Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Grapevine6 CEO Mike Orr (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: On the B2B side, it’s very difficult to turn these people to marketing because what you are describing are very good influencer strategies. This is something that I have done effectively for many years. It’s not something that comes naturally to people – sharing content.

First, you have to have your antennas out there to know what’s out there and what you want to share with people. The fact that you are automating and creating a structure around that is very interesting and can be quite effective. 

Mike Orr: I think it’s going to be the next big challenge for marketing. Instead of only owning all the technology and process themselves, they need to figure out how to educate that sales group. They are not going to achieve the same level that you or the marketing team would like them to, but they are the experts in those techniques. They need to be able to educate and enable sales to go out there and start engaging. 

Sramana Mitra: There are all kinds of content. Content marketing is very colorful if you do it right, and it’s not easy to do it right. The world is still struggling with that. Those who have figured it out are doing well, but it’s not easy to figure out. There are so many pieces of content marketing that are still not figured out.

This brings me to my concluding question for you. Where do you see white spaces in the world of content marketing and perhaps where AI could make a big difference?

Mike Orr: There is a lot of content out there. Content is widely adopted. The challenge is that there is too much. We have a model of simplifying that down and making sure that we are answering questions that haven’t even been asked.

Where search is really good is at answering questions that are explicit or fairly explicit. They can come up with answers to those questions. Where it’s not good at is answering questions that haven’t been asked like, “Finding content relevant to me.” Me is a pretty implicit thing. You have to figure out a way to translate that into a question that ultimately a search engine can answer. That’s an interesting application – to think of AI and how you personalize the customer journey and the service and how you model their relationship with customers.

All that requires a lot of natural language processing, because it’s going to be driven by the content that they engage with, whatever digital channel that your customer is engaging, and the digital conversations that they are having. This could be a meeting that they are having on Zoom. Who is applying AI to understand what that conversation is about and to better shape the customer experience on the next interaction based on the conversation that happened?

That’s the white space. It represents an opportunity that it’s not just that one person relying on the other to own the customer experience and always being the point of customer personalization. The systems can be smarter at helping that and creating a legacy of understanding the customer. That would be a big spot for AI in content in the near future. 

Sramana Mitra: Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Grapevine6 CEO Mike Orr
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