Asia's canned goods that its suppliers initially ran out of stock before ultimately reaching an 87 per cent increase in sales across the board.

All of which may have nothing or everything to do with news media. Big Red Group will be able to distribute Albert to third-party media companies as well as across entire supplier chains and direct-to-consumer retailers.

"We have trialled this amazing technology across RedBalloon and Wrapped and it has proven its effectiveness beyond doubt," says Simson.

After watching Albert reduce the cost of acquiring a customer by more than a quarter in less than 30 days, she's ready to share him with the business community, "ensuring that our dollars and the dollars our partners pay us to do what we do are working harder and harder day after day."

Albert works by wading through mass amounts of data, converting it into insights, and autonomously acting on them. As Simson says, it's a very different world to that when she started RedBalloon 16 years ago. The former Apple marketing manager and founder also of Bright Marketing, she's been a "local hero" over the last couple of decades, and one to watch, and not just on TV.

It'll be interesting to see where Albert takes her.

Peter Coleman