Customer connections powered by artificial intelligence
February 5, 2025 ·
Contributed by: Izabela Shubair, DeGroote Contributor
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Personalization in marketing has significantly transformed since the days when a favourite clothing store might call a customer with tips about new jeans. Today, companies leverage artificial intelligence (AI) to gain deep insights into customer preferences, including style, colour, sizing and the likelihood of purchasing. This advanced understanding allows organizations to use AI’s hyper-personalization capabilities as a competitive advantage.
In line with this evolution, DeGroote’s Executive Master of Business Administration (EMBA) recently hosted its inaugural masterclass, AI’s Role in Personalization: How Brands Use AI to Build Customer Relationships. The session explored how brands harness AI to enhance their connections with customers.
Paul Tedesco (MBA ‘97) is a DeGroote instructor and former president of TrackOMC, a prominent digital data technology and analytics agency. He has dedicated his career to using data and technology to create meaningful and efficient communications, helping some of the world’s most recognized brands connect authentically with their customers and employees. Tedesco led the masterclass.
“Artificial intelligence is the most exciting place you can be in marketing,” said Tedesco, explaining AI’s most distinct impacts on marketing.
“AI is allowing us to find and target customers in a much more effective way. And what that’s doing is creating a much more efficient landscape when it comes to buying media, talking to customers. We also waste less money on ad spend.”
“The second thing is effectiveness. So, this is the idea that artificial intelligence would help us decide who wouldn’t be interested in hearing what we had to say.
It would go through and look at records and customers and things people had viewed online, and it would say, ‘How do we ensure that we’re not sending messages to people who aren’t interested?’”
Based on these impacts, Tedesco offered numerous personalization insights. Here are five key takeaways.
1. AI is critical to brands because it:
- Can manage complexity, connect multiple channels, handle large amounts of data, deliver insights and real-time automation and reduce the need for resources.
- Drives efficiency, return on investment, marketing spend, greater conversion rates, retention and customer satisfaction.
- Delivers better research, personalized product recommendations, AI-powered chatbots, intelligent content, ad targeting, dynamic pricing and predictive personalization.
2. AI-powered personalization can focus on relevance, context and real-time.
Tedesco highlighted an example of an airline’s end-of-year email to its 40 million subscribers, illustrating how AI can generate relevant data points for tailored content creation.
- Relevance: “We know what a person’s normal airport is. We know how many points they have in the loyalty program. Their usual trips, upcoming trips, how they pick their seats, when they pick their seats, if they bring luggage. All of those things that you can then apply to this email to make it really relevant to them.”
- Context: “You can take that data and put it into context … Imagine you log on, and it’s morning, and that email looks like it’s daytime. Or it’s nighttime, you see a nighttime flight. So, it can be very contextual to today and what’s happening today.”
- Real-time: “AI can help you put real time in seconds. So, imagine someone searching for something on a website. They then click through into their logged-in state to be able to purchase. In one click, we have gone from seeing that behavioural data to analyzing that data, developing some insights and understanding from that data using AI and the modelling, and creating a relevant presentation to the person about what happened three seconds ago.”
3. Personalization benefits customers.
Enhanced relevance, time-saving convenience, timeliness of information and no frustrating spam are just some of the customer benefits of AI-personalized marketing, Tedesco said. “I believe what you can do with AI is get rid of all the wasted communication, which, in the end, creates a better experience for us with the brand.”
4. Data acquisition requires careful consideration.
Tedesco recommends that companies carefully assess how much personalization and data they truly need. “I think you have to understand what you’re going to do with it and then decide if it’s worth the cost of acquisition,” he says of data.
5. Generative AI can make the creative process more efficient.
Using the example of American bank JP Morgan, which is equipping employees with a generative AI tool that helps with cognitive tasks such as emails, reports and presentations, Tedesco said he believes generative AI can be leveraged in the creative marketing process. He pointed to commercials from Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, Mastercard, and others that either predominantly featured AI or were AI-generated.
