Matthew Bernardini is the CEO and Co-Founding father of Zenapse, where he leads the corporate’s vision and oversees the event of its proprietary AI foundation model into category-leading products. With a background as a product marketer, data strategist, and technologist, he brings a mix of entrepreneurial experience—having achieved 4 successful exits—and company expertise from organizations akin to JPMorgan Chase, Omnicom, and Capgemini.
Throughout his profession, Bernardini has maintained a powerful interest in artificial intelligence, psychology, consumer behavior, game theory, and statistics, which proceed to tell his leadership at Zenapse.
Zenapse is an AI-driven platform that reinforces customer acquisition, engagement, and retention through emotionally intelligent experiences. Powered by the world’s first Large Emotion Model (LEM), Zenapse uses psychographic insights and goal-based optimization to assist brands connect more deeply with audiences. Fast to deploy and straightforward to make use of, it delivers measurable ends in hours—not weeks—while reducing costs and increasing ROI.
Zenapse is built across the intersection of emotional intelligence and AI. What was the ‘aha’ moment that led to the creation of the Large Emotion Model (LEM)?
Zenapse has a veteran founding team with backgrounds within the product development, promoting, marketing, and customer experience spaces, with greater than 100 years of combined experience at firms like Capgemini, Omnicom, and JP Morgan Chase. Over our careers, we’ve seen a brand new paradigm shift emerge for marketers, where AI has modified how we take into consideration and interact with consumers.
In today’s fast-paced digital landscape, customers expect personalized and resonant experiences across all touchpoints, but traditional marketing solutions lack the speed and insights needed for real-time decision-making and struggle to satisfy these expectations. Concurrently, from product decisions to promoting campaigns, leaders struggle with the high cost of hiring multiple team members to finish this work.
To handle this need, we’ve built the world’s first Large Emotion Model (LEM), which helps marketers increase revenue and sales by bringing emotional intelligence into their consumers’ experience. By orienting their communication towards what’s of value and interest to consumers, slightly than a single “brand-first” message, brands can create more meaningful interactions that result in higher engagement, sales, retention, and customer acquisition.
How do you define a Large Emotion Model (LEM), and the way does it differ technically and functionally from a conventional Large Language Model (LLM)?
Our Large Emotion Model (LEM) is a predictive AI engine powered by a dataset built on knowledge of greater than 200 million consumers with 6 billion datapoints. Through AI-driven psychographic insights (i.e., beliefs, sentiments, and emotions), firms can understand what motivates their customers to convert – whether that’s the features or advantages of a product, special promotions and incentives, imagery or calls to motion, then allowing them to prioritize the brand experience content to a consumer’s preference.
In contrast to our LEM, which focuses on emotion and behavior, large language models (LLMs) give attention to text and functions related to natural language processing (NLP) without deeper insights into what different segments of audiences consider and value.
We’ve worked closely with Google, through their Google Startup and Google Cloud Marketplace programs, in addition to Comcast Lift Labs, to be certain that our solution is enterprise-ready and meets the needs of the world’s most demanding marketers.
Why do you think emotional intelligence is the “missing link” in most marketing AI platforms today?
The easy answer is that marketers haven’t been in a position to truly understand their customers because existing legacy technology focuses on demographics and behavior. We seamlessly integrate with tools from firms akin to Adobe, Salesforce, and Google to deliver extraordinary results.
95% of consumer decisions are subconscious and driven by emotion. Yet, for a long time, brands have used demographic (e.g., zip code, race, income) and behavioral data to tell marketing campaigns. While any such data has its uses, most purchase decisions are driven by emotions, which these data points fail to capture. In consequence, marketers struggle with limited accuracy and effectiveness, often resorting to generalized solutions.
Now, through our LEM, brands can tap into psychographic insights to construct this full picture and increase sales and revenue. The proof of concept for emotional intelligence’s role in marketing lies within the numbers: we’re helping household-name brands increase conversion rates by 40-400% and engagement upwards of 80%.
What are probably the most common misconceptions you see around AI’s role in understanding human emotion?
Certainly one of the largest misconceptions is that AI is here to interchange marketers. At Zenapse, we’re taking a unique approach – we’re helping marketers develop marketing and promoting with emotional intelligence and AI that helps them diversify their perspectives through the flexibility to attach and understand their customers on a deeper, more emotional level.
Traditional campaigns have often relied on lumping consumers into broad categories defined by demographics, like age, income, and zip code, which ignores the nuances of what humans truly care about. With our LEM, marketers can align campaigns around what matters most to every person.
As a substitute of guessing what might resonate, our platform helps marketers confidently create experiences that actually resonate since it’s built on a foundation of emotional intelligence. That’s not replacing the human touch – it’s making it stronger.
In your view, what separates hype from true innovation within the AI + EQ space right away?
We’re entering a brand new era of selling that’s defined by emotionally intelligent experiences, not surface-level personalization.
Consumer behavior has modified dramatically. The vast majority of consumers now prefer personalized experiences – they expect brands to know what they care about. This presents a chance for brands to leverage AI in a way that creates deeper connections with their consumers.
The difference between hype and true innovation is the standard of information. Our LEM is built on knowledge of 300 million consumers and 6 billion real-time data points, which supplies brands a comprehensive understanding of who their consumers are – something they couldn’t have done before now.
What sorts of psychographic signals and real-time data power the LEM, and the way are these modeled into the Data Lake?
The psychographics behind our LEM are based on 4 pillars:
- Beliefs – we group beliefs into individual categories, including how they value things like money, knowledge, family, and belonging, amongst others
- Emotions – take into consideration the way you react after seeing an ad or promotion. Does it bring you joy or make you anxious?
- Activities – from gardening to gaming, we account for all various kinds of real-world and digital activities
- Behaviors – the events and actions a consumer performs in an organization’s experiences, akin to completing a form, watching a video, or making a purchase order.
Consumers make buying decisions with their hearts as much as with their minds, so we all know that addressing the emotional component is the important thing to unlocking real value across your entire customer lifecycle.
LEM is described as leveraging 6+ billion data points across 300M+ consumers. What safeguards and ethical considerations are in place to make sure privacy and transparency?
Privacy is the middle of our product development. Our entire technology ecosystem is SOC2 compliant, and our dataset doesn’t capture or retain any consumer personally identifiable information (PII). Our data is aggregated and anonymized. We also maintain clear internal policies and governance practices to make sure ethical use of AI in every step of development.
Are you able to walk us through the role of ZenCore, ZenInsight, and ZenVision in powering emotionally intelligent customer experiences?
ZenCore is our proprietary consumer psychographic model and the engine that powers our LEM. ZenInsight is the information foundation of emotionally intelligent experiences. ZenVision, in real time, translates these insights into predictions on which messaging or content will resonate with a given psychographic segment and provides actionable recommendations for marketers. Together, these tools form a full-stack solution for marketing with emotional intelligence.
How does Zenapse adapt emotional predictions across verticals like retail, telecom, and healthcare? Are there any surprising industry use cases?
We’re already working with firms like Comcast, Sam’s Club, Aeropostale, Bread Financial, Bayada Education and Motion Karate to enhance conversion rates of digital brand experiences by 40-400%. While the emotional drivers vary by vertical, the framework stays consistent: we decipher what matters to a given consumer and help brands align their experiences accordingly.
What’s your long-term vision for LEM—do you see it evolving beyond marketing into other domains like healthcare or education?
Without delay, we’re focused on using AI to assist marketers and advertisers higher relate to their customers, and as our data continues to get well over time, so too will our LEM. We’ve got recently prolonged the platform beyond web sites to support CTV through our partnership with LG Ad Solutions and their innovation lab. Our goal is to increase our platform key consumer touchpoints by 2028 – video games, automobiles and connected homes to call a number of.
How do you see emotionally intelligent AI reshaping the following decade of digital experiences?
The flexibility to deliver real-time, hyper-personalized experiences across all digital platforms is already more powerful than ever, creating latest opportunities for partnerships. AI and emotional intelligence will proceed to be adopted, and as these technologies and insights turn out to be increasingly sophisticated, they will likely be the driving force behind marketing efforts across all digital media.
Our team is working hard to remain ahead of this curve. We recently announced our partnership with LG Ad Solutions’ Innovation Labs to assist CTV advertisers deliver emotionally intelligent experiences across LG’s ecosystem of 200 million smart TVs, and we’re working to bring our insights to other screens, like web, mobile, AVs, music, movies, connected cars, and more
We see the longer term of digital experiences being shaped by AI and emotional intelligence. Businesses that fail to adapt to this shift risk being left behind by competitors who’re quicker to reply to the changes in consumer preferences and behaviors.
