MarTech360 Interview With Vijay Chittoor, Co-Founder & CEO, Blueshift

Hi Vijay, could you tell us about your professional journey so far?

Before founding Blueshift, my co-founders and I spent 10 years working at the intersection of Marketing and Artificial Intelligence. We had worked at the AI company Kosmix,  which was later acquired by Walmart to become WalmartLabs, powering Marketing Tech and AI at Walmart. Subsequently, we founded Mertado, which became Groupon Goods.

In this journey, we saw first hand that today’s Marketing teams have nearly 1,000 times more Customer Data that they are trying to make sense of, and they are tasked with engaging customers on many more channels than 10 years ago. At Blueshift, we are focused on helping marketers solve this complexity.

What sets Blueshift apart from the competition?

While the customer journey is complex, our belief is that the complexity shouldn’t creep into a marketer’s job. That is why we have built Blueshift to make intelligent customer engagement simple. The platform puts data access and AI directly in the hands of marketers, and enables them to orchestrate cross-channel campaigns effortlessly. From a marketer’s perspective, this means that they can focus on delivering personalized experiences at scale, and not having to rely on IT teams for launching data-powered engagement.

How, according to you, has the Marketing Automation and Customer Engagement landscape evolved and will evolve in the coming years?

In legacy systems, customer understanding (segmentation and 1:1 recommendations) was decoupled from marketing automation (campaign execution). This limited marketers’ ability to intelligently respond to customers in real-time, and made them highly reliant on IT teams to process customer data and insights. Marketing decisions were rule-based, and Marketing Analytics was used offline to improve the rules every so often.

However, using AI, Marketing Automation 2.0 is finally empowering marketers to deliver true storytelling at scale, personalized to each individual. With the advent of true AI-based solutions, automation is now tightly coupled with an AI learning engine. This new approach of fusing “analytics” (or rather, AI-based learning models) with decisions in real-time is enabling brands to intelligently orchestrate customer experiences across their owned and paid channels.

This next leap forward puts AI in the driver’s seat for intelligently orchestrating cross-channel customer engagement. Marketers get to go back to the more strategic aspects of marketing, with a focus on the art of storytelling.

Also Read: MarTech360 Interview With JR Sherman, CEO, RainFocus

What impact does AI automation have on the revenue funnel of a business?

In a comprehensive analysis of the impact of AI, our study has found that AI can increase revenue by up-to 3X relative to their use in the marketing mix. The reason is that AI makes the customer experience intuitive, and nudges customers along in the revenue funnel with personalized offers and content. Companies that have invested in using AI to become more customer centric have seen strong revenue results due to the personalized customer experience.

What are the 3 things that brands can do to optimize their digital outreach?

Optimizing and scaling your digital outreach and engagement is all about Understanding, Predicting and Activating:

1. Understand: In a world where every customer has a unique self-directed journey with your brand, it becomes critical to unify customer data and understand each customer as an individual.
2. Predict and Recommend: The next step is to translate this understanding into predictions on the right content, products and offers that will be individually relevant to each customer.
3. Activate: Finally, brands must be able to activate these recommendations into timely messages on the customer’s channel of choice.

AI is the foundation across understanding, predicting and activating successful campaigns.

As a Business leader, what is the one piece of advice you would give to those who enter the C-suite?

I would encourage those newly entering the C-suite to treat it as the beginning of a journey, to stay curious, and be unafraid to try new things. Incidentally, at Blueshift, one of our core values is to “make new mistakes,” which encourages everyone to try new ways of solving problems, and instills a learning mentality.  Another core value is “obsess over customer success.” If you keep the customer in mind with every decision, you know you are headed in the right direction.

Thanks, Vijay!