Tell us about your role and how you got here. What inspired you to be a part of consumer engagement company?

I am president of Kitewheel, and began the business almost 5 years ago born out of a frustration with Marketing Automation software being stuck in the batch campaign mode of marketing and unable to serve the modern marketer who needs to communicate with customers in real-time across all channels.  I had worked in the Marketing Analytics and Marketing Automation space for 20 years and saw the industry back itself into a technological corner – I was introduced to a business called Provenir who had a real-time, cross-channel decision engine, and we developed this individual level processing approach into a revolutionary approach to customer journey marketing.

How do you see the contemporary trends in customer engagement management influencing journey orchestration analytics?

Businesses today have to engage with customers on the customers’ terms – their timing, their choice of channel – and they have to deliver a fantastic experience as often as possible if they want to retain customers and grow their value. Customer Journey technology is the solution to the problem of how to manage this cross-channel, real-time engagement in a data-driven way – the customer journey is the instantiation of what the customer experiences from a brand and journey orchestration software allows a business to now manage that customer experience in a smart way, from a single point of control.

In 2018, what would be the biggest expectations from customer engagement orchestration technologies?

This technology will “cross the chasm” in 2018.  To date it has been used by a small number of leading brands, pioneering the new approach.  But with the launch of the first Forrester report recognizing the space and the discipline more and more companies are undertaking customer journey orchestration projects, and we expect the technology to reach the first businesses that could be described as “early majority” in 2018.

Do you think B2B marketing communities help in building and fortifying a brand safe ecosystem? How do customer journey analytics platforms contribute to this ecosystem?

I would say that B2B marketers in the MarTech world are creating real difficulties for their brand customers and B2C marketers in general. The popularity of customer journey approaches to solve the customer experience problem has meant that suddenly almost any marketing technology is being described as delivering, or helping with, customer journeys – this confusion for customers slows down adoption of technologies significantly.

What startups in the martech ecosystem are you watching/keen on right now?

Drift, Anyone in AR

What tools does your marketing stack consist of in 2017?

Kitewheel, Salesforce.com, MailChimp, AdRoll, LinkedIn,

Would you tell us about your standout digital campaign? 

Our real standout is our brand new campaign on our website, where we are delivering guided personalization to our web visitors. By studying their behavior on our website, we are then guiding them to the next most interesting piece of content on the site that would fit with their experience to date. The campaign creative centers on our intelligent agent KAI that executes learning rules for every visitor to deliver the right kind of individualized content recommendations.

How do you prepare for an AI-centric world as a business leader?

It is critical to understand what AI actually is – a statistical technique that can find patterns in data to help automate processes. AI cannot find anything that isn’t a pattern in data, and it is actually an approach that has been around in the statistical community for many years. It requires good data, and a clear idea of the “objective” for the algorithm to learn from. If the business is not clear about their key objectives, they can easily get misled by AI finding statistical patterns in data that may not actually be of business value but could be the strongest statistical pattern. If mixed with too much automation, without business checks and balances, AI can quickly run a business process out of control. But used wisely, with lots of good data, and clear business direction, AI will deliver massive efficiencies and new insights to businesses that deploy it correctly.

One word that best describes how you work.

Communicate

What apps/software/tools can’t you live without?

Slack, Gmail, Google

What’s your smartest work related shortcut or productivity hack?

No longer listening to voicemails – but scanning the email/text versions

What are you currently reading? (What do you read, and how do you consume 
information?)

New York 2140 – Kim Stanley Robinson – we need to prepare for the future changed world that we are creating.

What’s the best advice you’ve ever received?

Honesty is the best policy

Tag the one person in the industry whose answers to these questions you would love to read:

Suresh Vittal of Adobe

Thank you Mark! That was fun and hope to see you back on MarTech Series soon.