New York 2017: American Express hosts first executive roundtable
The first Market Logic Insights Executive Roundtable was hosted by Phillip Chambers at American Express HQ in New York. The roundtable brought together executives responsible for Market Logic platforms in the Tristate area, with attendees from Amex, Colgate, MetLife, Keurig Green Mountain, Cardinal Health, Fidelity, Aetna, AIG, Comcast, PepsiCo, and Prudential.
The agenda was tight with a welcome address, visionary deep dive on the impact of AI (cognitive computing) for insights executives by our CEO Kay Iversen, and an open discussion led by panelists Brenda Armstead, VP Consumer Insights, Keurig; Carlos Fonseca, SVP Marketing Sciences, MetLife; and Richard Thorogood, VP Global Consumer & Market Insights, Colgate.
AI’s Impact on Specific Needs
To the impact of AI for insights executives, Kay described the roles a cognitive market information system serves (VP Insight, VP Intelligence, CMO and CIO) and presented the specific needs it helps departments to address.
He presented three applications for:
1) The future of knowledge management;
Use cognitive computing to consolidate all unstructured and structured data so users ask a question and get the answers from all research (primary, secondary, BI, social), and can explore visualized relationships between content in an immersive knowledge graph.
2) The future of self-service intelligence;
Use cognitive computing to personalize dashboards so users can self-select topic feeds from secondary sources and RSS feeds. The machine figures out which market signals are truly relevant for the selected dashboard, based on examples.
3) The future of marketing excellence;
Use a cognitive marketing assistant to understand what the user wants to achieve from the questions they ask, recommend the company’s best practice process, step by step, and suggest the right information at the right time in the process.
AI and insights organisations
Panellists agreed that AI technologies could deliver freedom for insights organizations to partner with the business to develop a strategy. For example, it was agreed that cognitive search is an effective way “to free data from silos and ensure that it contributes to strategy.”
They described self-service intelligence as a “capacity multiplier that frees up mental bandwidth to do the really important things.” And cognitive marketing assistants are potentially “freeing insights teams from reactive activities, to focus effort on partnering with marketing teams.”
The panel then led a lively discussion on knowledge alliances, where non-competing companies align like airlines to pool resources for new research perspectives on key topics at reduced costs, and the critical issue of change management to effectively introduce new insights platforms and ensure the workforce uses them.
