The challenge facing an enterprise marketer today is a challenge of scale. Almost all businesses are digital businesses that reject a lot of data, and turning it into useful information is key to bringing the customer closer.
A company that is working to increase the frequency of customer engagement with the brand is Blueshift Labs Inc. The company works with a number of large companies, including an online education provider Udacity Inc.to leverage AI and other technologies for powerful digital marketing.
“Imagine you’re a two-person marketing team and you’re challenged to figure out how to engage 20 million students,” said Manyam Mallela (photo), co-founder and head of artificial intelligence at Blueshift. “You need a system to say: why did all these students come? How do you personalize the experience so that every step of a student’s journey is created and delivered at scale? This is the kind of problem we are solving for our brands.
Mallela spoke to industry analyst theCUBE furry jeans ahead of the AWS Startup Showcase Event “MarTech Emerging Cloud-Scale Customer Experiences”, an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s live streaming studio. They discussed Blueshift’s formation history, industry use cases, and the data systems needed to drive customer engagement. (*Disclosure below.)
Solutions for Walmart
Blueshift approaches the challenge of customer engagement from a history of building engagement systems for one of the world’s most recognizable brands, Walmart Inc. Mallela and several members of his team come from early Kosmix, pioneer of AI in Silicon Valley.
“We were doing semantic search, and in 2011 Walmart launched its Silicon Valley innovation hub, Walmart Labs, with the acquisition of Kosmix,” Mallela explained. “Walmart had been doing e-commerce for almost 12 years before, but they were certainly behind their peers. We had to rethink many assumptions and trends that converged across multiple formats and channels. It took us three years to build these engagement systems.
Walmart’s earlier work set the stage for Blueshift’s creation in 2014. The startup SmartHub Customer Data Platform integrates data feeds from various sources, allowing users to create comprehensive customer profiles. The process involves the evaluation of a comprehensive list of factors, ranging down to such basics as a email subject line.
“How to get fresh data, activated at the time of the experiment, without delay at large scale?” Mallela asked. “That’s what we solve for our organizations.”
Digest and relevant
Another Blueshift customer is LendingTree Inc., an online marketplace offering a wide range of financial products, including home and car loans. The challenge for LendingTree was to distill and communicate the full range of its diverse portfolio.
“There’s a series of steps an organization must take to explain all of its offerings in an digestible and relevant way and to personalize them for each of those millions of customers,” Mallela noted. “All those industries that you wouldn’t think you needed to solve a digital engagement problem are now saying it’s the key to success and growth.”
Blueshift has focused its business model on delivering data systems that generate insights and then deliver the most suitable communication model for engagement. These systems include distributed search, distributed indexing, low latency systems, data lakes designed for high speed, and training model inference, in addition to support for AI and computing. machine learning.
“We do the heavy lifting, data management, identity resolution, segmentation, audience building, predictions, recommendations, and then we give you the delivery,” Mallela said. “There’s a huge ROI you get once you’re able to reorient your organizations towards that.”
The digital marketing landscape is starting to change again with the arrival of Web3 and increased attention to the metaverse. Mallela believes this will not diminish the need for AI tools to fully meet customer interests.
“In a metaverse Nike store, I still need to understand what the customer prefers and track that customer as they change their preferences,” Mallela said. “There are more than enough tools to find out what happened. There are only emerging tools to tell you what might happen.
Here’s the full video interview, some of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of the AWS Startup Showcase Event “MarTech Emerging Cloud-Scale Customer Experiences”:
(* Disclosure: Blueshift Labs Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Blueshift nor other sponsors have editorial control over the content of theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)