[WATCH] Artificial Intelligence, Real Marketing: Nate Clegg at SiGMA Europe 2021

In an interview with Charity Ovbiagele, Boom.AI’s Chief Revenue Officer Nate Clegg elaborated on the role AI could have in the future of digital marketing

Starting off by providing some backstory to Boom.AI’s history, Nate Clegg spoke about the firm’s origins in Utah and its mission to make customer service more personable.

Boom.AI specifically is a communication platform to be able to talk to people using artificial intelligence and in order to make marketing more personable, it has to get smarter and AI or artificial intelligence is the very definition of smarter. So as the AI learns, as it grows and it gets better at communicating with people, it’s going to be better than a lot of the things that currently exist in marketing, especially when you get to scale.

He also referred to how this evolution would take out some of the more tedious aspects of customer service for both the business, by allowing them to operate better at scale and take out IVRs, and for clients who would be able to enjoy a more personal, efficient and (ironically) human experience. Elaborating further on the origins of the firm, he spoke about how the company actually predated AI even if its original business plan still put it on the path of automation.

So we started about 15 years ago, not with artificial intelligence because that didn’t really exist 15 years ago. We started as a call center and our focus was creating technology that allowed people to play pre recorded statements and communicate with people from another country without their accent. So it’s very common in the United States, for example, to have people in the Philippines call because they understand the English language really well, and they understand the American culture, but their accents were still pretty perceivable.

Well, our technology created this pre recorded statement that they could play and it sounded like they were speaking to somebody from the United States. So that interaction enabled people from the Philippines or wherever to communicate with another community and their native sounding accent and over time that filled that void in the market.

This eventually led them to discover artificial intelligence which proved to be a vital pillar for the next stage of their services evolution.

Charity then asked what made Boom.AI stand apart from the competition when the field of digital marketing was getting more and more competitive.

Our communications with people sound very natural. Most of the time when you’re talking to an AI voice bot, it sounds like an AI voice bot, you know it’s a machine in it and it’s actually usually a negative consumer experience. Because we’ve had these 15 years to prepare creating this soundboard technology because you push a keyboard button to play an audio message. We’ve gotten so good at that and so smooth at that, that it sounds like a natural conversation with people. And that’s what sets us apart.

Charity then moved towards asking whether Boom.AI had any plans to expand into Europe.

We would love it. Several of us at our company have spent a lot of time in Europe or have lived in Europe. We love coming back. I lived in Italy for five years. I love being in Europe every second that I can and our owner and CEO lived in Italy for a couple of years and whenever we can get here and we’ll get here, even if it’s a trade show like Sigma.

Moving towards her final question, Charity asked Nate whether the belief that AI would take over the workforce had any merit to it and if we might be on the precipice of seeing the beginning of an artificially dominated workforce.

I think people are concerned that AI is more advanced than it really is. And I always joke that if you knew our programmers, you wouldn’t be as worried. I shouldn’t say that. They’re very great, but it’s not quite at the spot yet where it’s going to have a full blown replacement. But what it’s going to do is it’s going to replace the part of the jobs that we don’t want to do.

Using the customer service workers as an example, Nate argued that this form of AI would make high repetition, fatigue inducing tasks like taking repetitive calls obsolete. This would invariably raise the quality of life of the workers while maintaining if not supercharging productivity.

AI will replace a certain amount of jobs, but I think what will happen is we’ll start to see more and more people branch off into creative things, where if you look at Sigma and I’m sure they’ll have video of all the crazy stuff that’s happening here, AI can’t create this human beings can.

SiGMA 2022:

After the exciting set of conferences that was Malta Week 2021, the SiGMA Group plans to take the world by storm with the golden steeples of Kiev and the snowy city of Toronto being hubs to draw the best and brightest of the iGaming world together. Our next expo takes us to cutting-edge metropoli of the United Arab Emirates for three days of networking, panel discussions and festivities. Stay up to date with the latest and greatest through SiGMA News.