Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Cognitive Scale CEO Akshay Sabhikhi (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What is a good example of the other value proposition?

Akshay Sabhikhi: All of us have been to Amazon. We all shop and we have preferences around things we buy on different websites. Think about the last time you went to a website. Pick your favorite sports brand. I never authenticated myself or given my credentials to a retailer on their website because it’s too painful. I don’t know what value I’m going to get when I authenticate.

When I just go up to the website and start shopping, I don’t find any information that’s really personalized to me. What I do find is some very annoying, crazy ads chasing me all over the place. What we did was we said, “It’s unlikely that people are going to authenticate themselves but how do you start understanding the consumer when they come to your website?” As they start shopping or they like something, these are all interactions that are captured by retailers but nothing really gets done with it.

If you put an AI brain behind this where even if you’re not authenticated, in just five interactions, I can start building a profile around a shopper. In those five interactions, I can come up with an insane number of attributes about you that would give me a much better view of you as an individual rather than saying, “This person is coming from the northeast at this time.” Rather than having these broad representations, I can come back with a very individual representation. We call that the consumer DNA. Just put that aside for a second.

Imagine if I could take a catalog of products from a retailer’s catalog. Let’s say it’s a dress. Typically, retailers will tell you these five attributes of a dress: price, seasonality, cut, length, print, or pattern. If I told you that AI can now take the same dress and can image-attribute the dress and come back with almost 150 attributes, it starts giving you a deeper picture of how the dress is actually used.

If I combine this deep knowledge of the consumer and this deep attribution of the product and imagine adding a third dimensionof context, these three things come together and they’re able to come up with very personalized recommendations using AI where it almost feels like the website is tailored around you.

Sramana Mitra: Very interesting. Do you have metrics? By doing what you have been doing, do you have quantification of what kind of impact these kinds of AI infusion or augmentation is having?

Akshay Sabhikhi: As a smaller company, you have to start with the business outcome. In fact, we don’t begin any engagement using our platform until we sign a document that says, “These are the KPI’s. These are the metrics that we will deliver.” The first engagement with any one of our customers is typically 90 days or less. We have said this from day one, “We can’t afford a train wreck.”

If we don’t live up to the promise of AI, we’re going to lose credibility in the market very quickly. In some of the examples that I gave you, when it comes to engagement, the metrics are around how I can measure through a well-qualified and quantified A/B test. Arguably, if you’re putting things in front of them that are interesting for them, they’re going to stay on longer. The holy grail in retail is what do they buy and if you can actually measure conversion.

Those are metrics that we have been able to measure very successfully to show how even in a three-month window, you can drive engagement up to almost 30% to 40% ahead of where you are today. That’s just the beginning. The example I gave you around wealth management was driven off of increasing scale and productivity. It was actually a 10x measure that we put on wealth managers to say, “If you’re handling 20 people on average, you should now be able to service 200 people. We are able to show very quickly that wealth advisors are able to get insights to help them get just-in-time advice about the client’s portfolio.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Cognitive Scale CEO Akshay Sabhikhi
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