AI for ROI: Back to the Future

I’ve been working on an AI startup for the past 9 months so I thought I would drop an update and share some thoughts pertaining to AI for marketing and AI in general. We have taglined our product, “AI for ROI” so we are setting a high bar but we are very confident. If there’s a single thread through all the products I’ve worked on in my career it’s that they actually get results. This one is proving no different and looks like the best yet.

I know many smart people that think AI is just a bolt-on to current technology. After getting very deep this year into AI my opinion is that this is not the case. Everything is up for grabs with AI. Anyone telling you differently has something they are trying to protect from AI. They are afraid. AI *can* bolt onto existing tools however it is a new method of computation and one designed to create value. It scales based on hardware and data – both things in abundance. This is why AI is moving so fast.

I hear AI needs to augment existing workflows. No. AI will wholly replace and even eliminate current workflows. The question is when. The only thing holding up operational transformation – and this is true with AI across the board – is the readiness of people to embrace the changes AI brings. AI does not need a 6 month change management plan. Changes are instant and obviously beneficial. This scares people too.

I also see a lot of martech companies claiming that tried and true machine learning (ML) models that have been around for years are suddenly “AI.” This might work for a little while by confusing the market and playing on people’s data science ignorance but as real AI comes to market the differences will be obvious. This is just more fear.

Fortunately, money is not scared of AI. C-level execs will force readiness and first movers will be rewarded with increased market share. The same as it happened in the early days of Search Engine Marketing and Social Media. Thanks to privacy, businesses are now focused on collecting and organizing the type of data that Google and Meta use to power their AI. More and more this data lives in the brand’s private cloud. Brands will soon have the matching powers of the platforms because of first-party data and AI. They also have an advancing data infrastructure available in the cloud to power AI. We believe Cloud AI using private data are the coming operating systems for business functions including marketing.

Shaping a mass of behavioral and transactional information into “AI ready data” is now the cornerstone of success for powering consumer<>brand relationships. The veritable “customer360.” AI will put investments in customer data and data infrastructure to good use. We will soon progress from talking about tools to talking about outcomes. AI doesn’t care what data collector or CDP or data warehouse you are using. It makes all of them more valuable. We like to think of the AI we’re building as “outcomes as a service”

The fear of AI is understandable and real. So trust in AI will need to be earned. This is one of the most interesting parts of our work. Trust is easy to earn through performance. For Google and Meta performance was enough to hand them money (though I would say scale and convenience were also underrated factors). I wonder if brands will feel the same way when they have their own AI? We think not. 

AI will impact people’s lives. Real people. Real customers. Real employees. Brands are not some faceless tech middleware like a browser or an application. So not only are we building a product that works great, we are thinking about how the product is going to affect people emotionally. Because of the scale of data and the way AI works it will discover things that are non-observable to humans. This is the most exciting part of AI to me. It’s mind blowing. Magical. Yet, AI is not an illusion. It works on data that is collected and models that are built to turn that data into intelligence. It’s why trust is the most important part of our product.

Fortunately, I have a reference point. In the early days of the commercial web I led some of the first A/B testing around trust. I was part of a team that worked with Verisign and McAfee, two companies that sold trust as a product. It was exciting and groundbreaking work. 20 years later it is very cool to be working on this foundational element of new technology adoption again. And while much has advanced since then, human nature has not…at least not yet.

The pace of learning and progress in AI is astounding. Even the smartest people in the space have little idea what things will look like 5 years from now. Open source and hardware advances have zoomed us back to the future when someone anywhere with a laptop and a few thousand dollars can change the course of history. I feel unbelievably grateful to be building here. This will be my final technology chapter. Not because I plan to retire (never!) but since AI will be with us for infinity. 

For me, the last 5 years (with a break during COVID) have been an amazing journey of discovering, learning, writing and building in CDP, customer data and the marketing cloud. Now it’s time to do what I love most. Use transformative technology to help businesses improve their KPIs by understanding who their customers are and what is important and relevant to them. It’s time for me to go back to the future and improve conversion rates.

If you work for a brand and are interested in getting on our beta waitlist please reach out. We are currently working with innovation teams, data & analytics teams, martech teams and marketing teams to bring AI into their operations and lift their KPIs. Best of all, our AI is fun, exciting, super easy to use and delivers instantly. How many martech products can you say that about? I look forward to sharing more soon. Rave on.