The AI Playbook, with Eric Siegel

Funnel Reboot podcast

Episode 199

Today’s topic is AI and ML, and though you may think this doesn’t concern marketing, we need to acknowledge how it’ll shift things.

Up to now, marketing was done on the premise that for a given audience shown a message, some average percentage, would act on it. With AI, we’re now able to look at individual audience members and predict how each of them would act upon a message, and at the opportune moment we could have the message show up to each one of them. Goodbye analyzing what happened with crude audience averages, Hello to using detailed data to predict what’s likely to happen.

With AI holding such promise, why don’t more companies hand things over to AI? I had thought it’s held up by a lack of technical people who know how to do this, but our guest says we’ve had enough technical expertise - He himself was previously one of those data people, and his expertise wasn’t enough to do the job. He says AI initiatives are held back by those running business functions like marketing who haven’t made the business case and collaborated with the data people to implement this.

My guest is a leading consultant and former Columbia University and UVA Darden professor. He is the founder of the long-running Machine Learning Week conference series, a frequent keynote speaker, and author of the bestselling Predictive Analytics: The Power to Predict Who Will Click, Buy, Lie, or Die. In 2023 he authored “The AI playbook”

Let’s talk to Eric Siegel.

Timestamps/Chapters:

0:00:00 Intro 00:01:37 Welcome Eric Siegel 00:01:56 Barrier we face isn't technical know-how 00:06:05 Despite a strong start - AI's been slow to spread 00:11:17 Process a business needs to implement ML 00:27:41 building a custom algorithm 00:29:45 PSA 00:52:32 The human-side of the switchover 00:54:03 Contacting Eric

Links to all people and concepts mentioned are in the shownotes on the Funnel Reboot site.