AI uses in MarTech: Top 5's from the AI Growth Summit

My team and I have been building ML and AI driven models for business intelligence, sales, and marketing for several years now. Our data assets for AI are massive and you would need to be a company like Dun & Bradstreet to have more business entities than Microsoft has. It is sort of obvious. I mean, what company in the world doesn’t use at least one of our products? The answer, very few.

One of the practices we have at Microsoft is the sharing of a trip report. Any engineer that does a series of customer visits or attends a conference writes up a report on the trip to share. I wrote up my trip report for the AI Growth Summit virtual conference and had very positive response from my co-workers. I would share this trip report and some of my personal journey going deeper into AI Driven Selling.

To be frank, the AI Growth Summit really was geared toward sellers that had little to no knowledge about the use of AI in selling and marketing activities. Additionally, the quality of the content was a bit up and down. I did start watching all 27 videos, but I did not finish watching all of them. Some sessions were just Skype type interviews, others simplistic VLOGs, but the best being well thought out presentations with very interesting case studies. It was a “free” online conference where the admission price was a work email. In the end I found it to be a good price to value ratio. 

So, here are my personal top 5s from the AI Growth Summit with a lot of direct links to presenters and videos.  For the full events content go here. 

Top 5 Things I Learned about Modern B2B Selling

• Average of 6.8 decision makes involved in a B2B sale
• Sellers spend only 32-37% of their time selling
• Deals are taking 24% more time on average and Time to Close needs to be part of the lead prioritization process
• Less than 50% of sellers consistently hit their quota
• Think of AI as a Wedge technology. It can help by driving up revenue or driving down cost.

Top 5 Trends in AI Selling that I thought were worth noting

1. Personalized AI Driven content from the creation of emails, web pages, and even chat content
2. Traditional AB Testing is on it’s way out. AI will drive us to infinite customization at scale.
3. Commercial Social (most examples were LinkedIn) is the new frontier. Best path to the best key decision maker to close a deal. It’s all about shortest best path. 
4. Chatbot technology is exploding. Could be on a web page or texting back and forth.
5. Discovering Blue Puddles using AI. Ability to do nearly infinite segmentation to find new niche markets you can sell into where competition is currently low.

Top 5 Sales AI Companies I want to learn more about

• Tethr specializes in speech to text technology specializing in support and sales calls with models to analyze call success

• Drift primarily focuses on ChatBot technology for selling. Knows sourceIP for companies. They knew I was looking at their webpage from a Microsoft IP address before I’d done anything else.        

• Conversica is another chatbot company but I’m very interested in chat technologies so I want to follow up with more than one company. 

• Persado helps you come up with compelling language while you produce content. Think of it as Grammarly for persuasion. Sounds fascinating.

• Affectiva analyzes video of peoples faces to detect emotional response. Examples of use for detecting tired drivers but you can see it being used to test political campaign ads as well. 

Top 5 presentations from the event with one big thought each

Sales Ex Machina: How AI is Changing the World of Selling (38:25)

• Presented by Victor Antonio Auhtor of "Sales Ex Machina: How AI is changing the world of selling.” Direct YouTube link.
• One of the last talks I watched but the one I should have started with. Victor does a great job introducing AI for the new person and explaining how it will be impacting sales and marketing for the non-seller.

Redefining the Account Selection Process Using Digital "Social Proximity" Intelligence (13:03)

• Presented by Jamie Shanks CEO Sales for Life. Direct Youtube link .
• The concept of Social Proximity is very powerful. The talk is short and mostly an intro to the concept. The demo using LinkeIn Sales Navigator really brings it home.

Marketing in the machine age: the path to a more (artificially) intelligent future (23:30)

• Presented by Paul Roetzer Founder & CEO Marketing Artificial Intelligence Institute. Direct YouTube Link
• For me the overview of AI for the first 12 minutes was old news but Paul does a good job laying out what AI is and where it is in our lives. The 5Ps of AI in selling was the best part: Planning, Production, Personalization, Promotion, and Performance.

Gil Allouche AI Growth Summit Metadata How AI is Changing Marketing (23:56)

• Presented by Gil Allouche CEO @Metadata. Direct YouTube link.
• Gil’s main pivot is how the concept of A/B testing, picking the best of two options, is being replaced by infinite personalization using AI. Just as search is personalized per individual, so will marketing messages become in the near future.

Scaling ABM (account based marketing) with AI: Three Real-Life Examples of ABM Success (33:36)

• Presented by Nipul Chokshi VP Marketing @Lattice. Direct YouTube link.
• I really appreciated the case study approach. It really brought home for me all these company names and technologies into a real application. Key message was about applying AI to Account Base Marketing (ABM)

In summary the content was geared more for sellers and marketers than someone already working in data science. Even so, for me, the chance to better undestand the language and use cases of end customers of my work was a good use of my personal time. Besides, the event cost only my work email and since I didn't watch the videos as a live stream I could fast forward through those I wanted and pause and go back when I really wanted to understand a point in more detal.

My recommendation though is probably just watch the 5 videos I linked and you’ll learn all the most valuable concepts.