Our CEO Alex Holub discusses the future of automated marketing and business intelligence with Ryan Robinson of About.com in this article. Here is an excerpt from the interview:
How does Vidora think about Artificial Intelligence? How does this differ from mainstream perceptions?
Alex: “A.I. is a really broad field, and it has a bunch of different sub-branches. For instance, in the 70s, a lot of A.I. work involved ‘expert systems’. These focused on having humans enter in a lot of rules with that knowledge. And one of the most active areas to do with this is Machine Learning. This system adapts based on new information it receives. What’s great about Machine Learning is that the algorithm will adapt and optimize over time based on a specific goal you set for it. And it’s a really powerful paradigm.”
“The vision for Vidora is for a marketer or executive team to set a business goal, for instance ‘maximize total newsletter signups this month’, ‘maximize new user retention’, or ‘minimize customer churn’, and have Vidora automatically determine the best way to maximize those strategic goals across the various customer touchpoints. Now, humans are coming up with the business strategies and Vidora goes to work in executing those strategies.”
How are your current clients experiencing the benefits of integrating your technology with their websites?
Alex: “Vidora works with some of the largest global brands, and they are spread across a variety of verticals. Because of this scale, more data and control allows us to really move the needle for their core marketing KPIs. Vidora sees about 10m daily unique users and process about 200m daily behavioral events.”
“Today, one of our more exciting deployments is with MobiTV. MobiTV works with several of the largest global telcos, and Vidora provides their intelligence backbone. That backbone powers MobiTV customers across mobile deployments. Because of this, we collect behavioral data on user activity and optimize customer touch-points. Those KPIs include increasing app engagement, reducing user subscription churn, and increasing 7-day uniques.”
So how do you see A.I. influencing websites and the way we do online business over the next 5-10 years?
Alex: “I think that the next 5-10 years are going to be really exciting. This is because if we look at the past few years, we’ve seen a lot of Venture Capital activity and companies built around big data infrastructure. As a result, in 2016 you will see a lot of interest on how to effectively use all that data. So given the scale of data, it becomes increasingly important to have powerful intelligent systems which can help sift through it all. And this is where A.I. and machine learning come into play.”
“Today, we’re excited by the number of businesses transitioning to being almost entirely powered by A.I.. In the next 5 years, we will see businesses emerge where a centralized intelligent system will dominate decisions across a variety of areas. A.I. will have a hand in decisions ranging from media buys, to employee pay scales and how sales leads should be engaged. If we fast-forward another 5 years, I can envision a world where executive management and boards are deciding on broad corporate strategies. But even today technologies like ours are tactically executing and battling against one another in the marketplace.”
