 Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Jeremy Smart. Good afternoon Mumbai. It's wonderful to be here back in incredible India. I think that's the catchphrase for your tourism body. My name is Jeremy Smart and I'm from Acoustic. And for the next 15 minutes or so, I'm going to have a little chat to you all about future proof in your organisation, specifically your marketing department and how technology and artificial intelligence can play a role in helping you on that journey. Now if you're sitting there thinking, who's this strange sounding Australian standing on stage from a company that I've never heard of and he's about to tell us how to future proof our organisation, let me give you some context. Can I see a show of hands? Who's heard of IBM Watson? Yeah, that's great. That's the response we normally get. The vast majority of you. I suspect not many of you have heard of Acoustic. So if I give you some, oh that's good. It's good to see a hand up there and it's not a colleague. Acoustic is the result of an acquisition that was made last year by a private equity firm in the United States called Centerbridge who acquired the IBM Watson Marketing SaaS Solutions. And those solutions we've stood up are called Acoustic or the brand is called Acoustic. The solutions are what are on the screen behind me. So we have a marketing campaign automation tool called Acoustic Campaign infused with artificial intelligence that helps you, you know, send more effective email communication to your customers or SMS or push notification throughout orchestrating that customer journey that you're trying to build connections with your audiences and your customers. We also have Acoustic Content, which is a headless CMS that helps you distribute content through the myriad of channels that we have. Again, AI Infusion helping you on that journey and management of your content. We also have Acoustic Analytics, which is an AI infused analytics tool. It doesn't tell you, just tell you what's happening through your channels. It tells you why. Through journey analytics, struggle detection, giving you insights that you wouldn't have otherwise. And personalization, acoustic personalization brings to reality that pipe dream that we talk about around hyper personalization to your consumers, your customers, your audience. Underpinning all of that is acoustic exchange. Now think of that like a highway. A highway of information transfer from one application, be it third party of the external or one of our application, through to another application. So it's not a DMP or a CDP. It's simply a highway allowing information about me, one of your customers, to flow from one endpoint to another, one solution to another. And it wraps it all together. So that's the context of Acoustic. Now why is that relevant to you in terms of future proof in your organizations? Well, we know that today, more than ever, it is an incredibly challenging, complex time to be a marketer. Never has it been this difficult, this challenging. You're staring at the face of Everest as you try and navigate the journey of building relationships with your customers. We know this because we've shifted from a product economy to an experience economy. It's no longer about form and function, features and benefits. It's about the experience you delivered to me, your customer, and the way that you connect and build an emotional journey or emotional connection with me. We also know that you're trying to navigate a map of madness. There's more technology emerging than ever before. The channels, the proliferation of channels, how you connect with me. The different devices that I have in my life, the different platforms that emerge, it's incredibly challenging for you as a marketer. Furthermore, your competitors are not those in your industry, or just those in your industry or vertical. You're competing with Instagram, with Spotify, with Uber, with Tinder, because it's those apps that I base my expectations of the experience that you must deliver to me. So you need to start to think about how you meet those expectations of the consumers engaging with brands like Instagram. Now, here's the kicker for you all to consider. There's a paradox in all of this, and it's about data. The data that you have on me. I choose what data I give you. I can dictate how you use that data. How you build trust with me and allow me to give you access to use that data is dependent on the experiences that you deliver. Furthermore, we see stronger and stricter data privacy laws coming into place, GDPR and the European Union only two years ago. Locally, your government is looking to legislate a data protection bill. And additionally, the digital economy valuation of India is set to go beyond $1 trillion in the next two to three years. You have a fast growing middle class. So the market attractiveness of India is heightened. Foreign brands will enter this market because of that market attractiveness. So getting your data in a shape where you can use it effectively and build that relationship with me will be more important or paramount for you. So that's a snapshot of kind of the state of play of how we find where we find ourselves today at a consumer level, I mean, and at a brand level for you. So how do you future-proof? How do you future-proof through artificial intelligence and other technologies? I'm going to talk about three tenants that you can think about the application to your businesses and how you might use them moving forward. Now the first is about the customer. It's about being laser-focused, having a customer-centric approach to everything you do, operationally and strategically. The campaigns that you deploy, everything you do within your marketing domain must be focused on the consumer. Why? Because we're in a constant state of transformation. That map of madness that I talked about before that you have to try and navigate through technology channels, platforms, devices. That's a tricky thing to do. But we know that brands and businesses that adopt a customer-centric approach are far better off than those that don't. We talked about growing, you know, a number of data, a volume of data. Think about a country like India, in excess of a billion people. If you're not adopting a customer-centric approach to the way that you build the experience for your consumer, you're missing a trick big time. We talk about acquisition a lot. Acquisition's great. Winning's great. It's sexy. Everyone loves organic growth. But the reality is retention is far better. It's easier. It's more effective. It's more productive. It's healthier for your business. An example of that at play is a brand that we would all be familiar with, PayPal. So PayPal has some 300 million customers around the world. Now, even in India, 300 million's a big number. So PayPal are using our analytics application specifically the AI-infused elements of it to identify issues on site, issues that relate to their consumers along that journey. With 300 million customers, you can imagine not everything goes to plan always. There's going to be problems that arise. So how do you spot the trees from the woods? How do you identify the priority issues that you should focus on? Even with a huge team of humans at your disposal, you're not going to surface the insights that machines can. The power of artificial intelligence is at play here for PayPal. They're effectively able to identify the priorities that they can focus on to shift the needle of what really makes a difference to their business. Let's talk about the second tenant, a future proof in your business. And that's the modern marketing team. Marketing teams have evolved massively in the last decade or two, and they will continue to evolve further. What drives this evolution is again that map of madness we talk about. You have some 120 different channels that you can connect and talk to me through. We know that on average, you're operating in excess of 90 different applications and tools to try and manage that customer experience and journey. It's therefore no surprise that the vast majority of you will find it overwhelming, confusing. I work in technology, and I find it overwhelming and confusing. I'm sure most of you have seen the Scott Brinker chief martech slide. Follow that over the last 10 years, you see the evolution and growth of different technologies and applications. I think well in excess of 10,000 this year. What we see emerge as a result of this growing landscape of applications is new roles, specifically roles focused around data. The director of marketing data is a hot trend that we see emerging in the land right now. We see companies that have adapted to this change early invest two or three times year on year in the area of data management. Data orchestration, that role of data marketing is a critical focus for all businesses, and if you're not embracing that and investing in data management, you need to. Furthermore, with the GDPR or the data protection bill coming into effect here, not having your house in order from a data hygiene perspective makes you vulnerable. It's imperative that marketers adopt a data strategy, and we've seen brands and businesses that have strict data compliance where they rise to that challenge outperform those that don't. So you have an option when it comes to data and your modern marketing team, that is to upskill, evolve, or become irrelevant and redundant. We've done that with an acoustic, the acoustic exchange solution that I spoke about a little earlier, that highway that allows information to transfer from applications to other applications that plays into this trend that we see in the world today of an open ecosystem, some 91 different applications that you're running, not all from the same family, from different vendors, some maybe on-prem, some maybe SAS in the cloud, but we acknowledge that as the world we operate in today, and we respect that with our customers, a world that you operate in. Let's talk about the third tenant, we also like to refer to this as augmented intelligence. Why? We see humans and machines at their best when they're working together in harmony with one another. So what's something that machines always will do better than humans can do? That's to surface insights, scrutinize data at scale, at velocity, at volume. The benefit to you and to the marketeers with your organizations is leveraging artificial intelligence to give you the insights to focus on the things that matter most. The priorities in your business, the areas that will shift the needle in the right direction, focus on what matters and let go what doesn't. So you just need to start to think about how AI can play a role in your business, in your line of business, your team, your organization. Is it about sending a more effective email campaign to the right audience, at the right time, on the right day with the right subject line? An application that allows you to then scrutinize that campaign at scale and speed or is it about having a single platform that allows you to manage your content? Again, understanding what's effective through what channel, what device, with what audience. This is where artificial intelligence can start to compliment the human aspect to your team and give you that advantage that you need in a highly competitive landscape. We talk often about the growth benefits of artificial intelligence and your revenue streams or identification of opportunities, market opportunities, but there's an operational benefit to be made and achieved through artificial intelligence. Greater productivity and efficiency, improved employee satisfaction. You need to start thinking about the benefits to your organization through embedding AI into your customer experience initiatives. At Acoustic, we are laser focused on the marketers. We're not talking to any other line of business. It's having a suite of applications that are unified of a beautiful UI and are easy to use. We acknowledge the role of artificial intelligence and its growth within the world and we infuse that and we continue to invest in that in our solutions. And we acknowledge the open ecosystem landscape that we're playing in. You're going to have relationships with different technologies and vendors. It's foolish to think you're all in with one. We know you're not and that's the way we play the game. Laser focused on marketers infusion of AI respect to the world we operate within today. So as I start to come to a close I'll leave this with you. It's a jungle out there. Future proof in your organizations your marketing line of business is challenging. You need to have conviction in your beliefs and be brave in everything you do. So on that I want to thank you for your attention for the last 15 minutes, 14 minutes and 50 seconds. I wish you a wonderful afternoon ahead. I thank you for your time and attention and namaste.