By Sudipto Ghosh
Tell us about your journey into Artificial Intelligence? What’s the idea behind launching ‘Lucy’?
As a veteran entrepreneur in marketing services and ad tech, we’ve had a front row seat to the explosion of data available to marketers over the years. Data in various databases, data from subscriptions and data that’s in the tens of thousands of PowerPoints, PDF’s and Word documents floating around a company’s file systems. And as a matter of perspective, think about that data from 5 years ago and then 10 years ago.
If you could graph the volume of data over time, most would draw a hockey stick. So that’s the challenge we were contemplating. And then about 3 years ago, we saw that IBM was taking the billions they’ve invested in AI and making it available to third parties as API’s and Services that developers could utilize in building apps. My partners and I began to explore the opportunity to apply AI in solving this problem and we began to recognize that we could tackle these huge data problems in areas like Knowledge, Audience Analysis and Media optimization.
What’s the core of Lucy, and how did you collaborate with IBM Watson?
Lucy is a unique creation of Equals 3 with six patents pending and includes components of IBM Watson. Her architecture includes our unique IPs along with some of Watson’s APIs and services.
How does Lucy leverage AI to deliver better marketing experiences across the organization?
Finally, with Lucy, there is a technology that leverages every asset of data, combing through more data in minutes than an entire marketing team could go through in a year — unlocking, democratizing, and making it instantly accessible to those who need it. She allows marketers to leverage the entirety of the enterprise data to make quicker, more informed decisions across the board.
For example, when an organization is rich in valuable data, pulling out the information can be incredibly time consuming. Marketers tasked with reoccurring reports or repetitive research processes have little time left for real analysis by the time the data is captured and assembled. Lucy can automate these workflows and deliver reoccurring key information instantly — turning what used to take hours, or days, into minutes. By automating these time-consuming tasks, Lucy delivers a boost in productivity and more time for strategic insight.
