Artificial Intelligence in Customer Life Cycle

The digital world is rapidly evolving, and the 7th edition of DIGIXX Summit & Awards 2023, organised by Adgully, was aimed at exploring this transformation with the theme – ‘Virtual to Real – The Great Digital Transformation’.

While delivering the keynote address on ‘Artificial Intelligence in Customer Life Cycle’, Vaibhav Velhankar, Chief Technology Officer, Segumento, remarked, “AI is clearly the flavour of the season. Every day we are reading about AI – so, what does it take to really enable this from a technology perspective?”

Referring to a popular blog by Bill Gates, Velhankar said, “A few days back Mr Bill Gates wrote a very famous blog wherein he said that in his lifetime, he has seen two technologies which are revolutionary – a graphical user interface (GUI) and AI. What GUI can do, I think all of us have seen in marketing how user experiences have changed from where we were 10 years back to where we are now. I think AI is also at the same place, it is as revolutionary as the mobile and the Internet, both of these technologies have changed companies and business models altogether. AI is at that level.”

Citing some statistics, Velhankar said that in five days ChatGPT3 could acquire more than a million users. “I think this kind of growth is every marketer’s dream. There are two factors which led to this – one is simplicity and second is that all the technology has been abstracted from the user. Technology from the user, I feel, will be the fundamental design principle for anything happening in the space of AI.”

Further talking more about AI and addressing five fundamental questions, he said, “AI has to answer five basic fundamental questions, which will then frame the problem statements:

• Whom to Target
• Where to target
• What is the messaging
• What are the chances of conversion
• What else to say

I think these are the five questions in a customer life cycle which are to be looked at and solved by artificial intelligence.”

He elaborated on some specific solutions that marketers and enterprises can leverage and start their AI Journey. According to him, “Reach is all about whom to target. It is all about smart and dynamic segmentation and data enrichment working with your first-party data to create segments which are not rule based and which are not static, but creating segments which are real time which are more dynamic and which are intelligent. AI us provides us these technologies, and these are of direct use on how reach can be more sharper and wider.”

Velhankar further said, “AI can produce various targeting models to rank the channels – whether I go with Facebook first or whether I go with influencer marketing first or I go with all of them together. This is a classical data science problem, where again models can be built and it can be solved – for example, personalisation using generative AI. I think this is really well understood – be it for content creation or anything else.”

According to him, “AI plays a vry big role in the chances of a customer getting converted. There is the propensity model, which can give the probabilities of conversion and AI has the phenomenal ability to even capture emotions in the Indian market. If you look specifically at the BFSI sector, we all get calls. At the end of the day closure does happen by calling. That is a great way to capture the emotions of a customer – there are speech-to-text apps, text-to-speech apps. This kind of intervention at a level where the conversation is happening with a customer, ready-made models are available for the enterprises to pick it up and deploy it into the entire life cycle.”

These are edited excerpts, for the complete address, watch below:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fg7AFIBrzQk