In the first part of Digital Journal’s interview with Anil Kaul we learned the different ways that artificial intelligence is altering the way the travel sector operates. Examples ranged from personalized services to the use of robots to ‘meet and greet’ customers. These examples are insightfully provided by Kaul in the article “Impact of AI on the travel sector.”
In a follow-up interview, Kaul discuses the services that his data analytics company – Absolutdata – can provide for the travel sector and how this business-to-business offering can help travel companies remain competitive.
DJ: Earlier we discussed the benefits of artificial intelligence for the travel sector. What services does Absolutdata provide?
Kaul:Absolutdata serves global Fortune 500 leaders with a depth of analytics services and products that are driving more intelligent and faster decisions, in the world’s most competitive companies. We call this Decision Engineering. With nearly a decade of experience, hundreds of talented engineers and thousands of projects worldwide, Absolutdata offers an extensive depth and breadth of analytics services including, marketing and sales analytics, customer analytics, market research, digital media analytics, social media analytics, dynamic dashboard design, beautiful visualizations, ETL services, and big data architectures. Clients across many verticals have hired Absolutdata to implement extremely complex analytics, integrate disparate data systems, and solve challenging business problems.
To address the ever-evolving customer needs we have developed an in-house Innovation Hub called “Absolutdata Labs”, which focuses on developing new analytical products, incubating, and developing new technologies and analytical techniques.
DJ: How did you go about developing your platform?
Kaul:Absolutdata conducted extensive market analysis and assessed the need gaps that existed. Their research revealed a persistent worldwide shortage of data scientists, and this has held up companies’ adoption of AI in sales, marketing and brand management.
Absolutdata has launched a game-changing Artificial Intelligence-driven decision engine: the NAVIK AI Platform. The NAVIK AI Platform combines data, analytics and technology to optimize decisions on an ongoing basis without having to build a data science team. The NAVIK AI Platform develops an intelligent self-learning system that continuously learns from your unique business environment for better decision making. Until now, sales and marketing technology has primarily focused on executing decisions that were already made.
What makes the NAVIK AI Platform revolutionary is that it operates at a higher level to improve decision-making. The NAVIK tool’s non-technical front-end was developed to addresses this problem through an integration of back-end and front-end elements of the user interface. The NAVIK AI Platform’s unique decision engineering methodology and human-machine model form the foundation. The platform includes an AI Design Lab with a machine learning library, self-learning model builder and text mining lab. At the heart is the Decision Engine with a prediction simulator, decision option generator and recommender bot that, together, find the actions most likely to yield value and results.
The platform automates data integration and harmonization from multiple sources including existing CRM and marketing automation systems. Absolutdata’s NAVIK AI Platform has been developed timely given the persistent worldwide shortage of data scientists, which has hampered companies’ attempts to fully embrace the possibilities of AI-enabled sales, marketing and brand management.
DJ: How have you tested out its effectiveness?
Kaul:Designed for non-technical marketing staff, NAVIK MarketingAI is powered by the NAVIK AI Platform, and hyper personalizes offers for maximum results. MarketingAI was used by a global hotel brand to solve the decades-old problem of “one and done” customers — guests who stay at a hotel once and never return. A controlled AB test was conducted over an eight-week period. The campaigns that used MarketingAI experienced a 51% increase in revenue from opened emails, 31% more customer bookings and a two-fold increase in revenue from people who weren’t loyalty program members.
DJ: What is the take-up like?
Kaul:We’ve been serving the travel and hospitality industry for over 15 years and continue to work with large global hotel brands, OTAs, restaurant chains, and gaming and entertainment providers. Many leaders are early adopters of applying AI when it comes to marketing campaigns and loyalty programs because of the impact it has on results.
This impact is due to better use of data to direct where precious marketing dollars are spent. For example, dynamic segmentation, ie, segments based on recent and evolving actions and behavior, better match offers to an audience who is ready to respond to that offer.
DJ: Which types of customers and businesses does your service appeal to?
Kaul:Our service and product offerings appeal to a wide variety of industries and business leaders. Absolutdata’s customers tend to be executives and managers in the sales, marketing, analytics and IT functions, depending on the project and client need. Examples of industries we serve on a regular basis include travel and hospitality, technology companies, consumer packaged goods (CPG), retail, telecom, pharma, automotive, healthcare and large consulting firms, among others.
DJ: What is your marketing strategy?
Kaul:Add value by sharing our experience, expertise and thought leadership to help clients use data, analytics and technology to make better business decisions.
