You can call it hype — but Watson is getting marketers ROI

IBM CMO Rashmy Chatterjee is a featured speaker at MB 2017, July 11-12 in San Francisco. She’s among dozens of others from some of the most iconic brands who will be sharing how marketers are using AI within the broad marketing ecosystem to stay ahead. See the full roster of speakers here.

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“AI, or cognitive computing, absolutely should be table stakes today,” says Rashmy Chatterjee, IBM’s North America CMO. “In the future, cognitive computing (AI) won’t even be an option anymore. You’ll use it as a matter of course.”

In her upcoming talk at MB 2017, “Applied AI for Real ROI,” she’ll break down the real-world examples that prove her statement out — like the five-fold increase in conversions that BMO (Bank of Montreal) achieved using strategies fueled by Watson, IBM’s powerful AI platform.

“BMO uses our client experience tools, and their conversion rate on mobile — from customer interest to actual business — went up from ten percent to 50 percent,” Chatterjee says. “With American Eagle, we’ve seen an almost 20 percent increase in mobile traffic because AI implementation dramatically increased their understanding of customer issues.”

Chatterjee has an unshakable focus on making IBM’s clients successful, and goes on to explain this goal is achieved by helping brands better understand their customers, discern context of action and queries,  provide multiple options to engage, respond to feedback quickly in a personalized way — and, ultimately, by enabling them to deliver an unmatched superior experience.

Enter Watson, IBM’s poster child for AI, which now has APIs that can discern tone, understand personality quirks, and learn where and how the client is seeking to be engaged, with real-time input from customers that is immediately actionable.

“Watson has a set of capabilities, and with each of them the goal is: Can we make this experience better for the client, and can we make them more successful in what they want to do?” Chatterjee says.

For instance, the Tone Analyzer capability uses linguistic analysis to detect communication tones in text to understand conversations and communications — allowing brands to respond to customer needs, worries and wants. Or to better analyze and understand what’s really behind the thousands of comments customers leave scattered across social media.

“We also use Tone Analyzer for customer experience assessments and customer support, and with this information, we keep getting better,” she adds. “We’re constantly asking, what does it mean, and how can we respond to it better?”

Then there’s Watson’s Personality Insights service which extracts personality characteristics based on a variety of written communications using customers’ social media entries, enterprise data, and other digital communications.

Try a demo here and Watson may tell you that “you are helpful and analytical,” and “your choices are driven by a desire for well being” (along with a much fuller description). Or you may learn from that “you are excitable and adventurous, eager to try new things.. and you tend to speak up and take charge of situations.”

By enabling companies to learn who their customers are as individuals, they can improve acquisition, retention, and engagement with highly personalized interactions.

Chatterjee points out that mobile is where these AI capabilities have the most potential to shine. Of course, the bar is high. Customers already expect to be able to do most transactions on mobile, and take things like location capabilities for granted.

“But what is the next frontier?” asks Chatterjee. “What are the next things we can do — through emotions, through tone, through personalities, through so many other technological capabilities that will create an even more differentiated client experience?”

Chatterjee will be speaking about how her teams are already making progress on this next frontier — and where it’s going next. You can register for MB 2017 right here.