Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Dave O’Flanagan, CEO of Boxever (Part 3)

Dave O’Flanagan: The second step is using these different systems and data to be able to infer what the next best action is. That takes into account anywhere between 5 and 20 different features that are configurable by our customer. We believe that most of our customers are more than capable of being able to build these next best actions in the Boxever platform. Our role is to make sure that the data is available in real-time at the time they need it so that they can make the decision and change the customer interaction.

Sramana Mitra: Switching gears a bit, as you work with these airline customers and personalize their offerings, what open problems are you identifying that are out there that may be worthwhile for new entrepreneurs to look at?

Dave O’Flanagan: There’s a couple of things we’ve seen in marketing. When we talk about ensuring that we can personalize the experience of the customer, one area that’s a real challenge both in travel and beyond is content. Personalizing digital experience is a real challenge. If you create one-to-one experiences for customers, then you have to have huge amounts of content to be able to select from and be able to create that experience.

What we’ve seen is that that’s probably one of the top challenges or barriers of being able to do this because customers need to engage agencies or be able to source lots of content to be able to start to select pieces to create these unique experiences. I would say there’s a real opportunity there to solve the content challenge.

There’s a lot of people out there trying to solve personalization from an algorithmic perspective but there’s a big challenge around content. It’s great that I know what the customer wants but how do I present it at what channel and why. Another is in understanding how to deploy more and more at scale and test them in a safe and consistent way.

One of the big challenges with data science and algorithms for a lot of organisations is that the data scientists work on a dataset outside of the platform. They struggle to be able to bring those insights into operational context in a way that they can do it in a quick and easy-to-use manner. One big opportunity is understanding these workflows. It’s not really about creating the algorithm. It’s about being able to deploy the algorithm and deploy it in the e-commerce channel, the email channel, or in the web channel. There’s a big opportunity there to be able to understand how to make data scientists more effective and bring them closer to the customer.

I think the third one is mobility and IoT. There’s a lot of talk about it but from what we can see in the industry, very few companies or vendors have truly cracked it. There’s a lot of capability around warehousing event data but the ability to act and understand that data, do it at scale, and deliver it back into an enterprise system that can consume it, that seems largely unsolved right now. It’s an opportunity that we, at Boxever, feel that there’s a long way to go before that’s going to be solved.

Sramana Mitra: Great! Thanks for your time.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Dave O’Flanagan, CEO of Boxever
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