Assaf Baciu has nearly 20 years of experience shaping enterprise strategy and product direction for market-leading SaaS organizations. As co-founder and President of Persado, he drives the progression and advancements of Persado’s growing product portfolio and oversees the corporate’s customer onboarding, campaign delivery management, Center of Enablement programs, and technical services.
Persado offers a Motivation AI platform designed to enable personalized communications at scale, encouraging individuals to have interaction and take motion. Several of the world’s largest brands, resembling Ally Bank, Dropbox, JPMorgan Chase, Marks & Spencer, and Verizon, use Persado’s platform to create highly personalized communications. Based on the corporate, the highest 30 Persado customers have collectively generated over $4.25 billion in additional revenue through the usage of the platform.
Are you able to share the story behind the founding of Persado and the way your previous experiences influenced its creation?
My co-founder, Alex Vratskides, and I founded Persado 12 years ago. We were at Upstream, and have become fascinated with how text message response rates modified with even minor tweaks within the language. Provided that the variety of characters is restricted for SMS, we began fascinated with text messages as a mathematical problem that has some finite number of other messages, and with the correct algorithm we could find the optimal ones. We evaluated some approaches and saw that there’s a way…and the remaining is history.
Persado’s Motivation AI Platform is highlighted for its ability to personalize marketing content. Are you able to explain how the platform uses generative AI to know and leverage customer motivation?
GenAI, by itself, via a foundation model, cannot motivate systematically. It’s a component with a stack of information, machine learning, and a response feedback loop.
Persado has been generating and optimizing language using various approaches for over 10 years. We’ve collected a singular dataset from a million A/B tests from messages, across industries, designed to attach with consumers and motivate motion at any stage. We leverage this data to finetune a foundation model with Supervised High quality Tuning (SFT) and Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF). We have also adapted a second transformer model to give you the option to predict message performance based on language parameters. On top of that, our machine learning (ML) algorithms understand—in real time—which language elements resonate with a given individual, then adjust the copy inside the communication to that person or segment.
By repeatedly learning probably the most effective combination of message elements for every consumer, and dynamically creating probably the most engaging content, Persado-generated content is in a position to outperform human and other AI-generated copy 96% of the time.
How does Persado’s Motivation AI Platform differentiate itself from other generative AI tools when it comes to driving business results?
Persado is exclusive on many fronts.
- Purpose-Built – Persado has the one models specifically trained and curated with 10 billion tokens of selling enterprise communication, coupled with behavioral data.
- Emotionally Intelligent – Our AI is designed to know and generate language that elicits specific emotional responses from goal audiences. This capability is grounded in advanced ML models trained on extensive linguistic and psychological data.
- Precision – Our platform leverages probably the most powerful model architectures and is trained with statistically valid customer behavior data. We have now executed the equivalent of greater than 1M A/B tests, which enables us to generate the particular words, phrases, emotions, and stories that drive incremental impact 96% of time.
- Knowledge Graph – Persado developed a representation of key concepts expressed via language and their relationship with the market vertical, kind of communications, customer lifecycle journey, and channels. We use advanced NLP techniques to categorise, discover, and make use of those concepts (emotions, narratives, structure of message, voice, and more) to generate and personalize higher performing messages.
- Predictive – We use predictive analytics to forecast the performance of various messages, empowering marketers to create content with a high probability of success. This predictive power is exclusive and offers customers an excellent competitive edge.
What are a number of the key capabilities that Persado’s AI platform offers to make sure a seamless integration with existing marketing technologies?
Our platform securely integrates with a brand’s existing tech stack to simplify marketing content generation so brands can easily generate the highest-performing digital marketing messaging they should boost results. We mix custom, non-PII user attributes, and Persado’s award-winning language generation models to more effectively communicate with every customer across channels, at any stage of their journey.
Motivation AI is compatible with over 40 martech solutions to make sure each brand can use their existing martech stack to generate probably the most relevant, personalized outputs for his or her customers.
- Content Delivery Platforms – Our processes and tech enablers are designed to streamline the configuration of Persado-generated content in your deployment platform
- Customer Data Platforms – The platform facilitates an everyday update of non-PII data with Persado as an input for relevant and personalized content generation
- Analytics Platforms – We offer processes and data flows to seamlessly integrate results and reporting back into the Persado platform, supporting continuous learning and enhancing machine learning capabilities
Are you able to describe the strategy of onboarding a brand new client and the way Persado’s AI helps of their campaign management and delivery?
Prior to formal onboarding, Persado ingests all relevant brand voice materials from its clients, resembling style guidelines, information on segments, language restrictions, and more. This trains our model on how you can write for a business’s particular brand on day one. We hit the bottom running with a partnership kickoff to define KPIs and campaign focus areas in addition to to teach users on Persado Portal, our centralized platform where all content is generated, approved, and deployed. Along with hosting weekly check-ins during onboarding, we close out onboarding with an executive business review summarizing performance so far and next steps.
Our teams help brands get the tone or brand voice correct across channels by grounding all of their outputs in emotion—a key element of language that motivates customers to have interaction. By leaning into the emotions and narratives more than likely to resonate with each customer, brands can create more practical, revenue-driving campaigns while staying true to the brand’s values.
Scalability is one in every of the most important ways we’re in a position to help businesses with their campaigns. Personalization is a key tactic for marketers to achieve key audiences and attract latest customers. Nevertheless, true personalization is difficult to attain at scale. Using Persado’s knowledge base of 1.5 billion real customer interactions, we help enterprises uncover which versions of a message resonate best with their customers, in order that they can personalize these messages in real-time at each stage of the client journey.
You’ve worked with top banks and card issuers, driving significant revenue increases. Could you provide specific examples of how Persado’s AI has enhanced marketing performance for these clients?
Yes, while we work with many industries, we’ve got deep experience working with 8 of the ten largest U.S. banks and 6 of the 7 top bank card issuers. Listed below are just a few examples of impact:
Chase has used Persado to generate and optimize marketing messages for consumers in its Card and Mortgage businesses. They’ve been using Persado since 2019 to write down personalized market copy by analyzing massive datasets of tagged words and phrases. In pilot tests run by Chase, Persado AI-generated ad copy delivered click-through rates as much as 450% higher than copy created by humans alone.
Ally Bank uses Persado to boost cross-sell opportunities. Our Motivation AI platform has helped Ally understand which marketing communications resonate well with their customers across key channels like email and web. By knowing the do’s and don’ts related to targeted conversations with customers, the product marketing and CRM team are in a position to deliver a greater CX and unlock double-digit improvement on KPIs like clicks and actual conversions.
How does Persado’s AI be certain that generated messages remain on-brand and comply with industry regulations, particularly for highly regulated sectors like finance?
As you noted, because sectors like financial services are highly regulated, it may be difficult to implement AI across business functions. In financial services and beyond, brand and legal compliance are a significant piece of the AI puzzle. Although compliance and establishing AI governance can seem daunting, whether you’re part of a big enterprise or small business, it shouldn’t be a reason to not implement AI, or not less than try it out.
To make sure copy is aligned with best practices and regulations, we ingest compliance and brand guidelines into Persado’s model. Our built-in tools allow for straightforward compliance and brand review, feedback, and approval before deployment.
We adjust our approach to assist financial services brands remain compliant. While we are able to’t goal specific demographics, resembling age, for personalized marketing in financial services, we create high-performing narratives or emotional tones that resonate overall. From there, we observe which messages resonate with a bank or card issuer’s different segments.
What are some common challenges businesses face when attempting to prove the worth of AI, and the way does Persado address these challenges?
There may be a “opportunity lost” cost of enterprise inaction. Just a few changes in word selection can mean the difference between a accomplished transaction, application or enrollment and money being left on the table.
Persado’s impact is definitely measured. We integrate with analytics systems and repeatedly evaluate success via automated A/B tests that show the performance of our more engaging, personalized content, vs what the brand initially created. And, we measure the difference via the conversion funnel. On average, Persado increases content performance 43%, in comparison with humans alone or one other AI solution.
Our purpose-built AI isn’t only impactful, but easy to measure, which empowers business leaders to make higher decisions in regards to the technology investment—and quickly prove its value.
Given the rapid advancements in generative AI, what steps is Persado taking to remain ahead of the curve and maintain its industry leadership?
We’ve been leaders in AI for over a decade; long before it became popular following the launch of ChatGPT. As GenAI curiosity has increased across industries, we’ve been excited to bring and expand our marketing-specific capabilities amongst large enterprises needing a proven solution for creating high-performing, compliant messages at scale. We do that across channels as well: email, web sites, social media, SMS/push notifications, and even IVR.
Our global product and customer success teams are continually listening to our customers—who’re amongst a number of the earliest, and most successful adopters of AI–and shaping our roadmap to assist them deliver a stellar digital customer experience that also drives increased sales, loan application completions, on-time, payments, or other actions.
For instance, we recently released latest pre-built audience segments to hurry personalized content generation for marketers across financial services, retail, and travel. This feature helps brands increase engagement with specific groups of consumers by making it even easier and faster to generate marketing content that can resonate with customers.
What’s your vision for the long run of selling and AI?
The chances for AI in marketing are only expanding. AI can function a helpful asset for marketers to boost experiences and reach audiences in latest, more personalized ways. I believe we’ll see marketers shift from expecting (and using) GenAI to enhance efficiency and productivity, to ensuring AI tools deliver measurable increased performance.
Establishing AI governance and standards can even grow to be more vital as corporations expand AI use cases with an eye fixed on responsible AI. In the event that they’re not careful, brands can risk not being compliant with regulations.
Firms will have to be vigilant and use guardrails to make sure models will be tested to make sure they’re freed from biases, and that content outputs are accurate, relevant, and on-brand. Applied properly, AI has the potential to turbo-boost marketing performance and customer experiences, which generates the Most worthy profit for businesses: increased revenue.
