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Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Conversica CEO Alex Terry (Part 4)

Alex Tery: The way it’s doing it is, it is literally doing the natural language processing of all the inbound communication. You would be astounded what people will tell the assistant. They’ll tell the assistant way more information than they would tell the salesperson. Everything that the AI persona learns in those email interactions is stored in the CRM. The sales assistant is updating the CRM and the actual sales people at every step of the way. For example, we have a number of different ways that we can alert the sales people by sending an email, digest, or sending a text message. The point is the sales people are 100% in the loop. They’re comfortable that the sales assistant would operate like a regular assistant would. The sales assistant’s job is not to replace the sales person. It’s to augment the sales person and make their lives easier.

Sramana Mitra: You said you have about a hundred customers?

Alex Terry: 600 plus paying customers. That’s about 10,000 paying sales people. >>>

Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Conversica CEO Alex Terry (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: I would like to double-click down on that. Walk us through when a lead is being profiled by your engine, what kind of processing is happening? What parameters are being processed and how?

Alex Terry: You mentioned Everstring. There’s a number of different tools that we’re very complementary with. By the way, a number of the companies that we’re talking about are customers of ours and they’re customers of ours. We feel like we’re very complementary. Let me walk you through what an integration looks like and how that hand-off works. For example, for many of our customers, they have some kind of marketing automation system or a lead management system where we integrate with Marketo, Eloqua, or even homegrown email-based systems. Somewhere, a lead gets created and that lead has to get to Conversica somehow. It could be by API or it could be by daily uploads of CSV or flat files or email forwarding. We have a number of different ways that we support in getting a lead into the Conversica system.

Then Conversica integrates with the email system of our customers. If you think about the Conversica AI Sales Assistant, it’s a persona that acts as if it’s an STR or sales assistant in that company. At Conversica, ours is named Rachelle Brooks. If you get an email from Rachelle Brooks, >>>

Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Conversica CEO Alex Terry (Part 2)

Alex Terry: It is really outstanding when you look at the change in the last 10 years in terms of how companies and individuals use marketing and sales. The third category we talk about is machine intelligence. That includes the trifecta of technologies that we leverage where we focus on artificial intelligence, machine learning, and natural language processing. We look at that bundle of machine intelligence as the newest and one of the most exciting of those three waves.

In a sense, we think Conversica is surfing off those three important industry trends. We think they’re all pretty exciting. In terms of the specific problems that we solve for our customers, Conversica really addresses two common customer complaints. We hear this all the time. I’m sure you probably hear them as well. We hear marketing organization complain that the sales teams that they work with do not thoroughly follow up on all the leads that the marketing teams generate. A second complaint we hear is that sales teams are complaining that the marketing is generating low-quality leads. There can be a little bit of finger pointing going on in some organizations. >>>

Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Conversica CEO Alex Terry (Part 1)

The use of intelligent agents to automate various functions is an area that I am personally very interested in. This conversation dives into the specific area of Intelligent Sales Assistants.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with some introduction about Conversica and yourself.

Alex Terry: I’m the CEO of Conversica. We’re a private equity and venture capital-backed technology startup here in the Bay Area. Our headquarters is in Foster City although we have our development office up in Washington. We also have a large sales team in Kansas City, Missouri. We’re a little bit spread out. We’ve built an artificial intelligence-based sales assistant that helps any organization improve their sales and also their marketing and sales alignment. I can go into more detail on what that means later on. At the high level, we have an AI-powered sales assistant that operates at the top of that sales funnel. It engages and qualifies inbound leads and helps sift out the good leads and elevate them for immediate sales attention. It can also sift out the time-waiting leads and does it in a fully automated way so that it doesn’t waste the time of the sales people. >>>

Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Kevin O’Malley and Patrick Shea, Co-founders of AdDaptive Intelligence (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: So you have to basically manually speed the algorithms with the parameters. You’re almost providing certain constraints within which the machine is learning, as opposed to a completely unconstrained learning environment.

Patrick Shea: That’s exactly right. Similar to guided learning, which is very popular in artificial intelligence, we’ve always said that our process is a human-guided algorithm. That really helps describe what AdDaptive Intelligence is versus what artificial intelligence brings to the market.

Kevin O’Malley: If there’s one other trend that I would add that I think is important to the space, it would be the blurring of the line and the merging of the online world and the offline world. Traditionally, offline marketers have collected tremendous amounts of information from the number of times you get an oil change to what you buy in a retail store. Online data has always been based on your digital footprint. In many cases, a bit more anonymous than the offline data. >>>

Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Kevin O’Malley and Patrick Shea, Co-founders of AdDaptive Intelligence (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s switch a little bit to a different line of questioning. If you look at this approach of AI in the publishing and advertising space, what are the trends that you’re seeing? I’m specifically interested, however, in understanding where AI is making an impact and what kinds of trends have you seen in some of your industry peers doing what they’re doing using AI.

Patrick Shea: I think it’s specific to a lot of industries but it’s very prevalent in the digital marketing ecosystem. One of the biggest trend is the level of complexity and the fact that there are so many point solutions that are trying to solve a very specific problem. That’s a good thing. The barriers to entry in this market are lower than in others. It allows people to compete on value. When they provide a different value, they insert themselves into the larger stack. However as that happens, that level of complexity can create friction between buyers and sellers of digital media. As this industry continues to evolve, there will be more open platforms. There’s going to be more common standards that really don’t exist right now. >>>

Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Kevin O’Malley and Patrick Shea, Co-founders of AdDaptive Intelligence (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: When it comes to publishers, how much revenue are publishers making by plugging you in? Are they doubling revenues or tripling revenues? What kind of ROI are you showing them?

Kevin O’Malley: A lot of times, they are doubling the amount of revenue they’re bringing in from a traditional display advertising. Obviously, different publishers charge different amounts. We have seen, on many cases, that we have clients that are literally doubling the amount of display advertising revenue from plugging our solution in.

Sramana Mitra: What is your sweet spot in terms of publishers? Are we talking large publishers like New York Times and Mail Online or are we talking about smaller publishers? Where is your clientele? >>>

Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Kevin O’Malley and Patrick Shea, Co-founders of AdDaptive Intelligence (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Can you talk about the workflow of this? Where is the data collection happening? Where is the data integration with the algorithm happening? Is this happening in real-time, batch, or pre-setting of some sort? How is this setup? If I’m a publisher who wants to plug in your system into my site, how does this work?

Kevin O’Malley:  Everything is real-time, so is our data management platform, especially the technology that helps segment the data. That is done through real-time transactions. We’ll essentially place our technology on the publisher’s website. From there, we’re collecting, segmenting, and analyzing all that data in real-time. When the publisher has an advertising campaign to run, they’ll select certain segments of users and certain characteristics that they would like to target. We then would run the campaign on our platform.

The algorithm is obviously built into our media buying engine. Essentially, we’re using their data but we’re also using the data that we receive back from all of the impressions that we’re running. As Patrick mentioned earlier, there’s dozens, if not thousands, of different parameters – time >>>