The digital world is evolving rapidly and the 7th edition of the DIGIXX Summit & Awards 2023 organized by Adgully aimed to explore this transformation with the theme “Virtual to Real – The Great Digital Transformation”.
In his keynote speech on Artificial Intelligence in the Customer Lifecycle, Vaibhav Velhankar, Segumento’s Chief Technology Officer, noted, “AI is clearly the trend of the season. We read about AI every day, so what does it take to really make this happen from a technological perspective?”
Referring to a popular Bill Gates blog, Velhankar said: “A few days ago, Mr. Bill Gates wrote a very famous blog in which he said that he saw two revolutionary technologies in his life – a Graphical User Interface (GUI) and AI . What GUI can do, I think we’ve all seen in marketing how user experiences have changed from where we were 10 years ago to where we are now. I think AI is also in the same place, it’s as revolutionary as mobile and the internet, both technologies have changed companies and business models overall. AI is at that level.”
Citing some statistics, Velhankar said that ChatGPT3 could gain more than a million users in five days. “I think that kind of growth is every marketer’s dream. There are two factors that led to this – one is simplicity and the other is the fact that all technology has been abstracted from the user. I think technology from the user will be the fundamental design principle for everything that happens in the realm of AI.”
Speaking further about AI, he addressed five fundamental questions, saying, “AI must answer five fundamental questions, which then frame the issues:
Who to target Where to target What’s the message What are the conversion opportunities What else is there to say
I think these are the five questions in a customer lifecycle that artificial intelligence needs to look at and solve.”
He touched on some specific solutions that marketers and businesses can leverage and start their AI journey. According to him, “Reach is all about who you’re targeting. It’s all about intelligent and dynamic segmentation and data enrichment that works with your first-party data to create segments that aren’t rules-based and not static, but create real-time segments that are more dynamic and intelligent. AI us provides us with these technologies and these are of direct benefit to how the reach can be sharper and wider.”
Velhankar continued: “AI can create different targeting models to rank the channels – whether I choose Facebook first, or whether I choose influencer marketing first, or whether I choose all together. This is a classic data science problem, where in turn models can be built and solved – for example, personalization with generative AI. I think that’s really well understood – be it for content creation or anything else.”
According to him, “AI plays a very big role in the likelihood that a customer will convert. There’s the propensity model, which can give the probabilities of conversion, and AI has phenomenal ability to even capture emotion in the Indian market. If you look specifically at the BFSI area, we get all the calls. At the end of the day, closing is done by phone call. It’s a great way to capture a customer’s emotions – there are speech to text apps, text to speech apps. This type of intervention at a level where the conversation with a customer takes place gives companies ready-made models that they can pick up and use throughout the life cycle.”
These are edited excerpts, full address is below:
