Artificial intelligence (AI) has recently gained popularity and has become one of the most important trends in technology. AI is a field that allows the creation of programs and systems that can learn and process information. We invite you to read an interview with Pawel Sala (Chief Comunication Officer) about the application of artificial intelligence and future plans in Vercom S.A. Group.
Can AI replace marketer’s work?
Pawel Sala: In my opinion, not yet, although it is difficult to predict today what the future holds. In my opinion, we should ask this question in a different manner.
Namely, there are a number of activities that marketers do today, but they can be outsourced to AI tools for execution. Thus, marketers will have more of their very scarce time to focus on the thing that a human brain is best at, namely creative tasks.
The question should be “How can AI help us?” At the same time, it is worth remembering that these works will not function 100% independently of each other.
I remember when I first became interested in issues related to Big Data and AI many years ago. At that time, I came across a great article on “Freestyle chess.” This is a discipline that Gary Casparow created after he lost a duel with a machine called Deep Blue in 1997. It was all about playing a chess tournament with teams. The teams were usually “machines” or so-called “centaurs,” meaning they consisted of humans and computers.
In the end, the entire tournament was won by a team that consisted of humans and machines. I think this is exactly how AI and marketing departments (and other parts of the business) will work together. They will be two sides of the same coin, complementing each other’s work. We can see a similar relationship in weather prediction algorithms. If we add the knowledge and experience of a meteorologist to their work, the forecasts will be 25% more accurate. In my opinion, the same thing will happen with the tasks of marketing departments but not only.
How has AI technology been used in Vercom S.A.?
Pawel Sala: In Vercom, tools based on artificial intelligence are used both at the level of the organization itself and are directly implemented in the tools we offer to our customers. In these tools, we help, on the one hand, to increase the deliverability of the messages sent on the platforms. And on the other hand, we support marketers in their daily work, helping them make smarter and faster decisions.
From the point of view of the reader of this interview, I think that the tools which will attract the most attention are those which can be used by Vercom customers themselves. I would ask for more details in context:
How does AI help increase the deliverability of emails sent?
Pawel Sala: Most people think that delivering an email to inboxes is a simple thing, that is, you send a message and it arrives in the selected inbox and waits for the user to open it. Well, this process is not that easy. Along the way, there are many access securities at various levels that verify if the message should actually be delivered to a given recipient. Some of these rules are fairly clear and marketers can easily adjust to them. However, it is important to use tools with a good reputation and set up appropriate authentications, such as SPF, DKIM, DMARC or BIMI.
On the other hand, some anti-spam tools since 2015 have been using AI to judge how likely a sent message is to be of interest to a given recipient.
In other words, if I send the same message to several people, it should initially reach their mailboxes. Whereas later, a lot depends on how the recipients reacted to the message. Spam filters may block another such message or suggest unsubscribing a particular newsletter. That’s why it’s so important for marketers to skillfully segment their audience bases and not send the same messages to everyone. To make this job easier, we in Vercom S.A. have developed the following thing:
SendGuard, which received funding from the NCBiR. As part of this project, working with researchers from various academic centers in Poland, we built advanced AI tools that improve the quality of communications in the campaigns sent by our customers.
Our solution has analyzed billions of data records, collected in the FreshMail system. Based on the analysis, SendGuard in real-time mode hints that some customers may send messages identified as SPAM.
As a result, Customer Service can inform and educate customers in this regard, and suggest a better way to communicate. We can also predict whether a particular customer is likely to encounter some problems communicating with their recipients and help them better understand the needs of the recipients in advance, so that the messages they send to the recipients are more attractive to them and generate better results.
The thing that is also important in this project is the fact that it allows us to detect phishing and other dangers before messages are sent from the FreshMail panel. This allows us to prevent perilous incidents, keeping other customers safe.
The moment our trained AI has a hunch that an email may be potentially dangerous, it is blocked and does not reach the recipients. We started building such anti-spam and anti-phishing protections in 2019 and finished working on it in 2022.
I’m almost certain that no one in Poland has created similar solutions at such an advanced technological level. What’s more, the aforementioned algorithms continue to learn from internal data, so we don’t have a problem with user privacy here.
You also mentioned that Vercom uses AI in tools to improve the efficiency of Customers’ work. Can you elaborate on it?
Pawel Sala: We have created an automatic segmentator in Vercom, which, unlike other communication tools, allows us to segment recipients based on a defined rule, and gives us the ability to qualify a person to the appropriate segment in real time, based on real signals from recipients (such as performing a certain action on a website). This makes it possible to direct a completely different communication to a given segment group and send messages which are adjusted to a particular segment group.
Another project was the development of a product recommendation system for e-commerce within the Vercom Group. This is a technology that analyzes the recipients’ consumer behavior, based on the purchase history and the sub-pages the customers view within a given online store. Consequently, our algorithms can automatically recommend products which are the most likely to be purchased by a given group. Online stores can display recommended products both on the website and create customized messages from them in email, push channels, etc. Such actions, on the one hand, increase the business efficiency of a given store, and, what’s more, improve the recipients’ satisfaction. As a result, they get much more personalized messages from our customers.
Thanks to this solution, we can send the right message to the right recipients at the right time.
And how does Vercom use AI in its group?
Pawel Sala: Vercom is an extensive organization, providing a number of tools that are essential for communication in any company. On the one hand, in order to make sure that only real users take advantage of our solutions, we use AI algorithms to assess whether a user is credible to us, and whether we can allow them to use our software.
By implementing this solution, we have a perception of having responsible and informed customers in our midst, and the reputation of our communication infrastructure is very high, both among global players like Gmail and among local email providers.
As a result, we can provide our customers with the highest possible deliverability of the messages we send. On the other hand, by having a strong filter on which customers we reach, we ensure the stability of the growth of the entire organization by selecting customers who will work with us for years to come, rather than exposing the organization to fluctuations and the additional work involved in repairing a reputation that can be damaged by inappropriate actions.
Vercom S.A. is renowned for its highly stable and secure shipping infrastructure, which, combined with its ability to scale quickly and dynamically, is due in part to artificial intelligence.
This allows our specialists to predict in advance which components need to be optimized or connect additional server infrastructure, as there is a high probability that at any given time customers will require more computing power from our technology. By implementing this holistic approach, Vercom’s customers are satisfied, and Vercom as a company does not incur additional costs resulting from maintaining “too much” infrastructure throughout the year.
What are the future plans for AI technology and Vercom?
Pawel Sala: Since November 2022, when Chat GPT came out, we immediately noticed a huge opportunity in this technology, which is worth exploiting. What I mean by this is the “mystical” approach of marketers to communication with their recipients, which can finally be two-way communication, or perhaps even conversational communication.
All the channels offered by the CPaaS platform are two-way communication.
Unfortunately, for years, marketers and businesses could only afford to send messages but not reach conversions with their recipients. What we, as marketers, were able to do, was to predict what additional information the recipient would want to read and plan the mailing in advance accordingly, using marketing automation mechanisms.
In practice, when someone received an email inviting them to a conference, they opened it, read it and went to the page with details of the event. In the next step, they could automatically get an email, text message or push notification to accelerate their decision, because there were only a few last available seats left.
At the same time, since 2021, when Google decided to allow external companies to use RCS (Rich Communication Services) technology on Android phones, we have started working on implementing such solutions for Vercom Group customers. RCS also known as SMS 2.0, is the technology that allows us to send messages with attachments, such as photos or videos in good quality. At the same time, we are able to track the status of the message, whether it has been delivered, whether the recipient has read it and whether they are responding, for example. Now we can automatically write back to this message, that is, send a predefined reply stored in the system. We have already successfully completed implementations of the aforementioned technology.
Currently, as part of our work on the use of Chat GPT in Vercom, we are considering the possibility of automatic analyzation of responses from recipients of RCS communications and the possibility of automatic responses for them.
We regard the above actions as the first step towards using AI technology in conversational communication. Our plans go much further: we want to use this technology in other communication channels as well. It will allow marketers, for the first time in history, to enter the conversation with their recipients in a massive way. Such a solution will significantly increase conversions from marketing activities and improve satisfaction of a given group.
Final question:
Is AI just a fad, a temporary trend, or a revolution?
Pawel Sala: I wouldn’t call it a revolution, as this one may have a bad connotation for many people. On the other hand, it is certainly a disruptive change that will stay with us for a long time. I remember talking about Big Data and the use of AI in marketing at a conference in 2014, at that time it was a topic that only experts were interested in, and was totally misunderstood by many marketers. What we observe now is the entrance of AI under the thatched roofs. Today, to start taking advantage of the benefits of AI technology, you don’t need to have the title of “data scientist” .It is enough to have good tools that we can easily implement and make our lives easier. And history shows that the solutions that have already made everyday work easier, have stayed with us for a long time.
Paweł, thank you very much for taking part in the interview and for telling us in detail about the ongoing activities in the field of AI technologies and plans for new technologies in Vercom S.A. for the near future.
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