Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Protagonist CEO Doug Randall (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: This is really interesting. What trends do you see in the universe that you are playing in? What are the emerging trends? What kind of adoption are you seeing in customers of these kinds of techniques?

Doug Randall: I spoke to some of the trends on Big Data. There is an increasing desire among marketers for deeper and greater understanding of customers. This was ticked off when we knew that we could understand, at a personal level, what individuals want.

Amazon has incredible knowledge of an individual and that’s why they’re able to make recommendations. I think that that has >>>

Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Protagonist CEO Doug Randall (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What are the use cases? Where are you applying those capabilities to?

Doug Randall: There’re a couple of use cases. The big one that I like to think of is changing a narrative. Let me give you an example. We work with a very large foundation that is interested in having more underprivileged Americans attend college. They approached us and they said, “Here’s what our messaging has been. We want to know what we can do to get people to believe more in the value of going to college.”

What we found was that the narrative landscape fell primarily into two different categories. One was a very systems-oriented >>>

Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Protagonist CEO Doug Randall (Part 2)

Doug Randall: The first thing we do is we look for narrative richness. This is text that has high levels of emotion and that is not simply mundane and descriptive. Mundane and descriptive is, “I went to Starbucks yesterday.” Emotion is, “I like my green tea latte because it makes me feel good.”

We then use that to find what are the underlying claims or beliefs that are being expressed. Those component parts of the narratives are what we’re analyzing. Once we have those, we can start to look for similar claims and we can assign measurements to them. If we see a New York Times editorial about the problems of sugar, we can find all of the places where we see that claim >>>

Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Protagonist CEO Doug Randall (Part 1)

This is a fascinating window into how AI analyzes narratives to aid marketing and other functions. Read on for more!

Sramana Mitra: Let’s get started. Why don’t we start with having you introduce yourself as well as Protagonist to our audience.

Doug Randall: I’m the CEO and Founder of Protagonist. We’re a company that helps businesses as well as foundations and governments understand the narratives that are impacting them and understanding them in some special ways. We can identify >>>

Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Pavan Sondur, CEO of Unbxd (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What are the adoption that you’re seeing amongst online retailers of using technologies like yours?

Pavan Sondur: We’re seeing a paradigm shift in the entire e-commerce industry. We are moving away from one generation of search which is an IT infrastructure problem to an AI or machine learning model-based engine which ingests a lot of external data. It not just does search but is also able to do a lot more intelligent things in real-time which go beyond the capabilities of humans. That’s what’s happening. >>>

Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Pavan Sondur, CEO of Unbxd (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Walk us through some use cases of what you are able to do. What kind of personalization are you able to achieve?

Pavan Sondur: One is pure relevancy. When somebody is searching for a black leather jacket, we want an engine that can understand and tries to emulate an offline sales person. It needs to understand, at scale, what it is that I’m looking for and dig for it in the catalog even if the catalog has bad data in it. It will give me back leather shoes even if two out of the three words match. That’s one use case. It needs to work for every single query. It needs to work all the time. >>>

Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Pavan Sondur, CEO of Unbxd (Part 1)

Unbxd focuses on the trend where manually created rule-based systems are being rapidly replaced by real-time, AI-based, dynamic systems that drive personalization in e-commerce sites.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as Unbxd.

Pavan Sondur: I’m one of the Co-Founders of Unbxd. We are a five-year-old startup. We started off to solve the problem of matching user intent with the right content on digital platforms. For anybody coming to an e-commerce site, the engine that we plug in understands that intent and brings up the right product content to them. >>>

Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Jim Regan, CMO of MRP (Part 5)

Jim Regan: You have these companies doing a great job aggregating behavior that’s online but there are all these other inputs that provide a lot of context for the machine and bring us a level of capability to make our predictions even smarter. The second thing is I just hate is the way content is being created. I feel that it is so antiquated. That is still happening at the agency level.

Now that you have this unique visibility into what an organization is consuming, the challenge is in creating enough content to message them in a meaningful way, and I don’t see how they’d do it. I think the content industry is very far behind with this artificial intelligence capability. >>>