What are the key trends in using Artificial Intelligence for marketing and sales?

In today’s world, AI is becoming the key tool to assist sales and marketing teams with the ability to increase sales and increase efficiencies of the sales reps.  With AI capturing critical customer information and automatically populating CRM platform and tools. The reps are able to be more laser-focused on what the customers really need and quickly provide solutions based on their needs.  In other words, AI cares for the mechanics of the call which allows the agents to provide the “human factor” of empathy, product knowledge, and outstanding customer service.

Hi Irfan, I can only speak from my experiences in South Africa in the FMCG and financial services industry. I am aware of big data analytics being applied in the mobile telco space here in SA, but am not sure about the use of AI. I have heard however that the AI code in a few instances can simply be googled and used from there. There are also issues and legal considerations I believe that must be considered that have to do with the protection of customer information and customer privacy.

In financial services in SA, I think it is still in its infancy in the sales and marketing environment, but a bit more mature in the risk and credit environment. With campaigns in banks, I know analytics is applied to scoring both the likelihood of customers or account holders to purchase and to manage credit exposure for example, but this analytics is not done directly by the bank. It is outsourced normally to businesses like credit bureaus. I am however not sure if AI is applied to the analytics. In insurance, I have come across analytics in the sales environment for things like customer propensity to lapse, but these models and analytics I have seen are outsourced to university professors and I am not sure if they use AI in their data analysis.

In FMCG, one of my clients is playing with AI in the sales and marketing space, most notably around the optimisation of sales real estate (retail space optimisation). They are also applying AI to supply chain optimisation I believe. They are however short of skills here in SA and want to bring in-house people with the skills to develop and run AI and analytics. This capability is however also being coordinated (and some of it outsourced) with their global centre of excellence.