A widespread talking point at SBC Summit Lisbon was AI, and James Ross, SBC’s Multimedia Editor, caught up with Optimove’s VP of Revenue, Motti Colman, to find out why the CRM marketers have been using the technology “since before it was cool”.

“It’s at the core of who we are as a business,“ explained Colman. “AI to us was always about understanding the customer. It was about being able to say who the customer is, what we should do with them and how our clients should treat them.

“It started off through predictive modelling and then it became about AI orchestration. Once you scale up you’ve got so many deep layers of segmentation and so many types of different types of customers that you are trying to send campaigns to.

“Who should get what and when should they get it when there’s crossfire? When it’s your birthday and also you want to have a bet on Tottenham this weekend. What do we choose and prioritise? So AI has always been at the heart of how we help our clients orchestrate the various different campaigns on their platform.”

Optimove’s OptiGenie tool encompasses its AI marketing platform, offering AI insights, AI creation and AI orchestration. Colman outlined how one of the latest features of OptiGenie, target group discovery, allows the company to distil large groups of players into smaller segments.

He explained: “The tool’s feeding back to you different layers of segmentation and different behavioural types that exist within the customer ecosystem. It starts feeding you back with insights to help you as the CRM team thinks about ways to treat the customers.

“Once you start adding different customer groups, it will come back and say that’s an interesting group, it might react to campaigns this way or that way. It’s constantly feeding you back with layers of intelligence for how to break very big groups of players down to smaller ones as ultimately you’re trying to get down to one-to-one marketing.”

Looking ahead to the future, Colam also spoke about how he believes AI will help to save time and allow marketers to get back to doing what they do best – focusing on the creative side of marketing campaigns.

“AI is going to take more and more responsibility away from the CRM manager, but in a good way,” said Mohti.

“It’s going to free up their ability to actually make the decisions themselves to be more creative. What the problem has been is that a CRM marketer is a marketer, they’re a creative person, but they’ve been bogged down with playing with target groups and thinking about business intelligence-type ideas.

“Hopefully what AI will do for them over the next 12 months is take that out of their hands so that they can focus on being the creative marketer that they always wanted to be in the first place.”

To hear Colman detail Optimove’s use of AI as well as discuss its plans for expansion, click HERE to watch the full video.