AI Talk: Master your GenAI destiny

On 15 October 2024, AI Talk host Kevin Craine was joined by Jamie Grabert, President/Co-Founder, The Consultancy Group; and Deyana Petrova, Digital, Growth and Product Head, August Collection.

Views on news 

AI started with big hype and as a fascinating toy but has now morphed into quickly becoming the cornerstone of the marketing personalization efforts. AI is proving its value by reducing production costs. This is allowing smaller brands too to generate the amount of content and assets required to deliver a truly 1-1 of personalization. IT and marketing must come together to see what tech stacks they need to achieve goals and which are the ones that the budget allows. Ideally, CRM is also part of this discussion. 

A lot of data can be captured from a customer’s online trail. A customer leaving will also provide information regarding their needs and AI can identify patterns and touchpoints where customers tend to drop out of the customer journey. In these cases, you need to work backwards to identify where things went wrong. You can also retain customers who are about to drop out by keeping up communication with them. 

Understanding customer needs 

With 90% of customers wanting personalisation, today’s state-of-the-art chatbots stand a good chance of satisfying those needs. Human psychology remains to be the key factor to success – even in use cases with chatbots – but it’s also a wild card which makes it challenging for bots. Chatbots now also reach out to customers to get feedback about delivery. AI can also improve the rate of leads that are followed upon and which human marketers often forget about. Software like HubSpot and Salesforce can help a lot with sending automated feedback or doing sentiment analysis, which often couldn’t be handled manually by humans due to scale. Meanwhile, keeping a human in the loop has been evidenced to shorten the buying cycle. When GDPR was introduced, compliance gained priority over the customer experience, while now a shift Is gaining momentum, where privacy policies are getting communicated to customers in a more straightforward way.

 
The panel’s advice

• AI today can reproduce the personalised corner shop experience of the old days.
• The ethics of using an AI bot must be looked into when deploying AI.
• Your tools will be only as good as you train them to be.
• Keep being curious about AI and search for new use cases.