Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Blueshift CEO Manyam Mallela (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: I completely agree with you, especially as marketing is becoming more of content marketing. You see TV ads but a lot of the brand marketing happens through content.

Good content marketing is still rare. I think we do very good content marketing. We basically run a media company and an acceleration program. We don’t even think about our content as marketing necessarily.

Manyam Mallela: Content is your product. That is the marketing and product experience. You touched upon a really good point, which is that more and more companies do not think of marketing as separate from product experience. 

Sramana Mitra: That’s right. That vehicle that’s putting those two together is content.

Manyam Mallela: That’s right. 

Sramana Mitra: Engagement is really tricky. You have this piece of content and you have somebody who has seen it on LinkedIn. You don’t need to feed that same piece of content to the same person through email or blog. You want to feed that person something else. Right now, I don’t have the tools to do that with.

Manyam Mallela: How you quickly do that as a marketer is very challenging. 

Sramana Mitra: You may have read the story of ButcherBox. It’s this online meat supplier company that provides really good quality meat. I did that story recently in the newsletter. It’s relevant now. It’s worth re-circulating.

Manyam Mallela: Not having the right tools can hobble a marketing organization. 

Sramana Mitra: You can’t have scalability.

Manyam Mallela: A lot of small companies tend to do that manually. 

Sramana Mitra: From your vantage point, what are the open problems that you see out there that you would recommend new entrepreneurs to build companies around?

Manyam Mallela: Having been doing AI and machine learning for 20 years, I recommend first-time entrepreneurs to think not just about the technology but look much more from, “What does it mean for me to say that these customers need a solution?”

One of our Board members has coined this phrase. You market revolution, but you actually sell evolution. Most customers who would buy from you are on a journey. Founders have to think about ideas that map that journey where you’re building a path for someone to walk but also, at a later point, run and sprint.

There is now a good set of AI technologies that the cloud and open sources enable for most teams to have access to. You don’t have to invent large-scale cloud computing because AWS and Azure are providing that for you. The level playing field on the technology toolkit is unimaginable. It’s profoundly different than where we were even 10 years ago.

For a lot of companies, the discussion should not be much about the technology itself. The real problem is how can you apply it to a workflow. AI in the middle of workflow is one of the most powerful things if done right with a design that empathizes with the person who’s doing the workflow. Marketing still has many of those workflows that are very manual. You just said yourself that you have a lot of manual workflow.

This segment is part 6 in the series : Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Blueshift CEO Manyam Mallela
1 2 3 4 5 6 7