Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Socialbakers CEO, Yuval Ben-Itzhak (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: In a way, it kind of feels like some of these fat startups need to happen because there’s so much fragmentation in every single workflow right now. Marketing is one them. Content marketing is one of them. Digital marketing is one of them. Wherever you look, there’s so much fragmentation in capabilities.

Yuval Ben-Itzhak: Well, there’s actually a solution and a great example of a startup that very recently was acquired for more than $500 million. Before I started my journey in marketing, I spent 20 years in security. Computer security is as fragmented as marketing. There are so many security positions in a typical organization in IT.

A similar challenge is, “How do I manage all the security from network security to application security?” It looks like a nightmare and is probably not going to be one startup that can do it all. Apparently, there are solutions that came to the market as security or incident requests, incident management, or orchestrations. Basically, you still have those point solutions or solutions for a particular problem, but they source that data. They sit on top of them. They superseded up everything trying to understand what really matters and doesn’t matter. Where to optimize? Where to alert the people?

Same can be applied to marketing by doing all the data plumbing from all those digital networks, having AI and machine learning on top of this data stream, bringing in the real insight into the marketers, and then giving recommendations of what’s right and wrong, and then pushing back at that data for execution. I truly believe that the startup that understands that fundamental problem can achieve it by focusing on that. You don’t need to reel all this ecosystem in. You just need to interface them and process data and provide that capability.

There was this example I was referring to before. There’s a security company that Palo Alto Network acquired about a month ago. It is a security orchestration company that started three or three and a half years ago and managed to do it quite successfully. They grew very fast. One of the reasons is because the pain is so hard. They have similar fragmentation challenges although in a completely different domain. Still there’s room for new startups to focus on this challenge and provide a solution. I think it’s a tremendous opportunity at the end of the road.

Sramana Mitra: Interesting. We’ll keep an eye out to see who can bring the marketing technology side and digital marketing side together in the way that you’re saying the security companies that Palo Alto network has acquired and brought together. Very good. Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 6 in the series : Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Socialbakers CEO, Yuval Ben-Itzhak
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