[VER] Inteligencia Artificial, Marketing Real: Nate Clegg en SiGMA Europa 2021

In an interview with Charity Ovbiagele, Nate Clegg, Chief Revenue Officer at Boom.AI discusses the role AI could play in digital marketing in the future

To start, Nate Clegg explained the history of Boom.AI, the company’s origins in Utah, and its mission to make customer service more personal.

Boom.AI is specifically a communication platform to be able to talk to people using artificial intelligence and to make marketing more personal, it has to be smarter and AI or artificial intelligence is the very definition of smarter. So as AI grows and learns to communicate better with people, it’s going to be better than a lot of the things that currently exist in marketing, especially when you get to scale.

He also touched on how this evolution would remove several of the most tedious aspects of customer service for both the company, by allowing them to better operate at scale and eliminate IVRs, and for customers, who could enjoy a more personal, efficient, and (ironically) human experience. Delving into the company’s origins, he talked about how the company predated AI, even though its original business plan put it on the path of automation.

So we started about 15 years ago, not with artificial intelligence because 15 years ago it didn’t yet exist. We started as a call center and our goal was to create a technology that would allow people to play pre-recorded statements and communicate with people from another country without their accent. In the United States, for example, it’s very common for people from the Philippines to call because they understand English and American culture so well, but their accent is still quite noticeable.

Well, our technology created this pre-recorded statement that they could play back and it sounded like they were talking to someone from the United States. So that interaction allowed Filipinos or those from any other country to communicate with another community and with their native accent, and over time that filled that gap in the market.

This led them to discover artificial intelligence, which proved to be a vital pillar for the next stage of the evolution of their services.

Charity then wondered what made Boom.AI stand out from the competition when the field of digital marketing was becoming increasingly competitive.

Our communications with people sound very natural. Most of the time, when you talk to an AI voicebot, it sounds like an AI voicebot, you know it’s a machine, and it’s actually usually a negative experience for the consumer. We’ve had these 15 years to prepare this soundboard technology so that you press a button and an audio message plays. We’ve become so good and so real, it sounds like a natural conversation with people. And that’s what sets us apart.

Charity’s next question was whether Boom.AI planned to expand across Europe.

We would love to. Several members of our company have spent a lot of time in Europe or have lived there. We love to come back. I lived in Italy for five years. I love being in Europe whenever I can and our owner and managing director lived in Italy for a couple of years and whenever we can we will come, even if it’s just for a conference like Sigma.

In his final question, Charity asked Nate if the belief that AI would take over the workforce had any merit and if we might be about to see the beginning of an artificially dominated workforce.

I think people are concerned that AI is more advanced than it actually is. And I always joke that if they knew our programmers, they wouldn’t be so worried. I shouldn’t say that. They’re very good, but you haven’t gotten to the point where you’re going to have a full replacement yet. But what it is going to do is replace the part of the work that we don’t want to do.

Using customer service workers as an example, Nate argued that this form of AI would render high-repetition, fatigue-inducing tasks, such as answering the same calls, obsolete. This would invariably increase the quality of life of workers, while maintaining, if not increasing, productivity.

AI will replace a certain amount of jobs, but I think what will happen is we’ll start to see more and more people branching out into creative things, where if you look at SiGMA and I’m sure they’ll have videos of all the crazy stuff that’s going on here, AI can’t create this that humans can.

SiGMA Asia 2022

After all the excitement of the Malta Week 2021 conferences, the SiGMA Group plans to move around the world with destinations like Kyiv andToronto as hubs to attract the best and brightest in the iGaming world together. Our next exhibition will take us to the avant-garde metropolis of the United Arab Emirates for three days of networking, panel discussions and festivities. Stay up to date with the latest and greatest through SiGMA News.