Contify uses artificial intelligence to provide brands with market and competitive intelligence.
Using the solution's AI-powered insights, marketing, sales and product teams can track information on their competitors, customers and industry segments, then use those insights to deliver personalized engagement, increase sales and launch world-class products.
We spoke with Shilpa Tandon, Marketing Manager at Contify, to learn how this marketing AI solution works.
In a single sentence or statement, describe your company.
Contify is an AI-enabled market and competitive intelligence platform that helps businesses track information on competitors, customers and industry segments by enabling users and teams to collect, curate and share actionable intelligence across their organization.
How does your company use artificial intelligence in its products?
Contify’s artificial intelligence capabilities help in analyzing and extracting essential insights from the big data to provide market and competitive insights to organizations across industries enabling them to gain a competitive advantage.
We use robust natural language processing (NLP) that is based on the ETL (Extract, Transform, and Load) framework. Extraction is the process of scrapping the information from various sources. Transformation is the process of transforming the data as per our needs so that it can be integrated into the system. Loading is used to store all the incoming data into our database.
Our NLP removes irrelevant data from the scraped data and extracts important entities from the text such as companies and geography. For this, we use custom-made regex, multiple NERs, and proprietary logic to tag the entities that news is about, not the entities which are mentioned in it.
Our AI capabilities extend to solving the ambiguity problem such as differentiating between "Apple (fruit)" and "Apple (company)." Contify uses proprietary predictive models that are trained on one of the most comprehensive annotated datasets in the world. Through this, we tag the stories with industries and topics from more than 150 categories. We also use different deduplication processes to filter out duplicate data.
What are the primary marketing use cases for your AI-powered solutions?
Contify’s AI-enabled market and competitive intelligence platform is used by sales, marketing and product teams of leading organizations across industries for account-based marketing, content marketing, competitor analysis, email marketing, marketing research, triggering sales conversations, and managing communications and public relations.
Contify enables account managers to manage the account's health, reduce customer churn, explore new upsell and cross-sell opportunities, and strike up engaging conversations. Our platform helps marketers to deliver personalized customer engagement and launch differentiated marketing campaigns. Product teams can build and launch world-class products leveraging market and competitive insights from Contify.
What makes your AI-powered solution smarter than traditional approaches and products?
While marketers have the responsibility of positioning and promoting their organization's products and services, they also must keep track of their external environment and competitors. Contify’s AI-enabled market and competitive intelligence solution saves marketers from the manual tracking of the competitor’s websites, and helps them focus on creating and executing a successful marketing strategy.
With automated alerts, competitive insights are captured and shared swiftly, almost immediately, enabling marketing leaders to be proactive rather than reactive to a competitor shift or a tectonic shift in the market. The traditional method of tracking market and competitive intelligence, such as Google Alerts does not provide effective and quality results.
Are there any minimum requirements for marketers to get value out of your AI-powered technology? (e.g. data, list size, etc.)
There are no minimum requirements. We have clients across the globe ranging from small and medium businesses to large enterprises. So, the only minimal requirement for a marketer to get value out of our AI-enabled market and competitive intelligence solution is that they should be a business entity.
Who are your ideal customers in terms of company size and industries?
Companies with more than 100 employees and above $50 million in revenue. Target industries include: IT, applications and technology firms; life sciences; healthcare, pharma and biotechnology; management consulting (research), and banking, financial services, and insurance.
What do you see as the limitations of AI as it exists today?
AI has its limitations when it comes to subjective things that are more contextual and less based on data and facts. This is because the machines might take over the complex repetitive tasks but the human subjective analysis cannot be replaced with bots completely.
What do you see as the future potential of AI in marketing?
Intelligent data-driven marketing by pulling insights from millions of customer interactions, and then leveraging machine learning and AI to make ongoing and accurate predictions about consumer needs, desires, and behaviors. This enables organizations to craft more engaging customer experiences.
The connected world of devices combined with AI has also created a new frontier for organizations to explore: Business to Robot to Consumer (B2R2C). Marketing to robots happens when virtual assistants, digital avatars and robots become the gatekeepers between brands and consumers. For example, when your voice assistant knows what you need to buy for your grocery before you even know you need it.
Any other thoughts on AI in marketing, or advice for marketers who are just getting started with AI?
In this digital era, marketing teams across the world are contemplating leveraging new-age technologies such as AI to make marketing more intelligent, efficient, consumer-friendly, and effective. Marketers leveraging AI-enabled solutions should use it as a decision support system to augment their judgment and intuition with algorithms’ recommendations.