#78 - Vijay Chittoor, CEO of Blueshift - On the power of AI–marketer synergy

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that’s transforming impact marketers can make in cross-channel marketing scenarios. My guest is Vijay Chittoor, Co-founder and CEO of Blueshift.

Vijay has a wealth of experience in AI, marketing technology and e-commerce domains. He was an early team member and the director of product management at Kosmix which was acquired by Walmart to become WalmartLabs. In 2010 he co-founded Mertado and led it as the CEO for two years until it was acquired by Groupon and became Groupon Goods. This prepared him for his new venture, Blueshift, which he co-founded in 2014.

Vijay is a graduate of Harvard Business School’s MBA Program. He also holds Bachelor’s and Master's degrees in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay.

Blueshift enables B2C marketers to automate segment-of-one marketing on every channel.

They’re on a mission to put AI in the Hands of Every Marketer.

This triggered me, hence I invited Vijay to my podcast. We explore the transformation of digital marketing, and the scaled revenue opportunities that it now provides to companies of all sizes. We also discuss how AI is enabling marketers to reclaim their creative and strategic role again and create a flywheel of value that’s pretty hard to stop once in motion.

Here are some of his quotes:

Every few years, a technology matures to a point when non-technical people can start using it, and when that happens, that unlocks a lot of enterprise value

What's happening is that you and I, as consumers, we are interacting with all these brands on digital and mobile and social. And when we do that, we are leaving behind 1000 times more data than we used to leave behind 10 years ago.

With all the data we're leaving behind marketers, and brands now for the first time have a way of understanding us as the dynamic individuals that we've always been.

Doing that is exciting, but it's also challenging, because dealing with a thousand times more data, dealing with 10 to 15 times more channels, that is very difficult for marketers.

Obviously, humans are not best equipped to operate at that scale. Humans are created for guiding how the engagement should be driven, how that engagement should be humanized. Where the machine can really come in is to help the human marketer become excellent at that scale of decision making and make each decision truly intelligent.

That's what we do with the Blueshift platform.

During this interview, you will learn three things:

1. How thinking differently about key customer challenges allows you to build solutions that have a transformative impact because of their simplicity.
2. That AI alone is not the solution – the synergy really kicks in when humans and AI systems are working well together and even impress the customers’ customers
3. That to deliver remarkable solutions you have to stay true to your vision – no matter how enticing the short-term opportunity is.