Embracing AI for Consumer Engagement
Credit: iStock® | Gremlin
Today’s post is an announcement; not because of any carefully laid marketing or business development strategy, but by virtue of finding ourselves immersed in something proving to be too important, too pivotal, and enormously powerful in creating durable consumer engagement and business growth for our client's brands.
So, today I want to share that C[IQ] Strategies is all-in on artificial intelligence (AI) applications for a new level of infinitely scalable customer engagement: conversational and interactive AI, using natural language agents (NLAs). In other words, we’re making a significant strategic business commitment and investment in helping brands leverage AI. While it will never be the only aspect of brand and consumer engagement strategy work we perform, it will be a considerable element.
The reason for this is we’re now immersed in two, and potentially by the end of the quarter, three projects to design, build, and deploy — first as Pilots, but then as production — conversational-AI service agents for deep customer engagement. We’re literally designing and engineering these new Apps!
This work is resulting in a build-up of a C[IQ] AI technology development team, including some very senior computer scientists and software engineers with deep experience and a world-class UX/UI team (yep: it's not just about data and math; designing a multi-modal, highly interactive NLA requires a significant interactive design effort).
With that, and from what we’re seeing in industry, we’re all-in and want to make ourselves available to help our clients pursue this incredible new aspect of marketing technology.
Rapidly Growing Capabilities
We’re about 6 months in so far, and I can attest, firsthand, that this is the most exciting and significant development since the advent of the World Wide Web. Of course, the good and bad of that is that this revolution also feels eerily similar to the dot-com boom/bust of 2000-2002. This time, however, I’d like to think the tech-sector has learned some lessons about the risks of over-hype; although honestly, while the hype is soaring, so far, there is substance to most of the claims.
Similar to the dot-com era, we’re seeing a few tech-titans rapidly make land grabs to corner key elements of the new infrastructure required to build AI Apps and services. And of course, there are also open-source alternatives to the foundational “language models” for building A.I. Apps (IBM offers a nice short tutorial on these alternative models).
I look forward to soon sharing with our readers important insights; for instance, why C[IQ] is focused on AI service agents, rather than Chatbots (and the distinction); why we’re using a specialized approach to language models to ensure the agent’s quality in output; plus other useful considerations.
Cautiously Proceeding; Aggressively Progressing
To be sure, we’re cautious about some of the aspects of large language models (LLMs) as necessary foundations (thus, our unique approach called domain-specific small language models). Foundational LLMs are known to get things wrong; they’re known to literally hallucinate in their responses at times, and most concerning is that they can be compromised (think: content poisoning.) A small upside is that they’re fine to experiment with to evaluate how an AI App might work in a production setting. And they’re a quick way to dive into AI. Yet, deployed on their own, we do not believe these LLMs from the Tech-Titans are ready for brands to use out-of-the-box. There are still too many examples of things going awry (or at least not going as expected).
So, first I want to emphasize the need for guarded optimism with A.I. One thing to understand is that the current A.I. Apps (if you can really call them truly “AI” which we will discuss another time) is that they are far from perfect if you rely on the popular LLMs of today’s Tech-Titans like Google, Meta, Microsoft, or OpenAI. It seems like customer service Chatbots can get their companies in all sorts of trouble if the engineers of these Apps are less than careful. For example, Air Canada was recently forced to give a customer a full refund in compliance with a policy its customer service AI Chatbot had literally made up.
Yet, almost daily, we’re making advances and breakthroughs on the projects we’re working on, and the potential for AI to completely reshape the consumer brand experience is just off-the-charts huge.
And for the most part, zealous developers racing to sell into this opportunity are implementing these AI assistants with 2023 methods. Yes, it’s moving very fast. There are new ways to prevent these types of errors, and my fractional CTO and my Sr. Architect both promise to share how we’re leap-frogging ill-advised implementations by those lacking the education and experience in the technology. (Again, I strongly encourage common sense and cautious proceeding; the “snake oil” in AI is unlike anything we’ve seen in the rise of digital commerce—seriously, but the good news is, I can help you navigate the noise.)
So, for C[IQ] it’s very unlikely that we’ll ever allow an AI service agent loose for a client’s brand that: [A] has not been thoroughly tested for trust and safety, and [B] just starts making-up customer service policy! 🙄 That also reminds me to emphasize we’re huge promoters of “Pilots.”
Responsible AI Innovating
Speaking of which, this is why we’re taking a “crawl-walk-run” approach to our client projects. We’re being cautiously optimistic, and taking careful steps to (for example) help our clients develop specialized small language models and natural language agents that are carefully trained to protect the best interests of a Brand and provide the very best information and services. Two principles guide our work:
Extensive testing for trust and safety in these Apps — because to do otherwise is malpractice; and
Pilots, pilots, pilots — we do not let anything out into the wild of the consumer world until our client and we are satisfied it is safe to do so.
It turns out so far, because this technology is evolving so fast, my team is regularly finding solutions to challenges nearly as fast as they encounter them! 🤓 (As I noted above, we’re making a significant investment in the technical know-how and talent for which currently, demand far outstrips supply). At the end of the day, this work requires carefully vetting the hype and the claims; separating the wheat from the chaff, so to speak. The result is responsible innovation — innovation we want to bring to you.
We want to bring our rapidly growing capabilities, experience, and skills in AI to consumer brands, perhaps even your own business.
C[IQ] is blessed to be attracting the best and brightest because they appreciate and respect our approach to marketing technology, consumer engagement and intelligence, and consumer-centricity. Top of mind for us — especially myself — is getting you solid information to make your decisions about when and how to wade into this new amazing technology.
I’ll bet you’re already being bombarded with offers, pitches, ideas, and pressure to “do something AI.” With my 2+ decades of experience in the most important aspect of brand management: consumer engagement and retention, I want to offer your business my unique capabilities:
A highly experienced B2C marketer, fortified with a solid foundation of knowledge and experience applying AI to marketing and consumer engagement.
Where to From Here?
We believe there is nearly no limit to the potential of AI in the marketing technology stack. To be sure, while we’re addressing applications across the entire stack, we are particularly focused on building Retail AI Service Agents for consumer engagement. That is considerably different than using AI to brainstorm your next big campaign strategy, draft new messaging, or perform predictive analytics; there’s already a spectrum of offerings and experts for that.
By contrast, our niche is more focused, albeit large, and I dare say more technically challenging. So, of course, I’m looking for more consumer brands who want to engage in this, and starting with a pilot makes sense for most. While I’m entertaining new projects, I want to help as many as I can come to speed on this stuff. So, the next step is to scale how I can do that.
There are one of three ways I’m going to proceed to offer initial help on this fast moving topic; I haven’t decided which way I’ll go, but you'll be the first to know. And you can help me decide how!
Specifically, I intend to offer periodic short tutorials and insights on AI in brand and consumer marketing — what it is (and is not); how it works; and what it can do for your brand-to-consumer engagement and business growth. The three possible ways I can do that are:
Continue to use our blog platform here; or
Produce a LinkedIn® newsletter (but you’d need to be a LI user for that); or
Develop a Substack™ that you can freely subscribe to (with more advanced information, services, and advice on a paid subscription).
Which way should I go? 🤔
I’d love your thoughts as a comment here, or simply contact us. And if you’re even slightly pondering what AI can do for you, please reach out and let’s just chat about whether its right for your brand (it actually isn’t right for every business depending on their stage in life).
For a shot of “ideation,” consider three projects C[IQ] is working on right now; each offers applicable expertise and portable capabilities:
For a global brand a new kind of “AI concierge” to build and sustain a highly personalized, smart, 1:1 customer relationship; always on 24x7, tirelessly able to assist with any product questions and all aspects of online commerce; continuously growing smarter about the customer’s needs; and (the best part): infinitely scalable.
For a stealth startup in the sports technology space, an “AI training agent” that is continuously building a “digital twin” of its user to help that user train to reach her peak potential while limiting risk to injury; and the agent is continuously “learning” from every aspect of incoming data to help recommend training adjustments.
For a global civic-engagement organization, an “AI co-pilot” to help users navigate an incredibly important civic duty and right, guiding them along the process path including managing certain time-sensitive tasks to ensure the user can engage in that civic activity.
We’re all in on AI; we’d love to help you get there too.