A core marketing tenet, customer engagement is key to retention and, by extension, a company’s ability to scale and grow.

With artificial intelligence unlocking a swathe of new experiences, driving creativity and simplifying operations across multiple verticals, customer engagement is the latest area at which it’s being pointed. Combining marketing automation, a customer data platform and AI, Blueshift Labs Inc. is spearheading that paradigm, according to Vijay Chittoor (pictured), co-founder and chief executive officer of Blueshift.

“We position Blueshift as an intelligent customer engagement platform, and the problem that we see is that every brand today suffers from this idea of siloed engagement across the customer journey,” Chittoor said. “If you and I are consumers of many brands, we see that our experience when we walk into a bank branch might be very different from how we get engaged inside the digital product — this is the problem.”

Chittoor spoke with theCUBE industry analyst John Furrier, during a CUBE Conversation from SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio in Palo Alto. They discussed Blueshift’s unique approach to AI, the challenges in customer engagement and the exciting prospects of generative AI within the industry. (* Disclosure below.)

Revolutionizing customer engagement with AI

Blueshift sees itself as an intelligent customer engagement platform, with a broader view of the problems companies face in keeping users continuously curious across the customer journey. The traditional “if this, then that” approach to solving this problem, which relies heavily on manual decision-making, has become obsolete in the face of evolving complexities in data, according to Chittoor.

“How do [companies] solve the engagement silo problem and get to intelligent customer engagement for the new world?” he asked. “The way to solve that has to be about moving away from this manual decisioning paradigm to an AI-driven [one]. That AI-driven decision paradigm has to be supported by unified data across the entire customer journey, and it has to influence decisions on all the different engagement channels.”

That AI-driven decision-making is to be supported by three principles: data delivery, data decision and endpoint delivery. Unifying data in real time, adopting AI-driven decisions and ensuring the seamless delivery of decisions across various engagement channels are the pillars of Blueshift’s strategy, according to Chittoor.

Much like digital transformation, data unification exists in a spectrum — it isn’t a monolithic, on/off state. While acknowledging that enterprises possess substantial data, the key challenge lies in activating that data. Blueshift advocates for the unification of real-time event data with data housed in enterprise data warehouses, ensuring a comprehensive and up-to-date view of customer profiles.

“How to combine this real-time event data with the relational data that’s in data warehouses is one of the key challenges that needs to be solved,” Chittoor noted. “Once you solve that and you truly unify the profiles in real time, you need to be able to make AI-driven decisions in real time as well. I would say like every brand, every customer that we talk to has taken the first one or two steps.“

There’s also the discussion of gen AI and its intersection with customer AI, according to Chittoor. Gen AI accelerates content creation, significantly reducing the time required for generating engaging content. The synergy between both enables brands to personalize content based on individual customer preferences, creating a tailored and relevant experience.

Here’s theCUBE’s complete video interview with Vijay Chittoor:

(* Disclosure: Blueshift Labs Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Blueshift nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE