Two methods to cut through the AI noise
by Lalit Bhise
Aug 23 2024 | 03 min read
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Disclaimer: This essay is primarily aimed at CPG companies focusing on reaching consumers using offline or Mom and Pop as a channel. This may be useful for a broader audience too but use your discretion!! These are my personal views.
My colleague, Akshat told me this story last week. He recently won an RFP at a large enterprise. One of the last steps was an in -person meeting between leadership at customer and our team. They had also invited a couple of other RFP participants for the presentation. We were the last to present.
When Akshat entered the conference room, he looked around the table and saw tired, weary frustrated faces. When he enquired the reason, “All we have been hearing since morning is AI, AI, AI, AI and more AI! Can you at least please speak about something else?” came the reply. Thankfully Akshat was prepared with Bizom pitch which speaks of actual business outcomes delivered using technology (which of course includes AI).
The pitch was far more content and much less meaningless buzzwords (Bullshit if you can say it!). No wonder we won the deal!! It’s not only me seeing the AI noise on my LinkedIn, it has reached board-rooms of large enterprises, time to educate the world on how to cut through the noise!!
I have been programming for almost 29 years now since 1995. I wrote my first AI program in my 2nd year of engineering (1996). So, AI is not new. We have been consuming recommendations from Amazon and Instagram for over a decade now. So, AI usage in day-to-day life is also not new. Then why is there so much noise around AI today?
Two years earlier, the world got awed by Generative AI’s ability to assemble unstructured information in a way coherent to humans. So much so that ChatGPT could churn out almost human-like essays and poems!! (Some may say even better than humans :-)). This was like an iPhone moment for the non-tech world. Business owners could now see and believe that technological advances especially in AI will change their world. That conviction got the critical mass AI needed to be mainstream.
But like every gold rush, this AI wave gave rise to a bunch of fly-by night operators too!! (Remember the fart apps for iPhones?) Almost every new startup and their dog started harping on AI and that’s what is causing all this cacophony today. I decided to offer help.
Here is an attempt to equip you to navigate through the noise to leverage AI without getting unnecessarily distracted. Here are my simple 2 methods, when you are looking for how AI can impact your business.
Method 1: Start with the problem
I often interact with CPG leaders. I also follow industry veterans like Nitin Paranjape or Sudhir Sithapathy. To me they mostly talk about a “no nonsense” approach to business and technology as a tool not as a solution, i.e. Start with the real problem and then look for how technology can help rather than the other way round.
This is a famous message by Sudhir on how a sales guy equipped with pen and paper was more productive than a sales guy using technology!! This inspired us to create and improve our “Smart Basket” algorithm so we can show sales executives exact SKUs in store in the first page and reduce time taken to scroll through pages on app!!
Similarly, I was chatting with an ex-head of sales of one of the largest beverage brands in India. This brand has grown at an astronomical speed of 10x in the last 10 years!! I was asking him about the challenges in growth and his advice on solving them using technology. He spoke at length about the degradation of skills and drop in numbers in the front-line sales team in CPG in India, mainly due to better opportunities in the gig economy for quick commerce and food delivery apps.
In markets like Indonesia or Saudi Arabia, the drop in field executives was attributed to cost escalations in RTM by many leaders, so I also resonated with the problem internationally!! I asked him for possible solutions. His suggestion was to improve the middle layer and get those guys to be on the ground and visit markets more. “Not enough of these new managers visit markets, they just want to do armchair analytics” he rued.
We took that feedback and integrated it into improving our retailer app so self-ordering can be very easy to enable B2B ecommerce directly between retailers and brands. We also integrated intelligence in our middle management app to ensure we equip them with the right tools in the market, be it beat optimization for their sales executives or next best action for themselves while they are in the store.
Do we use AI in our solutions? you bet! We have one of the CPG’s best AI teams led by one of the best AI minds in the world. Do we talk about it? There is no point. Growth of our customers speaks of the success of our tech and AI. Intelligence must be experienced, not talked about.
Most successful AI implementations happen when people start with a real big problem blocking their growth and see how/if technology can help. If the technology means AI, so be it but solving the real business problem needs to be at the center!!
Method 2: Start with the solution
Paradigm shifting technological waves like AI can help you solve unforeseen problems in innovative ways too, so just because you can’t foresee it doesn’t mean technology can’t solve that problem but doing that needs a different mindset.
One of the interesting things GenAI solved was using existing data in a different way for content generation. ChatGPT was an innovation in user interface/experience. Can you think of unstructured data in your business which can be analyzed and presented better to our users to unlock value in a way not imagined before?
For example, over years Bizom customers had collected millions of pictures of products, outlets and shelves etc. Manually auditing / reviewing those pictures for insights or compliance is expensive and time taking ordeal with limited ROI. But using GenAI we felt we could ask “questions” to those images. And by asking the right questions we could gather a lot of intelligence out of that data including creating automatic product catalogs or identifying duplicate outlets and so on!! In future we think using Voice as a medium of interaction will be a game changer for all mobile first tech platforms, including Bizom.
When you start with a solution, you need a great tech team with decades of experience to identify which data of yours can be used in which use case which you hadn’t thought of before. Constant investment in technology and experimentation for decades will lead you to some of those breakthroughs. We do that ourselves, so our customers don’t have to!!
In summary, today you may be swamped with the AI noise especially from companies just seeking attention without any viable tech or user base. If you want to separate wheat from chaff, use these simple 2 criteria. Ask which of your current immediate problems AI is solving or ask what new data/information AI is unlocking for you to use. Easier to just reach us at Bizom for help in getting the real intelligence!!!
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