Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Stuart Wall, CEO of Signpost (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What you’re saying is that for all these decisions, which are often manual decisions working off a salesforce.com system or any other CRM system, you work with heuristics and logic such that your intelligent agent is making judgement calls on what actions need to be taken and actually triggering those actions directly?

Stuart Wall: Absolutely. We’re running machine learning against that optimization problem. The second big part of the process is data. Most businesses, even if they have a data science team optimizing marketing, don’t have great data on their customers. Mia pulls together that email transaction and credit card information for any one business and keeps that up to date in real-time. That, by itself, is quite valuable. The other thing that’s interesting is that Mia tracks data on about 30 million Americans.

Because of all the businesses we work for, Mia gets email, phone calls, and credit card swipes from about 1 in 10 people in the United States. From that, she can infer a lot about who someone is and respond to marketing. She may have interacted with them on behalf of another business and is able to update how we interact for another business. She can also run tests across a very big dataset and then apply that automatically for all businesses.

The way it works today is, every business has a myopic view of their own customer base. They can run an A/B test, which is largely based on regression analysis. Everybody has access to only their own data. Everyone is doing their own manual testing. When you do it through machine learning with a large dataset, you get a lot better effectiveness.

Sramana Mitra: I have a number of follow-on questions based on what you said. Let’s start first by asking about your target customer and where you are getting the maximum traction. It sounds like this is a B2C CRM?

Stuart Wall: That’s right. There are two big buckets of businesses we’ve identified – B2B and B2C. Most CRM platforms were started for B2B companies. Salesforce is an example. Most businesses actually don’t have a sales team. They’re B2C. Within the B2C bucket, we make two distinctions. There’s e-commerce and then there are businesses that have a physical presence.

Local, in that regard, doesn’t necessarily mean a retailer. It could be a dentist, insurance agent, or a lawyer. Their physical location matters for them. They could have a review on Yelp for example. That’s where we focus. It’s actually the majority of businesses. We think it’s an underserved category by the existing tools.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Stuart Wall, CEO of Signpost
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