What Are You Going to do Next? Using Artificial Intelligence to Find Out
By Henry Mulak, September 8, 2021
Keeping a customer is more important than finding a new one. That’s what clients are telling those at Piano Software, Inc. “Minimizing ‘churn’ is more important than sales,’ says Billy D. Aldea-Martinez, one of Piano’s regional directors. The company helps media outlets manage a whopping 1.15-billion subscribers. Consider that each customer has up to 121 data points. That’s a huge amount of data to crunch. How does the company do it?
(Picture: some of Piano Software, Inc.’s clients)
Media companies like Bloomberg, TechCrunch, The Economist, and CNBC are telling Piano that keeping customers, or preventing churn, takes priority over finding new ones. Both are important, but the existing customer is the proverbial “a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.” This is where Propensity Models come in. This is the modeling of customer behavior by using Artificial Intelligence to help predict what you will do next. Aldea-Martinez addressed this expanding field of AI and Machine Learning in the Business School of AI’s “WeeklyWed” webinar.
“Likelihood to Act”
The more data the more powerful the algorithms become. With a smarter algorithm, companies can build a better product which attracts more users which, then in turn, generates more data. Where to crunch all that data? Aldea-Martinez says that eventually companies will need to ask themselves if it’s best to do the work internally or to outsource it. As he puts it, “own or rent.” That’s where Piano Software, Inc. comes in. The company has more than 500 people to do the job compared to the ten or so workers that clients may hire internally to do the same work.
Piano did not begin as an AI company, but they’re moving that way. The simple reality is that sales propensity models make the move to Artificial Intelligence inevitable. This is how Piano does what it does, allowing AI to help predict behavior, developing a better understanding of a business’s audience. It’s now helping the world’s largest media companies create and launch ways to generate sales and optimize performance. In doing so, it’s been able to convince them that sharing data with a third party allows everyone to benefit.
Note: Billy D. Aldea-Martine is Regional Director, Piano Software, Inc. and a former student at Business School of AI, founded by Sudha Jamthe.
The Author: Henry Mulak is a journalist and teacher in Silicon Valley covering the technology sector, specializing in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning.
