Artificial Intelligence - seeking a relevant data environment

By Marco Abele (CEO & Founder of TEND) & Oliver Bussmann (Strategic Advisor to TEND)

So much rubbish!

Ready access to information is a double-edged sword. On the one hand we can instantly search and satisfy our requirements for answers to all nature of questions or queries that we might have. However, we all feel the pain of the constant bombardment of unsolicited and irrelevant mails, ads and offers. GDPR goes some way to protecting us from it and recently gave us an opportunity to decline some of the real rubbish but the majority of us are still faced with a daily barrage of fairly bland and too often irrelevant information. We barely skim the surface of most of it and very likely miss some of the good stuff along the way.

Hope is at hand

The incredible advances in AI technology and data analytics are now enabling companies to embrace the opportunity to truly serve their clients by making every effort to understand their needs, likes, dislikes, aspirations and in so doing personalise every possible interaction with them. Any company whose purpose relies upon putting its customer front and centre of everything it does must consider adopting advanced analytics, machine learning and genuine AI to improve efficiency, as well as to increase the customer’s all round experience and ultimately satisfaction. You want them to keep coming back!

What’s in it for me!

Let’s take TEND as an example. We set out to build a platform marketplace to enable customers access to buy and sell collectable objects that they were truly passionate about and aspired to experience and bring into their lives: art pieces, wine, watches, jewellery, cars, boats. We would use cutting edge technology to facilitate co-ownership of those assets, bringing them within reach of many more people but, equally important, we would use that technology to direct the right opportunities to the right people. To do so we would need to understand just where our customers interests and passions lay; no point in telling our customer all about an Aston Martin when she has already told us that she has absolutely no interest in cars but would love to invest in a Birkin Bag!

Analytics and cognitive computing, if thoughtfully deployed, can deliver:

• Hyper-personalised experience for each client or group of clients based upon a deeper understanding and on-going learning process about purchase and investment habits, needs, behaviours and desires. This is about a service company being on top of its game and predicting those client needs.
• An optimised asset-to-customer match which in turn can speed up the time-to-transact, success rate and, ultimately, brand loyalty.
• Insights, such as portfolio analytics and simulations and appropriately-packaged information for both clients and partners.
• Asset valuation, pricing and sensitivity analytics.
• Continuous risk monitoring of operations with fraud detection and prevention.
• State of the art, intelligent chatbots.

AI functionality can improve the results of those tasks we’re pretty familiar with and are maybe even beginning to expect as ‘bread and butter’ requirements, such as data mining and analytics. Effectively and appropriately used, AI can also provide ‘Neuro-linguistic programming’ or NLP (in a nutshell, “the study of excellent communication–both with yourself, and with others”, deep machine learning and even predictive analytics.

Reductive & relevant - a purposeful data environment

A business such as TEND must maximise the use of AI to optimise the process of asset-to-customer matching. This means building up as accurate a picture as possible of a given client’s aspirations and even identifying his or her dream asset and having just that asset at hand at the moment the client is ready to invest in it. This enables a whole new level of customer service to be attained.

AI also provides the means to promote new ideas for assets or, as a teaser, to present assets that are in the pipeline to a very targeted audience (both existing customers and potential new customers) that we are confident will genuinely be interested and pleased to hear about these assets. In other words, if our AI is doing its job, we don’t need to bombard and irritate an ‘art lover’ with anything and everything to do with fine art. Rather, we can let that customer know about a piece by his or her favourite artist that will be coming to the TEND market place in the very near future. That’s a very powerful signal that we are taking note of our audience and are interacting with them and get to know them as individuals.

Behind the scenes we have the technology in place to capture all relevant data including user interactions and requests, transactions, market and third party partner events, asset valuation changes, feedback and our own operational activities. Gathering that information is all well and good but, unless we apply clear ontology and taxonomy (in a nutshell, naming and organising) when streaming it into our data lake, it can very easily remain stagnant. If we get it right, however, we can:

• have real confidence in the structure of the data rather than frankly not knowing what we have.
• more easily analyse and develop relevant information in any given context or scenario.
• enable re-use of the knowledge and information we build up.
• demonstrate the evidence to support any assumptions we might make and be very clear about it.

Deliver what your customer wants

Too many companies have such a mass of internal data that, without the right tools and strategy, they risk limiting data analytics to what they have and know at the expense of what they don’t yet know and likely should know. At TEND, we want to understand what people are doing and thinking away from our immediate environment and so we will use AI to harvest information from tens of thousands of potential customers, partners, social media or other unstructured data sources. That very powerful data set enables us to map customer behaviour, understand preferences and even predict with confidence what customers are likely to be interested in. By continually seeking to optimise the process we can go a long way to ensuring that the platform is promoting the right assets to the right customers at the right moment.