Growing Importance of AI in B2B Sales and Marketing

great thank you so much Nicole todays meeting all about the growing importance of AI and b2b sales and marketing were going to do a presentation of about 20 minutes or so first by shamone chato which Ill introduce in a second and then were going to have a very spirited panel discussion youll be more than welcome to weigh in on the chat with questions for our panel so what before we get it – shamone Id like to introduce her she is a marketing and business strategy professional with over 20 years of experience shes passionate.

about nurturing client relationships enhancing customer experience driving tangible business outcomes and enhancing representation of women in leadership roles shamone leads marketing for retail consumer packaged goods telecom media entertainment gaming life sciences in health care and PS verticals for HCl an eight point five billion dollar technology company she is a gold medalist microbiologists holds an MBA degree in marketing and finance from symbiosis University as an it and has.

attended executive leadership programs at Yale School of Management and Tuck School of Business shes also a recipient of the Stevie Awards for Women in Business 2017 so shamone its all yours Thank You Kyle okay do you see my slide Josh yeah edge well KITT perfect thank you thanks for this opportunity and without much ado win straightaway get into the topic for today how do you humanize your marketing and your customer interactions with the health of artificial intelligence we do want know.

that computing today is undergoing a massive evolution and establishing the new novel it is fundamentally altering the way we interact with technology we are aware of the mobile first evolution which happened and mobile source bottom multi-touch we evolved beyond keyboard and mouse today a is ushering a new era of evolution which has been bought in by vision and boys and this is also changing the way customers are engaging with technology today customers are.

engaging with technology and brands in a more natural and more immersive manner all thanks to artificial intelligence if it if you take a step back from ten years back and we we do realize that marketers would primarily focus on just two time slots to reach out to their customers one was the morning commute time and the second world the dinner time in the night when the entire family was together in front of the TV this.

graphically changed the way the weather the moment the mobile revolution steps in and we started talking about hyperconnected consumers who was looking and expecting brands to interact with him or her anywhere anytime any device conversation moves towards being more personalized targeted and contextualized in the era of the hyper connected consumer today with AI we are witnessing a new revolution where customers are looking at brands to communicate with them in their moments of maximum opportunity and this is all being.

enabled by artificial intelligence which we look at speech text analytics machine learning theyre all able to create for us as interpret the first the consumers in first in win moment in moments of sentiment or a lab sentiment artificial intelligence is also enabling a new level of engagement which can happen or we have artificial conversation assistants which are available today.

which can lead to very immersive and engaging conversations with our customers which is also emotionally intelligent so there’s a huge shift which is happening we see a lot of it happen in to be in the b2b space and I will give you some examples as we move forward as to how we can leverage these technologies so what is it that AI Park powered marketing technology does for us this this technology is able to integrate the systems of insights and the systems of interactions together and is able to ensure that we are able to.

have some very intelligent in Morses contextualized and – personalized conversations with our customers so whats happening in terms of the adoption of artificial intelligence everybody is talking about this but are people really embracing it as much now only about 25% of the marketers are looking at the doctoring some sort of AI technology in the near future so balance everybody is just.

trying to figure out how to start experimenting with artificial intelligence and how to integrate into it into its existing marketing sex act while these are the figures in which exist today we also have examples of a lot of early adopters of artificial intelligence in marketing and how they’ve been very successful we all are aware of Netflix and in fact about 75% of the Netflix wheels would actually be.

are recommended so you know would see a recommended feature by Netflix so such is the evolution of the recommendation engine of Netflix in the year 2013 Netflix announced that it had about 33 million versions of Netflix it actually had 33 million subscribers so that is a level of personalization that is a level of really understanding the customer behavior the customer journey the customer interaction and then delivering the product which is suited and in my alignment with what the customers is.

looking for so lets I look at how in a b2b space which is much closer to us are the sales and marketing professionals leveraging the artificial intelligence or can leverage AI technology to as we start the course is the basics of marketing is you start with understanding your marketing market segmenting your market and gathers and marketed challenges today there are a lot of gabion platforms which are leveraging artificial intelligence to be.

able to segment the market for us to be able to provide better insight into the intent of a customer and be able to present to us a segment of customers who are right now in the market looking for a particular type of service offering – programmatic buying which will actually help us leverage and you know optimize our media spent to be able to send targeted messages and.

targeted promotions to that set of customers today with the advent of ki you’re seeing marketers getting more and more Awards in terms of attribution being able to map the entire customer journey and being able to clearly identify which are those marketing myths mix elements which are yielding better returns for them this was sufficient Iran is helping a lot of marketers optimize their media mix lets look at lead generation for example today ki is.

enabling not just lead scoring you know it is also enabling a lot of engagement with the leads in terms of ki conversations assistants the sales team are more and more relying on virtual assistants to be able to you know manage the bottom of the funnel or you know the top of the funnel opportunities and once those opportunities are Monmouthshire and there is a clearly identified leads that they have do these reads then get passed on to the sales team so there’s a lot of interface which is happening as far as VI technologies.

and to sales and marketing teams are concerned even if you look at content today if we look at folds folds is actually leveraging words made to be able to create more flexible content so when you look at content optimization being able to understand whats on the segment is going to consume what type of content and being able to dynamically to you the type of content and push it to the audience with something which is.

getting enabled by idea weve seen a lot of use cases of artificial intelligence in industries like retail where its a slightly more matured set up for adoption in terms of gigantic sizes in terms of recommendation engine recommending the next back this action the next best purchase etc you know today I think it almost every website that you go to you will see a chat bot of you will encounter a lot of names.

which are coming into your mailbox are being written by they I assisted virtual assistants so this is a reality today a lot of people are embracing it they are embracing it in bits and pieces but we do have a revolution waiting to happen so this this chart your just gives a view of at every stage of the customer lifecycle AI technologies have a role to play and we as marketers need to ensure that you know we are embracing artificial intelligence integrating it into our marketing 6-pack integrating it.

into the way we do business and we operate our marketing function so one of the pitfalls of artificial intelligence if there’s so much that AI can do and there is that a lot of our Y value of artificial intelligence and marketing buy so the only 25% of companies are today looking at adopting a I in the near term so there are a couple of reasons the very first reason is that all of us you know including maybe the.

people who are on the panel today we are still figuring out artificial intelligence we are trying to understand what is it what it can realistically deliver and just you know just trying to segment hype out of the reality a lot of these VI platforms are also scattered and this gets further enhanced when we look at our magicks platforms a lot of.

them are which are made out of passwords which are not fully integrated where data so does not happen very seamlessly right and then there is this announcer concerns about enterprise sexuality so all of that are definitely possibly acting as inhibitors for marketers to be embracing artificial intelligence also I think once we decide that we want to have artificial intelligence embedded into the way we do marketing and we reach out to our customers there is a fine line which needs to be maintained between personalization and intrusion most of you would have heard about it.

examples when a father comes to know that this daughter is pregnant because suddenly she starts receiving a lot of powers of prenatal care for that etc so how do you draw this thin line as to when are you being intrusive and when are you being forced alized and in fact you know I remember there was a special session which was we made to us where you know every email conversation which goes to a b2b audience can actually be personalized with his or her photographs.

etcetera and I was like seriously Im not really sure that every bit of female that eyes please I want my photograph to be embedded into every image that is getting created you know you know every mastered which comes to me in the form of email I would want my photograph to be there so so how do you you know how you could.

draw that up how do you navigate this fine line between these two a lot of things algorithms are still Mason this deliverer Goldwing able to mature has signed passes by but still there is fear of what happens if there is how to control automation which which causes some customer interaction to go in a manner that we might not have really wanted it to and then pin a lot of our teams and some of you who are on this.

call or this webinar who have tried to integrate artificial intelligence into your existing marketing organizations the current team members are very very this is a fear of redundancy there is the initial fear of this is initial reaction of rejection that you know this is something that’s has been doing for the past twenty years Ive been doing it for the past ten years or five years seriously can can a machine takes this over can it do aspirants the job as what I was doing so there are these cyber.

concerns within the team members in marketing so how do marketers end up unlocking the potential of AI there are a couple of things so the first is that we need to embrace AI as a means to intend not having and you know integrating way I choose and adopting in AI choose because if the next happening thing is the next buzzword we need to really start identifying what is it the TI can deliver to us what are the answers it the insights that the eye can provide us and the data churning that can happen.

and you know the learnings that can happen through machine learning one of the answers that we can get and whats the level of commentation that can happen in the current marketing process which AI can deliver we also need to understand how do we evaluate these various BI solutions which are there there’s a restorer of choices within the marketplace how do we pick the right option which suits the requirements that we have and then how.

do we ensure that you know we are on the right side of privacy issues as well as ethical challenges similarly as we move towards the theme so that’s another concern that our team members very of embracing artificial intelligence you know its marketing once to embed artificial intelligence into the marketing mix or the sales I okay about it is the business okay about it to do that we first need to ensure that we very clearly said you date one of the activities you know which are high-value.

non-repetitive which humans should continue to do and where is it that artificial intelligence would augment what human is doing to why we know and the old wonder stand that the new technology you know it is evolving some of these algorithms are not as mature as what we would expect them to be okay would want them to be why we need to trust artificial intelligence to do what it is expected to do we need to consistently ensure that there is a verification mechanism which is inbuilt into the system and I think last but not.

the least we all need to start reimagining a new workforce which is going to be entering our marketing teams it is a mix of a digital workforce it is a mix of humans and a lot of technology is all integrated with the matrix actually have currently so within the organization I think this come a long way from imagination to reality we have.

this sci-fi movies where you know we saw a lot of artificial intelligence being depicted today it is a reality you know this is this is one of our robots which is called pepper which we leverage in a lot of our interactions so you know in a lot of events etc and a customers are leveraging it to dry subsequent interactions in in their respective businesses we do have come a long way.

for and the future is waiting to happen there’s a lot of excitement for marketers there’s so much as marketers can do with artificial intelligence now becoming a part of our team thank you so much lets continue this conversation this is my email id happy to be in touch with anyone who wants to Michele thank you what do you okay great shamone thank you that was an absolutely absolutely fantastic so very much appreciate that so what Im going to do now is Im going to jump into our panel discussion I assume everyone can see my.

my panel slide here Im gonna take that as a yes so what Id like to do we have a great great panel today and Im going to introduce all three of them and let them also do a quick introduction to you and Im just going to go from order right to left and this will kind of complement everything that shamone just talked about so our first panelist today is.

David yang PhD hes co-founder of iya AI founder and chairman of Abby also a member of the band of angel silicon valley-based Barre serial entrepreneur in 1989 David created his first company Abby Abby currently has over 1,200 employees and as a leading developer of artificial intelligence content intelligence optical character recognition and text analytics they have 14 offices in 11 countries and right now more than 50 million users in 200 countries rely on Abbys solutions currently dr yang is dedicated to Eva AI which is a spinoff from Abby which he.

co-founded in 2016 its a company that develops real-time AI people analytics and performance management systems which helps organizations save millions of dollars by predicting resignations of key employees detecting interpersonal conflicts and more dr yang has started a variety of business creative and educational processes projects Im sorry and his author of numerous patents and scientific publications his areas of interest include AI modern art architecture and education the World Economic Forum in Davos named him as one of the top 100 world technology pioneers David Im sure you’re getting a virtual.

round of applause would you just like to spend a couple sentences and tell us what you plan to bring to our meeting today Wow Kyle you know thank you for its such a generous introduction I well its actually one a very interesting presentation and I support every your word so were talking up to the hi how is transforming sales and marketing right we are at Abby and Eva we are from that part of the world who.

creates this AI blocks we are doing exactly what you described so Kyle but I guess the question is how does it work together right I can see I is definitely changing the landscape of marketing and sales by influencing predicting customer experience behavior and all other things which Mohnish shared so I would say that when were talking shamone I mentioned that hyper connected customer also we called empowered customer so in the age of age of empowered customer those companies who put customer experience first they mark it better they sell more.

than the wind market share a both/and b2b and b2c so there’s human invention they I technologists can impact and huge impact the ways companies manage assess and predict customer experience and many odd things for example several years ago we had to wait several hours in at the bank office and a couple of days after that only to receive to receive bank loan or even open the bank account today using many banks for example using APIs intelligent capture technologies which can capture all necessary information just from the phone with a phone camera and and it allows banks to minimize the.

the gap in seven minutes there are banks which are using that technologies to actually to make immediate decision about based on tons of information of the customer provided to make simple exact decisions so that’s some kind of examples about how AI can transform sales and marketing for example in this case on the onboarding stage excellent well David thank you for that that introduction in kind of context setting that’s fantastic were going to dig into all of that here today so next Id like to introduce Robert Bartley Robert is a seasons mark the season marketer that.

held leadership roles in Xerox corporations Sutherland Global Services Capgemini and Jenn back he currently works for a boutique marketing consulting firm providing fractional CMO services to small and mid-sized firms hes a computer system software engineer in his early days and the often employs and leverages technology to maximize effectiveness of the marketing strategies and tactics he oversees digital marketing and now AI and.

robotics are all key enablers in his toolbox born in Stockholm Sweden Robert now resides outside of Princeton New Jersey outside of work he enjoys Alpine Skiing golfing playing ice hockey which I did last night Robert I love it and sailing and his spare time hes also currently building a tiny house on wheels to be used as a vacation home and Ive.

actually seen that in on Instagram so Robert why dont you introduce yourself oh thanks Kyle and yeah its trying to give a little bit of a flavor there of me as a person but you know Im coming from the marketing perspective really looking at having having had the opportunity to lead several marketing departments and so and its a challenge right and taking on technology so Ill be coming from the perspective of the end user of the marketing department that are that are challenged by.

balancing the the sales teams and and and their ability to drive decisions and and also IT who always has a hard pretty hard hand on on whats going on and whats getting implemented and this is certainly technology so so Ill be bringing in that perspective to the conversation great Robert thanks very much last but certainly not least but you’re on the far right of the slide Martin is Martin Guillaume Martin is focused on delivering technology enable.

business transformation to the media and telecommunication industries and IBM Martin leads the lead to cash cognitive process services and over the past decade hes focused on driving digital business transformation in telecommunications and media organizations globally before 2017 he led business development and strategy for media services at Ericsson globally as well and under his leadership Ericsson media services expanded in new geographies established new partnerships and launched innovative video and data services such as nubu Martin is a strong technical and business background in media and telecom Ericsson IBM a toast he was CTO for Goldman Sachs privately.

owned equity firm VP bertelsmann electronic commerce platforms director of Sonys royalty systems basically his media and telecom experiences are far-reaching global and digital so Martin introduce yourself please sure sure okay we could do pretty good job but the big thanks for that so Ill say if you would Ill try and give you some of the Sales and Operations perspective here as Kyle said Im responsible for IBMs call me the process services business specifically focused on lead to cash which is everything between CRM and ERP specifically things that our revenue.

enabling or revenue related like lead management configuration price quoting still contracting ordering billing collection and disputes all of that is in our scope and the business I represent is a B IBM sort of BPO business powered by AI and automations so that’s what I do and that’s respect Ill viewer than bringing team okay excellent thank you very much Martin so lets go ahead and get started what Im going to.

do is Im going to ask some questions of the different panelists they they kind of know what questions theyre going to get but theyre also welcome to chime in at the end of an answer if they like but Im going to start with David and David the question Im gonna posed to you is when considering an AI solution kind of you know where do you.

start right not only where do you start but what can you expect as far as rewards and impact and of course what are some of the roadblocks right um where we just do we start we I guess the we should look at all experience of customer with our services and understand how the person understand knows learns about our product and the product and the values.

and how it the customer own boards and then finally you should win the retention and customer success so customer will will spread positive reaction in the median with a friends so all that you know all that steps are now being influenced by new technologies so if you can finally make this loop and finally improve your K factor both in b2b and b2c areas you actually winning the market share winning your competitors and I brought an example of.

onboarding when AI technologies can immediately capture information and make easy decision how to the best way to onboard person but those so you can use robotic process automation inside your company to minimize the gaps and to maximize customer experience and happiness providing your whatever services or products you’re selling not to to provide best reaction from from you less friction so and and many more.

so you can continue that the result the outcome is happy customer and higher retention higher virality okay excellent thank you for thank you for that Martin Id like to like to come to you on on another question you and I talked earlier about starting with pain points when considering a I can you talk a little about that and also discuss the types of data that you need to make an investment in AI successful sure so two what I like about Davids comment and shamone his comments its all about.

about people right its AI its its its its automation but we have to start where it matters most and that’s with the experience right whether you’re talking about employees or customers you have to understand the pain points what is your end point what are you trying to do with AI what are you trying to do with automation and those two things go.

ahead and enhance so what is the journey you want to deliver to your employees or customers and how can that be made better through AI and what were finding in large corporations in particular is that the nature of the data you have to start with the data but the nature of their data repository is problematic to more than one extent the first problem.

is that you have different repositories so you’re dealing with you know a sales database that’s different from the contract database that’s different from a product databases so theyre all talking about the same business transaction and business objects but theyre seeing it through different lenses so there’s there’s a lack of consistency of data across the different repositories what we call systems of record so you need to create a unified view of that and the second thing that that is that its also a challenge here is that you need to make sure that you.

cant you cant really change these underlying systems so we would contend that you have to create a unified view of all of that yeah we would advocate a decoupling approach which means that you leave the systems of record in place but you create a layer where you introduce AI independent of those systems of record you deliver a new customer experience that addresses the the pain points that you’re trying to solve for so so those are the you know creating a consistent view of the data that you can then base.

your AI off of and then delivering an abstracted decoupled experience that allows to do that allows you to address the pain points that youve identified the beginning okay if you find that the data is hard to get well the datas not hard to get the beta is about abundant but its inconsistent and not always structured so you you know Im sure David has experienced this and has.

solutions for this which is all about taking unstructured data and converting that to some form that AI can interpret so and say I need structured data to be to be able to be informed and you need that structured 8ai data to be consistent so that you’re actually basing your decisions on a consistent set of data whether its one one parcel of AI is converting unstructured data.

into structured data in the second part of AI taking structured data in making decisions on top of that right yeah that’s exactly right yeah okay and well I wont certainly talk about that yes yeah I think I think they Martin the point you’re making of what AI can actually do because I think a lot of the challenges that that company sees in adopting any new technology is the legacy right they have legacy this legacy that and that always becomes a stumbling blocks moving forward whats so exciting with.

with AI is that it can actually put a layer on there and and allow you to continue to use that legacy and as you suggested you should and by still actually implementing the next level of technology and capability in a seamless manner that’s exactly right so so just to paraphrase I think what we need to be able to do is to keep the systems of record to keep the legacy as as a the custodian of your transactions because changing that is very expensive and take can take you know years in the case of large.

enterprises so there is no question that you cannot delay the implementation of AI but you need therefore to create a new layer where that AI lives and that new layer is stands above the systems of record but the systems of record need to continue to be the custodians of your business transaction so I think that’s the challenge today is that how do you do that well it would take first of all all the repositories that you have.

structured and unstructured and convert that to structured data that’s consistent that AI can be powered off on and then secondly how do you convert that the business transactions and think you continue to feed your existing you know legacy systems while benefiting from AI and delivering these great new experiences that I think is in a nutshell the summary of the challenge that’s that that is in front of us as as.

we transform the customer experience who did it with with AI and through digitals well that yet you know Martin that makes a lot of it makes a lot of sense to me and it doesnt sound like an like an easy problem and Im sure between the three of you on the phone there’s probably some some at least some starts to some good answers there you know Robert one of the things that you and Ive talked about last time we I think when we talked it even at at the.

IOP OWS last year you and I talked a lot about sales effectiveness and you know I come at it from sales side you come at it from a marketing side but you have that expertise around how to make salespeople more effective kind of along with the ways to help shrink that well-known sales and marketing gap you know where sales complains about marketing marketing complains about sales and it never seems to end.

um Id like if you could please talk a little bit about that sales and marketing gap and shrinking that in relation to maybe how AI can help that yeah you know lets be real right sales first sales second sales third marketing doesnt make the podium so you know proving the return on that marketing investment gaining the trust to the sales team.

a true partner is not easy although Im hoping Im speaking for many of the folks on this call and I say you know marketing can have a huge impact on not only providing sales with highly qualified sales opportunities but also as along the entire sales process and certainly AI can do that in many ways I know she want to touched on it in her presentation you know that that sort of continuum as several continues that were in that and you know better.

prospect validation and qualification it is one of the first things we can do right so using AI and data tracking you know looking at web wizard review download social media you know but then you can also look at news articles financial value ratios and if you think about you know the ability to target this at scale I mean any I in my view in the sense its not doing something that couldnt be done before it just does it at scale you know so you can conclude.

take tackle a much larger problem and taking much larger amount of data so when you can start looking then at at automating potential outreach as I said take take that top of the funnel and and and the low-hanging fruit is starting to to initiate outreach using AI and then using machine learning to build the expertise of what is good and bad and.

what is actually working and whats not working and then as the prospects engage the Atlanteans can monitor that activity used further qualification criteria to validate when a prospectus sales ready and and using AI to understand the real intent the purpose empower the financial data about the prospect that you can weave in to ELQ actually help you identify a truly profitable customer.

versus one that the competition just doesnt want and that’s why you’re getting right so yeah all of that is is the you know working with with them to prove that you have good quality prospects because the worst thing that have and this you know you send over a prospect hey they downloaded the white papers call them you know busy sales guys its going to do that once maybe twice and then its going to look at you and and you know basically that’s what happens so once we we have them engaged.

and then the sales are engaged you can integrate the AI tools alongside the CRM tools as Marcin talked about and constantly provide them with relevant content because you understand where they where they are what has worked in the past what are the right pieces of content that they can present to the client which are the right customer case studies examples is that there were approaches that work with four different.

personas of the of the customer so it is like having that experience super sales person coaching you along the way and it allows especially in new salespeople to become effective very quickly got it I like the you know the ability to to do things at scale and it sounds to me like it also you’re also taking a lot of data crunching some things in order to make things happen faster and better to give the salespeople in advantage and not waste.

their time doing unneeded things so what I want to think about that and we go back just a couple minutes ago the the whole subject of structured data unstructured data came up in the conversation and you know obviously David that’s one area of AI but one thing you’re doing at IVA that AI is is the human analytics piece and so the human analytics is also a really important component of what you’re trying to do Id like to get your take on you know just share some information.

about that and maybe provide some insight on the dividing line between human and and and machine capabilities perhaps right yeah I started several companies most of them and in AI space and they do different things Abby is creating technology which converts unstructured data to structure so old as documents they can convert to actionable knowledge for customers for more gaming and sales but what is what IVA is doing IVA is an neural network which.

understands our most available as its employees we have been we were discussed engagement with a customer a customer engagement but what eBay is doing is employee engagement and Eva understand the best practices for example of salespeople and Eva understands observing the objective data object observed their digital footprint and observing how they work with say Salesforce a system understands what differentiates best salespeople in comparison with a Minney occurs with the rest of the sales team and understanding the difference system Eva makes recommendations individualized recommendations to every employee every team member how to improve how to make.

more sales how to make be more efficient so that part is if our PA helps organization overall to be to substitute repeating routine operations with the brain Eva is helping the biological part of organizations human the best part of our our collection to be more effective to be more happy and that’s amazing its its now its possible observing millions of data points how people behave how people react people do and bring this insights to all of us to other humans so the so David does that.

on the human analytics piece does that include you know one of the things that we think about in selling all the time is you know some some salespeople are naturally inclined or naturally born to do certain things and some are not and teaching people how to sell who dont have a natural inclination or desire necessarily to do it its like pushing spaghetti up a hill on this human analytics piece can can you also look at sales people in a sales.

team and say you know this person is just not naturally predisposed to be able to do this therefore its going to be very hard to actually teach them how to do it is that is that part of this I dont understand it enough to know yeah Kyle its a very good question yes exactly some people naturally were born to do that some people naturally were born not to do that so that part you want to understand as early as possible and so far people companies try to make this.

decision just by feelings just by me but but when we have remote in place when we have a lot of remote in place all continuously traveling agile business teams you can now managers cannot face-to-face meet every person every day in new comers they sometimes stay with a company for half a year for a year and sometimes two years before company finally understand that they are not right can compare the.

digital footprint of those people on the first very early each employee including sales people first month how they behave and see that these people behave closer to those people who never succeed in in the past or vice versa these people behave very similar way to those people who became superstars so this is one aspect how to understand natural abilities of people but also there are another part which is trainable so not everything charisma not everything because if something is but because of discipline something because of you know you have to do 50 calls a day that’s it and you.

have to reply to your customers in 15 minutes not in in 10 days so eva is also observing communication patterns and red flags when some people are group b he is answering employees i mean customers emails slowly a versus group a which answering agile and and effectively so that part is trainable controllable right okay that’s that’s fascinating to me being a being a sales guy and working with sales teams and realizing that most sales VP still tell me that their success rate for hiring people that end up succeeding at their.

at their company is less than 50 percent many tell me its less than 40 so Im fascinated by that whole science and one of these days Id love to have a longer offline conversation with you about that but thank you for that clarification so so Robert you know one of the you know one of the uses of AI is to personalize.

and tailor the customer experience and you know were coming back to that martin even talked about that – shamone talk about that its all about people right so if you can you’re trying to tailor the customer experience down to each individual could you talk a little bit about a few of your experiences in this area for us absolutely yeah so personally station it is todays the matter of fact right to get exposed to so much information that we tune out.

everything that’s not relevant yeah she want to mention an example with the new baby but you know we we also shun away from anything that’s blatantly obvious in an attempt to simply use our name or possibly a few other variable components right and in my view the best personalization is when you dont see it at all I mean you dont it just speaks to you you know and the other very relevant topic we use Im speaking about.

this is created creating a frictionless customer experience and you can do that really when you have that individual in mind you know making is easy to do business so personalization comes in every aspect of the customer interaction you know we talk a lot about customers and that is really every touchpoint is the moment of truth is I like to look at it and it starts with the brand well Ill focus on two quick ones you.

know sort of the website and and sort of the chat in the chat pod which was mentioned several times so you know most companies target a fairly wide set of customers with very needs and you know we all know that what they do is they go to the web to do the research so this is perhaps one area where you can start using AI fairly simply you know today what most people do will create a very sophisticated yet hopefully simple to use navigational structure to allow the customer to.

choose their own path down to the website and we all hope and pray that they will go past the first page now there’s technology that that today that will identify a visitor by IP address and Buckett them into an industry or whatever in it and therefore you can start to provide a tailored experience you know on the fly from a set of options automatically when they visit and and this is an area where I see already starting to change but clearly.

its coming really really fast yeah because AI will enable us to not only provide that tailored page creates an industry or company but it will enable us to do that completely composing the page on the fly based on that individual visitor so were not they been before what are they appear to like or not like what what preferences or do they like pictures versus video versus reading you.

know how what do they seem to react to and why Im not sure AI is quite there yet to compose the entire piece but Im pretty confident that it can very well stitch together a very attractive piece from snippets of approved marketing content so you know this whole thing around creating versus versus using and marketing approvals and branding and then hold that that’s a pretty touchy subject actually when it comes to a marketing perspective and and that also says that having a digital asset management system on the backend be a critical component that you get.

into this because that AI engine will going to need to use assets assets to display on the screen to communicate with etc imagery videos content documents or or on-the-fly snippets of component and you need to manage that so that’s something that if you dont have it yet itll be good to start looking at and start investing it the second thing is a chat thing and I think you know like someone said almost everyone in the individual and you had has chat and in.

the b2b way I mean I I find it myself I use it quite often if its available and I want to its a quick play but then you know you try to engage them and it says well were not open right now what its like you know that’s why you have a chat right so right I can really hold that real text conversation and provide that capability 24/7 and given advances in speech and other things like Google home Siri Alexa so forth you know that voice assisted chat is probably not far behind.

if its not there but Im already and again the theme there is to make that experience frictionless make it easy to do business okay that makes that makes a lot of sense to me obviously everybody likes to do business with companies that are easy to do business with and how many times youve heard somebody say you know I just want to deal with them anymore theyre so.

hard to work with so obviously that personal approach seems seems to be the right thing so let me let me go to Martin on a question – you know Martin I you know you you’re you’re youve probably seen this Ive talked a lot of folks marketing executives kind of all believe that were going to see a I enabled solutions starting to drive a big chunk of marketing and sales and a lot of companies and and pretty soon I believe with your focus on lead to cash you got a lot of space in there do you.

believe that the incorporation of AI is going to change the roles that kind of the roles of those sales and marketing personnel and all so therefore the desired capabilities that you’re going to be looking for in those people being hired and if so how do you see that changing because it seems to me a lot of that will change youll it seems like youll require different types of people with different skills capabilities all of that Im really curious on your take on that yeah so that’s that’s I think a really interesting question but but if you’re.

to summarize this so AI is the promise to have sort of all of your sellers become as effective as your best sellers or or try to get there its also allowing you to sort of make sure that your selling are the right stuff so your sellers are focusing on the right stuff by guiding them so the whole idea that a I will replace humans is not where were at I think where we are is AI is sort of.

a it is a is a way to supercharge make humans better but they are gonna stay in charge right so another way to look at it is AI is sort of an exoskeleton for the humans so they make they make them better faster stronger but its not going to replace people its going to its going to make them better at what they do so sales is not is not an exception sales will work that way as well so were going to the way that we were saying this happening is what were.

seeing humans being guided so the sellers that lack the discipline that we talked about earlier or they lacked the rigor with which they identify an opportunity to upsell or cross-sell hey I will be there to assist that so its going to capture what works and its going to enhance you know your ability to adapt quickly so it will figure out whats happening before humans do and it will scale it as Robert was referring to this scaling effect so itll offers the detection and then the enforcement of a.

consistent approach with a customer so so I think that that will that will make more people more effective in the sales arena and marketing arena but but the rules will evolve I think that is very definite and its assisted by AI and the good news is that the human touch will become more of the difference between sellers and that’s that’s I think a really interesting thing that were seeing is that people who know how to empathize and how to relate how to understand your problem Kyle not you know anybody elses but you’re the ability to live in your.

shoes is a very strong skill set that will be increasingly in demand I believe so that we will be in a position to really empathize with who were selling to and understand the whole organization and therefore try new things be creative and be assisted with AI is that that capture yeah yeah and that that’s actually I like I like the way you put that with the human touch you know becomes even more important it.

also seems like it while it while that becomes important it also seems like maybe some other things that some sellers might have been good at might become less important because AI is doing some of that for them that makes sense or not absolutely absolutely right okay a lot of this reinforcement of the right behaviors and and the the triggering of actions when the right behaviors are not.

are not there I think will be made easier so as you do you get better because you’re being guided by this exoskeleton so to speak that helps you do things and helps you be more agile and more able to react in real time because sales is about reacting in time at all times right understanding what were being asked and then being able to adapt your offering to what what the.

customer is asking for got it very very fascinating to me thank you for that I weve only got a couple more minutes I want to see if I can get a couple kind of quick questions here and some answers and let me apologize up front if I ask the wrong panelists the wrong question but if youve been Im going to start with you what if you’re not quite ready to really get into AI all the way lets.

say you’re in Martins shoes at at IBM and you’re thinking I you know I really want to kind of dip my toe in the water but I dont want to go whole hog you know honey it where do you start how do you do that oh oh all right David did I lose you no no where do we start I mean kind of maybe maybe Ill skip this its its probable it will take.

more than one minute okay that’s probably a tough question for for one minute I I apologize for that but I think there’s one I think that you might be able to answer in quickly maybe yeah there’s a lot of things going on in AI and marketing and the marketing and sales space today what do you think is the most exciting capability that’s since you’re kind of lead a leader in this industry what do you think is one.

of the kind of the biggest its most exciting capabilities that might come along in the next year or two if you ask me I would say the abilities to predict something which didnt happen which which which is to predict something this is new generation observing historical data points deep learning and technologists now can predict something in the future this is the most powerful thing which applies to everything were doing including marketing sales people behavior AI people analytics recommendations and everything excellent that’s that’s pretty fascinating and maybe even a.

little scary but exciting at the same time Ill tell you what we have a just a couple minutes what Id like to do is Im going to let each of the panelists just give kind of a closing thought or comment maybe a takeaway if you will and and then well go ahead and close this out so Martin let me let me go right the left here a quick takeaway maybe for the audience for today on what we talked about absolutely so I would.

to two possibly three things start at the end start with what do you want to solve right what pain do you want to relieve so start with the user journey dont start with your systems or processes dont optimize that look at what pains you want to solve and then in customer experience that’s the first thing the second is data consistency you know what structures what what what what.

data do you need in order to help that problem what source of information do you need and where does it reside how can you make it consistent if it resides across multiple areas and decouple it from your IT if need be but it but your your systems of record needs to stay your system of record and really focus on you know try things out and it needs to be done in twelve weeks max right if.

it takes more than twelve weeks break it up right that’s right dont dont try big big things try small things and incrementally improve it excellent thank you Robert about you Oh two things one one is you know dont be afraid of again think of it as as what you do today but enable you to do it at scale and and to get started you know looked in your technology stack today talk to your to.

your vendors and your and your partners and your suppliers and you know inquire what they may have as far as AI capabilities already built II and hopefully they have something or they working on something or see what kind of integration with third parties that might have so that you can get sort of start small try something and its.

Martin said if its too big and it takes too long you know you have to be quick get off the ground try something small and learn from that and then build on excellent thanks Robert David yeah I would agree with her on birth and Martha and I would support them and that would just add and choose right partners aha good call well hey Ill tell you what ladies and gentle this has been this has.

been really phenomenal I David Robert Martin Im very confident you’re receiving some really loud virtual applause back from the audience and I appreciate that in shamone your presentation rocked it it was a great start and really appreciate that this has been a fantastic panel Im very much enjoyed being the moderator were looking at a few more meetings for the chapter for 2019 and we are always actively seeking panelist presenters and even additional relevant topics so if youve got something please reach out to.

us and let us know you can get a hold of myself style andrew is my business partner bill Hall or shamone this is our contact information Id like to Id like to thank everybody once again its been a fantastic panel and meeting I realize Ive gone a minute and 14 seconds over but we hope to see you guys again soon.

thank you very very much thank the crowd would things you want to thank your time thank you