How Do Brands Get Started with AI? General Assembly Hosts Michael Housman

By Dr. Michael Housman | January 25, 2018

General Assembly hosts Michael Housman for a webinar about marketing and AI as he fields the frequently asked question, how do brands get started with AI?

"This is the question I hear most often: How do we get started with artificial intelligence? And the answer is you need are three things - at least initially. What you need first are KPI outcomes, what I mentioned before, which are the outcomes you’re trying to predict. Those KPI outcomes are the measures we want to optimize. That’s what we care about at the end of the day - what we’re trying to improve. There’s customer data. Those are what we call features or elements about the customer. It could be demographic data, the number of times they’ve reached out via the website, or the number of times they’ve liked your Facebook page, or commented on Instagram, whatever the case may be. Those are all the things we know about customers. And then here’s the key - and probably the trickiest part of all - is we need to be able to match up customer data with KPI outcomes on a one-to-one basis in order to identify the ways in which those customer data predict those KPI outcomes. So in many cases, we need to build crosswalks, connectors, mappings - there are different names - but the idea is the same thing. We can’t work with aggregated data to engage in machine learning. We need customer level data and outcomes to be able to build these models."

To recap, the three things any brand needs to get started with AI are:

  1. KPI Outcomes - what you're trying to predict.
  2. Customer Data - individualized, not aggregated.
  3. Connectors between KPI Outcomes and Customer Data - this is where RapportBoost.AI steps in.

Our team of data scientists helps at every stage of this process and can work with any data set - no matter how great or small.

Check out our YouTube channel to watch more of the webinar where General Assembly hosts Michael Housman, and request a demo today!

Dr. Michael Housman

About Dr. Michael Housman

Michael has spent his entire career applying state-of-the-art statistical methodologies and econometric techniques to large data-sets in order to drive organizational decision-making and helping companies operate more effectively. Prior to founding RapportBoost.AI, he was the Chief Analytics Officer at Evolv (acquired by Cornerstone OnDemand for $42M in 2015) where he helped architect a machine learning platform capable of mining databases consisting of hundreds of millions of employee records. He was named a 2014 game changer by Workforce magazine for his work. Michael is currently an equity advisor for a half-dozen technology companies based out of the San Francisco bay area: hiQ Labs, Bakround, Interviewed, Performiture, Tenacity, Homebase, and States Title. He was on Tony’s advisory board at Boopsie from 2012 onward. Michael is a noted public speaker and has published his work in a variety of peer-reviewed journals and has had his research profiled by The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The Economist, and The Atlantic. Dr. Housman received his A.M. and Ph.D. in Applied Economics and Managerial Science from The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and his A.B. from Harvard University.

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