 Okay, welcome everyone to theCUBE's presentation of the AWS Startup Showcase. The topic is Mar-Tech Emerging Cloud Scale Experience. This is season two, episode three of the ongoing series covering exciting startups from the AWS ecosystem. Talk about their value proposition in their company and all the good stuff that's going on. I'm your host, John Furrier. And today we're excited to be joined by Anjana Malawa who's the co-founder and head of AI at BlueShift. Great to have you on here to talk about the BlueShift Intelligent Customer Engagement Made Simple. Thanks for joining us today. Thank you, John, thank you for having me. So last time we did our intro video, we put it out on the web, got great feedback. One of the things that we talked about which is resonating out there in the viral Twitter sphere and the thought leadership circles is this concept that you mentioned called 10X Marketer. You know, that idea that you have a solution that can provide a 10X value, kind of a riff on the 10X engineer in the DevOps cloud world. What does it mean and how does someone get there? Yeah, fantastic. I think that's a great way to start our discussion. I think a lot of organizations, especially as of this current economic environment are looking to say, I have limited resources, limited budgets. How do I actually achieve digital and customer engagement that helps move the needle for my key metrics, whether it's average revenue per user, lifetime value of the user, and frequent interactions. Above all, the more frequently a brand is able to interact with their customers, the better they understand them, the better they can actually engage them. And that usually leads to long-term good outcomes for both customer on the brand and the organizations. So the way I see 10X Marketer is that you need to have tools that give you that speed and agility without hindering your ability to activate any of the campaigns or experience that you want to create. And I kind of see the roadblocks, usually for many organizations, is that kind of threefold. One is your data silos. Usually data that is on your sites does not talk to your app data, does not talk to your social data, does not talk to your CRM data and so forth. How do I break those silos? The second is channel silos, right? Which is I actually have customers who are only engaging on email or some are on email and mobile apps, some are on email and mobile apps and maybe the OTT TV in a Roku or one of the connected TV experiences or maybe in the future in other Web3 environments. How do I actually break those channel silos so that I get a comprehensive view of the customer? And my marketing team can engage with all of them in respect to the channel. So break the channel silos. And the last but that's kind of like, what I call like some of the little talked about is I call the inside silo, which is that not only do you need to have the data but you also have to have a common language to share and talk about within your organizations, what are we learning from our customers? What do we translate our learning and insight on this common data kind of platform or fabric into an action? And that requires the shared language of, how do I actually know my customers and what do I do with them? I call it the inside silo as well. I think a lot of times organizations do get into this habit, like each one speaks their own language but they don't actually are talking the common language of what did we actually know about the real customer at that? Yeah, and I think that's a great conversation because there's two, when you hear 10X marketer or 10X conversations, it implies a couple of things. One is you're breaking in old way and bringing in something new and the new is a force multiplier in this case, 10X marketer, but this is the cloud scale. So marketing executives, chiefs of staffs of CMOs and their staffs, they want to get the scale. So marketing at scale is now the table stakes. Now budget constraints are there as well. So you're starting to see, okay, I need to do more with less. Now the big question comes up is ROI, right? So I want to have AI, I want to have all these force multipliers. What do I got to do with the old? How do I handle that? How do I bring the new in and operationalize it? And if that's the case, I'm making a change. So I have to ask you, what's your view on the ROI of AI marketing? Because this is a key component because you got scale factor here. You got a force multiplier opportunity. How do you get that ROI on the table? Right. I think that's a, as you rightly said, it's table stakes and I think the ROI of AI marketing starts with one very key simple premise that, today some of the tools allow you to do things one at a time. So I can actually say, can I run this campaign today? And you can kind of scramble your team, hustle your way, get everybody involved and run that campaign. And then tomorrow it's like, hey, I looked at the results, can I do this again? And they're like, we just hustle for all of us to get that done. How do I do it tomorrow? How do I do it next week? How do I do it for every single week for the rest of the year? That's where I think the AI marketing is essentially taking your insight, taking your creativity and kind of creating a platform or a tool that allows you to run this every single day. And that's agility at scale. That is not only a scale of the customer base, but scale across time. And that AI based automation is the key ROI piece for a lot of AI marketing practitioners. So Forrester, for example, did a comprehensive total economic impact study with our customers. And what they found out was actually the 781% ROI that they reported in that particular report is based on three key factors. One is being able to do experiences that are intelligent at scale day in and day out. So do your targeting, do your recommendations, not just one day, but do it every single day, right? And don't hold back yourself on being able to do that. And they got to get that return. They got to get the sales too. This is the numbers. That's right. They actually have real dollars, real numbers attached to it. They have a calculator. You can actually go in, plug your own numbers and get what you might expect from your existing customer base. The second is that, once you have a unified platform like ours, you're, you know, the 10x marketer that we're talking about is actually able to do more. It's sometimes actually, you know, it's kind of counterintuitive to think that a smaller team does more, but in reality, what we have seen that is the case when you actually have the right tools, the smaller teams actually achieve more. And that's the, you know, redundant operations, you know, conflicting insights that go away into something more coherent and comprehensive. That's the second insight that they've found. And the third is, you know, just having reporting and all of the things in one place means that you can amplify it. You can amplify it across your paid media channels. You can amplify it across your promotions programs and other partnerships that you're running. You know, that's the key thing about platforms that people don't understand is that you have a platform and it enables a lot of value, in this case force multiplier value. It enables more value than you pay for it. But the key is, it enables customers to do things without a line of code, meaning it's a platform. They're innovating on top of it. And that's, I think, where the ROI comes in. And this kind of leads me to where the next question is, I wanted to ask you is, you know, not to throw a wet blanket on the mark tech industry, but I got to think of when I hear marketing automation, I kind of think old. I think old inadequate antiquated technologies, I think email blasting and just some boring stuff that just gets siloed or bespoke from something else. Are marketing automation tools equal, created equal? Does something like what you guys are doing with Smart Hub change that? And can you talk about that? Cause that's the, it's not going to go away. It's just another level that's going to be abstracted away under the coverage. Yeah, great question. Certainly, email marketing has been practiced for two or three decades now and in some form or another. I think we went from essentially what people call list-based marketing. I have a list, let me keep blasting the same message to everybody, you know? And then hopefully something will come out of it. A little bit more saying, you know, then they can, okay, and maybe now I have CRM database, right? And can I do database marketing? Which they will call like, you know, hey, hi, John, hi, Monium, which is the first name. And that's all they think we'll get the, you know, customer excited about it because you called them by name, which is certainly helpful, but not enough. I think now I think what we call like, you know, kind of what the new age that we live in is that we call it graph-based marketing. And the way we, you know, kind of, you know, materialize that is that every single user is interacting with the brand with their offerings. So then this interaction graph that's happening across millions of customers, across thousands of content, articles, videos, shows, products, items, and that graph actually has much richer knowledge of what the customer wants than the first names or list based ones. So I think the next evolution of marketing automation, even though the industry has been there a while, there is a step change in what can actually be done at scale and which is that taking that interaction graph and making that, you know, you know, a part of the experience for the customer. And that's what we enable. That's why we do think of that as a big step change from how people are being practicing list-based marketing. And within that, you know, they, you know, certainly there is a radiation of curve as to how people approach AI marketing and they kind of are in a different spectrum. Some people are still at list-based marketing, some people are database marketing, and hopefully we'll move them to this new interaction graph-based marketing. Yeah, and I think the context is key. I like how you bring up the graph angle on this because the graph databases kind of imply there's a lot of different optionality around what's happened contextually, both over time and currently, and it adds to it, makes it smarter. It's not just siloed, it's just one dimensional. It feels like it's got a lot there. This is clearly, I'm a big fan of it. I think this is the way to go. As you get more personalization, you get more data. Graph database makes a lot of sense. So I have to ask you, this is a really cutting edge value proposition. Who are the primary buyers and users in an organization that you guys are working with? Yeah, great question. So we typically have CMO organizations approaching us with this problem. And they usually talk to their CIO organizations, their counterparts. The CIOs have been, the chief information officers have been investing in data fabrics, data lakes, data warehouses for the better part of last decade or two and have some very cutting edge technology that goes into organizing all this data. But that doesn't still solve the problem of how do I take this data and make a meaningful, relevant, authentic experience for the customer. That's the CMO or problem. And CMO orgs are now challenged with creating product level experience with every interaction. And that's where we're coming. So the CMO orgs are the buyers of our smart hub CDP platform. And we're looking for consolidating hundreds of tools that they had in the past and making that one or two channel marketer is actually the 10x marketer that we talk about. And you need the right tool on top of your data lakes and data warehouses to be able to do that. So CMO orgs are the real drivers of using this technology. You know, I think that also plays the ROI equation or an ROI and having that unified platform. Great, great call out there. I got to ask you the question here because this comes up a lot. And when I hear you talking, I think, okay, a lot of great stuff you guys have there. But if I'm a company, you know, I want to make my core competencies mine, right? I don't really want to outsource or, you know, buy something that's going to be core to my business. But at the same time as market shifts, the business changes and sometimes people don't even know what business they're in at the end of the day. And as it gets more complicated too, by the way. So the question comes up with companies and I can see this clearly. Do I buy it? Do I build it when it comes to AI? Because that's a core competency. Wait a minute, AI. You know, I'm going to maybe buy some chatbot technology. That's not really AI, but it feels like AI. But I'm a company. I want to buy it or build it. That's a choice. What do you see there? Because you guys have a very comprehensive platform. It's hard to replicate, imitate, inimitable. So what's your customers doing with Despective Buy and Build? And where do they get the core competency? What do they get to have as a core competency? Fantastic. I think certainly AI as it applies to the organization level. I've seen this at my previous organization that I was part of, which is, and there will be product and financial applications that are using AI for the service of that organization. So we do see depending upon the size of the organization having in-house AI and data science teams, they are focused on these long-term problems that they are doing as part of their product itself. They, adjacent to that, the CMO organization gets some resources, but not certainly a lot. I think the CMO organization is usually kind of challenged with the task, but not given the 100 people data science and engineering team to be able to go solve that. So what we see among our customer base is that they need a agile platform to do most of the thing that they need to do on a day-to-day basis, but augmented with whatever in-house data science they have. So we are an extensible platform. What we have seen is that half of our customers use us solely for the AI needs. The other half certainly uses both AI modules that we provide and actually augmented with things that they've already built. And we do not have kind of a fight in that ring, but we do acknowledge and we do kind of provide the right hooks for getting the data out of our system and bringing their AI back into our system. And we think at the end of the day, if you want agility for the CMO, or there should not be any barriers. It's like they're in the data business and that's the focus. So I think what I hear you saying is that with your technology and platform, you're enabling them to be in the data business as fast as possible. That's right. Versus algorithm business, which they could add to over time. Certainly they could add to. And I think the bulk of competencies for the CMO are on the creative side. And certainly, kind of wrangling with data pipelines day in and day out and wondering what actually happened to a pipeline in the middle of the night is not probably what they would want to focus on. Not their core competency. I got that yet. You can do all the heavy lifting. I love that. I got to ask you on the blue shift side on customer experience, consumption. How can someone experience the product before buying? Is there a trial POC? What's the scale and scope of operationalizing and getting the blue shift value proposition in-house? Yeah, great. So we actually recently released a fantastic way to experience our product. So if you go to our website, there's only one call to action saying explore blue shift. Right. And if you click on that, without asking anything other than your business email address, you're shown the full product. You're given a guided tour of all the possibilities. So you can actually experience what your marketing team would be doing in the product. And we called it Project Rover. We launched it like very recently. And we're seeing fantastic reception to that. I think a lot of times, as you said, there is that the question mark of like, I have a marketing team that is already doing X, Y, Z. Now you're asking me to implement blue shift. How would they actually experience the product? And now they can go in and experience the product. It's a great way to kind of get the gist of the product in 10 clicks, much more than going through any number of videos or articles, right? I think people really want to say, let me do those 10 clicks. And I know what impression that I can get from the platform. So we do think that's a great way to experience the product. And it's easily available from the main website. And the value proposition isn't always a straight line. And you got that technology. And I got to ask from your experience with the customers that you're talking to, prospects and customers, where do you see yourself winning deals on customer engagement made simple? Because the word customer engagement has been around for a while and it's become, I won't say cliche, but you know, there's been different generational evolutions of technology that made that possible. Obviously we're living in an era of high velocity, omni-channel, a lot of data, the graph databases you mentioned are in there, big part of it. Where are you winning deals? Where are customers' pain points where you are solving that specifically? Yeah, great question. So the organizations that come to us usually have, one of the dimensions of either they have offering complexity, which is what catalog of content or videos or items do they offer to the customers. And the data complexity on the other side is to what is the scale of customer base that I usually target. And that problem has not gone away. I think customer engagement, even though it has been around for a while, the problem of engaging those customers at scale hasn't gone away. And it only is getting harder and harder. And organizations that have, especially on what we call the business to consumer side where that's kind of the bulk of what marketing organizations in B2C segments are doing is, I have tens to millions of customers and how do I engage them day in and day out? And I think that if at all that problem is only getting harder because the consumer preferences keep shifting all the time. And where's your sweet spot for your customer? What size can you just share? Kind of the target organization. Is it medium to enterprise, large B2C, B2BC? What's the focus area? Yeah, great question. So we have seen startups that are in Silicon Valley that are on the kind of, I have now a half a million monthly active users, now how do I actually engage them to customers and clients like Lending Tree and PayPal and Discovery and BBC who have been in the business for multiple decades, have tens of millions of customers that they're engaging with. So that's kind of our sweet spot. We are certainly not maybe for kind of a small shop with maybe 100 plus customers. But as you reach the scale of tens of tons of customers, you kind of start seeing this problem and then you start to look out for solutions that are beyond especially list-based marketing and email glass. So as the scale, you can dial up and down but you have to have some enough scale to kind of get the data pattern if I can connect the dots there. I would probably say you're looking at 100,000 or more monthly active customer base and then you're trying to ramp up your own growth based on what you're learning and to engage those customers. Yeah, it's like a bulldoze. You need the heavy equipment. Great, great, great conversation. For the last minute we have here, Man, you give a plug for the company. What's going on? What are you guys doing? What's new? Give some success stories, your latest latest achievements. Take a minute to give a plug for the company. Yeah, great. We've been recognized by Deloitte as the fastest growth startup two years in a row and continuing to be on that streak. We have released turn-cree integrations with AWS partners and Snowflake partners and Data Lake partners that allow kind of implementing BlueShift a much, much, much streamlined experience with bi-directional integrations. We have now 100 plus data, data connectors and data integrations in our system and that takes care of many other needs. And now, I think organizations that have been budget constrained and are trying to achieve a lot with a small team or are actually going to look at these solutions and say, can I get there? And can I become that 10X marketing solution? 10X marketing organization. And as you have said, agility at scale is very, very hard to achieve. Being able to take your marketing team and achieve 10X requires the right platform and the right solution. We are ready for it. Yeah, every company's in the data business. That's the asset. You guys make that a sing for them. It's good stuff. Love the 10X, love the scale. Manny and Melville, thanks for coming on. Co-founder, head of AI at BlueShift. This is the AWS startup showcase season two, episode three of the ongoing series covering the exciting startups from the AWS ecosystem. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching. Thank you John.