Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Samir Addamine, Founder and Chairman of FollowAnalytics (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: GDPR was a priority for you long before all this because a priority for the rest of the world. Being in Europe, you had to pay attention to privacy much sooner.

Samir Addamine: Exactly. Also I would say that one of the company’s main value is ethics. Ethics is beyond regulations. It’s much more important. We are collecting data on mobile. We are collecting sensitive data here. We are collecting behavior when people are using the app. We are collecting locations. We are following the Apple and Google guidelines. The Apple guidelines are very restrictive, which is good.

Sramana Mitra: They’re much better than Facebook.

Samir Addamine: There’s no comparison with the others. Apple does not sell data to third parties. It’s not their business model.

Sramana Mitra: Since this discussion is in the context of Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence, help us understand the AI angle of the use cases that we’re talking about?

Samir Addamine: We have a product called Optimize. It’s an A/B testing product. We have an engine that categorizes users. It detects automatically what should be delivered to each user. It learns what types of messages work making the sampling phase shorter and yielding higher conversion rates. It’s a campaign tool that’s doing A/B testing intelligently. 

We also have a second application of AI. It’s what we call Final Exploration. We analyze all data received to help our users explore the path taken by users in their app. For example, based on an event, customers can see what relevant events happened before, after, or in between two events. This is more AI for funnel analytics. For example, a luxury brand wants to send a message out about a new bag collection.

Users love their brands for various reasons. For example, quality, exclusivity, style and so on. By writing variants of a push message around this concept, the marketer can make sure that the right message goes to the right user. Since there’s not just one winning variant, all variants are distributed to the right users. Usually, A/B testing is saying, “Segment A has 35% conversion rate. Segment B is 22%. Segment is 25%. We’re going to do Segment A.” It’s losing all the others.

Sramana Mitra: You do an on-the-fly personalization by segment and profile.

Samir Addamine: Exactly.

Sramana Mitra: Is this both on mobile and desktop?

Samir Addamine: Now, we do mobile and web. We do that integrated with Salesforce and with others. I can give you an example for Final Exploration as well. I look at the key conversion events. For instance, purchasing or signing up for yearly contracts. Then, I look back at what the users did recently, which led to this action. The system looks at the relevant events and not just the most recent or the most frequent.

To conclude on AI, the vision I had since the very beginning was to work on a system that could be a self-driving campaign. An intelligent system can tell me how to connect with Samir. The ultimate goal is getting closer to the self-driving marketing automation product.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Samir Addamine, Founder and Chairman of FollowAnalytics
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