Businesses need innovative solutions to help optimize customer experiences that drive growth. By incorporating artificial intelligence and forthcoming advancements into existing capabilities, brands can benefit greatly.
As companies think about the implementation of an AI strategy, they face the decision of either developing the solutions internally, procuring them from external sources, or outsourcing the necessary expertise.
Deciding on where to start and what to do can be challenging as there will be a multitude of tools and capabilities offered by hundreds of vendors. Companies must strategically choose use cases that deliver not only immediate value but also ensure tangible ROI in the short and long term. In such scenarios, it will become crucial to rely on providers who possess domain expertise and valuable data assets to complement enterprise data. This approach is crucial for securing early adoption and demonstrating the benefits of AI to gain support for future initiatives.
Technology solution providers like Merkle offer invaluable services, such as solution implementation, consulting, and platform expertise. They possess the knowledge, frameworks, and tools required to develop a comprehensive roadmap, enabling organizations to smoothly initiate AI initiatives on a small scale and gradually expand.
3 Key values provided by a purpose-built solution
- Leverage Generative AI for enhanced customer experiences.
- Maximize the value of first-party data.
- Enhance data privacy and compliance.
Further, as stated in the 3 Key Trends for AI and Marketing in 2024 article that “Marketing technology providers will also be aggressive in releasing the next wave of native features and capabilities, aiming to enhance the overall user experience for marketers”, one of the considerations will be what features to use from existing tech investments and how to integrate them into the overall solution that will make today’s tasks seamless.
Our approach that emerged as the winner in the Google Hackathon contest
A cross-functional team from Merkle’s CDP practice led by Jas Singh won first prize for their solution entry “Marketing AI augmentation” in a global hackathon sponsored by Google. This solution was all-encompassing from strategy and requirements through data management, model creation, and UI deployment.
The traditional approach to digital transformation has often been one-dimensional, focusing either on meeting consumer needs or achieving business objectives. However, we designed our solution considering both the marketer and the consumer journey. This solution solved today’s reality that marketers face several challenges when promoting the brand to consumers from content creation to who to market to, while tackling customer experience issues when interacting with a brand such as irrelevant messaging and lack of personalization.
The scaling power of AI
We envision a shift in the modern marketer's role from being primarily tactical and operational to becoming more strategic. The automation capabilities of AI allow marketers to better align their initiatives with their organization and business goals, enabling them to scale efforts and deliver more relevant and hyper-personalized experiences.
To enable the marketers of the future to perform their tasks faster, better, and at scale, the solution addressed the current challenges by streamlining and automating the process of generating large-scale personalized experiences.
It showed how a combination of customers' own data with Google Vertex AI models can augment for example Adobe’s Experience Platform and Journey Optimizer.
This AI approach showed how to enhance brands' existing technology to solve marketer’s classic problem of who, what, and when — day-to-day marketers’ functions that are time-consuming and inefficient.
For example, a marketer at a retail company could use Google Vertex AI to target their audiences by analyzing their purchase history, online behavior, preferences and priorities. This would allow them to create email campaigns with hyper-personalized content to reach their customers through their preferred channels at the right time. This tailored approach will resonate with the customer, leading to a higher likelihood of engagement and conversion, and align with the brand's business goals of increasing reach and loyalty within a specific consumer segment. For instance, if a customer frequently purchases children's clothing, our solution can ensure that they receive emails highlighting new arrivals or sales in that category with custom subject lines and personalized offers, significantly increasing the likelihood of repeat purchases.
Although this submission showed how some of the key functions in marketers' workflow from ideation to deployment will provide unprecedented speed and efficiency with automation, we also would like to note that the new capabilities will also need human interaction for oversight, and approvals.
With this Hackathon win, Merkle’s CDP practice feels they have a good foundation to develop further the AI augmentation offerings that will be used with orchestration tools. We’re continuing to work on integrations with CDPs and Merkle’s GenCX.
Looking to integrate your technology and AI to enable better experiences? Reach out to our team of experts here.
