MarTech Interview with Zohar Bronfman, CEO and Co-Founder at Pecan

How can marketers use AI to drive better future predictions on what their customers will want? Zohar Bronfman, CEO and Co-Founder at Pecan shares more:

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Welcome to this MarTech Series chat, Zohar, tell us more about yourself and the story behind Pecan…how has the journey been since the brand’s inception?

Thank you for having me! I met Pecan’s co-founder and CTO, Dr. Noam Brezis, at Tel Aviv University when we both were studying for a master’s degree in cognitive sciences. At university, we participated in a data science competition where the prototype for Pecan was born. Though Noam and I both went on to complete PhDs, we always wanted to use our studies to do something that had an impact.

Pecan equips marketing and business analysts with the ability to build and implement predictive models that directly affect the bottom line. The journey has been quite a ride — four years later, we have raised $115M and are working with several Fortune 100 companies.

Pecan recently announced a funding round, we’d love to hear more about this and what near-term plans the team has for the platform?

Earlier this year, we raised $66 million in a Series C round led by Insight Partners, with participation from GV (formerly Google Ventures) and our existing investors S-Capital, GGV Capital, Dell Technologies Capital, Mindset Ventures, and Vintage Investment Partners.

This funding is an amazing validation of how we’re democratizing data science and making its power available to more business teams. In addition, the funding supports our effort to scale the company and further advance R&D. For example, we recently announced new elements of our platform, including the ability to monitor model performance in production and to automate model deployment with a click. We’re excited to continue to innovate and expand the Pecan platform’s capabilities.

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How are you seeing newer innovations in AI based predictive analytics change the game for marketing teams given today’s dynamics?

Today’s market is challenging, as we all know. Conditions are changing quickly, as are consumer preferences and behaviors. Marketers need to not only understand what happened in the past by analyzing their customer data – they also need to use that data to predict what’s likely to occur in the future using AI-powered modeling.

That predictive approach brings huge benefits. For example, one of our D2C customers doubled their campaign conversion rates with AI-powered predictions. A mobile game company we work with tripled their players’ in-game spending with better-targeted campaigns. That’s definitely a game-changing result!

How can marketing teams capitalize more on the benefits of predictive systems to drive output and ROI?

The first step is the hardest for a lot of teams — just trusting that they’re really ready to adopt AI. Many teams think they need to do massive amounts of sophisticated data work and even hire expensive specialized talent to use AI.

But in reality, if they have data they’re using for analytics, visualization, and typical BI tasks, a platform like Pecan can handle the next steps for implementing AI much more quickly and cost-effectively through automated machine learning.

With AI capabilities on board, the team can decide what they need to predict and how they’ll act on predictions to boost their KPIs and ROI. For example, what will they do to retain customers predicted to be likely to churn? We know that many teams don’t have the data science resources they need, so we’ve built our platform to help analysts and businesspeople ask the right questions about the future and get the answers they need to achieve transformative results – whether they have data scientists on their team or not.

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A few thoughts on the kind of platforms /features that you feel will become more crucial to BI/marketing teams? 

Consumers increasingly expect a seamless experience as they interact with companies across multiple channels and in the offline world. Data integration across multiple channels needs to be easy and fast for teams. In addition, privacy changes mean marketers need to be able to get the most value out of their first-party data.

AI-powered predictive methods offer far more growth potential than simply analyzing historical data. Finally, teams need to be able to respond quickly to sudden changes in the market with agile, adaptable data capabilities and tools. Those will all be incredibly important capabilities for marketers who want to maintain a competitive advantage over the next few years and beyond.

Some last thoughts on the future of martech and B2B marketing?

I don’t expect the pace of change to slow for marketers, even though they’ve already dealt with so much in the last few years! But what’s great is that today’s innovative martech makes it possible to anticipate and plan for the future in new and much more effective ways. Change doesn’t have to be so daunting when we can prepare for it.

Overall, I’m thrilled to see how proactive thinkers in marketing are starting to inform their strategies and decision-making with knowledge of the future. While adopting a predictive-analytics approach is a mindset shift, the potential for growth is immense. I’m excited to see more companies benefit from this perspective.