Summer Insight Series: What happens after AI gives you the answer?
AI is changing how quickly businesses can understand their customers. But getting the answer is only the beginning.
In the latest instalment of our Summer Insight Series, AUDIENCES Founder & CEO Rob McLaughlin explores what happens when AI-powered customer intelligence meets activation and why the organisations that turn insight into action will have the real competitive advantage. As part of our ongoing Snowflake series, Rob looks at the opportunity to connect Snowflake Intelligence → Audience → Activation → Outcome.
AI Can Tell You Who Your Best Customers Are. What Happens Next?
The next chapter in our Snowflake series looks at what happens when AI makes customer intelligence easier to access and why activation is what turns that intelligence into value. In our last article, From Customer Intelligence to Marketing Outcomes, we looked at a simple challenge: businesses have invested heavily in bringing customer data together, but too little of that intelligence makes its way into day-to-day marketing.
AI is about to make that challenge even more interesting. With Snowflake Intelligence, business users can ask questions of their enterprise data using natural language and get answers grounded in the organisation’s governed data. For marketers, think about what that could mean.
- Which customers are most likely to upgrade?
- Who is showing signs of churn?
- Which customers should we stop targeting with acquisition advertising?
- What characteristics do our highest-value customers share?
Questions that have traditionally required a brief to a data team, a query and a wait can increasingly be answered far more quickly. But there’s a second question that matters just as much - What happens when you get the answer?
From intelligence to actio
Let’s say you identify 150,000 customers with a high propensity to purchase a particular product. Useful? Absolutely. But the marketer doesn’t ultimately need another number on a dashboard. They need to do something with it. They need to turn those customers into an audience. Activate that audience across the channels where they spend their media budget. Suppress customers who have already converted and understand whether the activity actually delivered a commercial outcome.
The journey should be simple: Question → Intelligence → Audience → Activation → Outcome.
AI is transforming the first part. The opportunity now is to make the rest just as easy.
AI doesn't automatically solve the activation gap
At AUDIENCES, we talk a lot about the activation gap: the distance between the customer intelligence organisations have and the proportion they can actually put to work in marketing. AI has the potential to dramatically increase the intelligence available to marketers. But if acting on that intelligence still means extracting data, reformatting it and copying it between multiple platforms, we haven't solved the underlying problem.
We've just made the first step faster. That's why the infrastructure underneath AI matters. Snowflake provides a governed data foundation where organisations can bring together customer, transactional, behavioural and other enterprise data. Snowflake Intelligence creates a new way for business users to interact with that data. The next opportunity is making those insights actionable without introducing another unnecessary layer between the organisation's data and its marketing.
Close the loop
That's where we see AUDIENCES fitting into this next phase. AUDIENCES is deployed within a customer's cloud environment, enabling marketers to build and activate audiences using the first-party data they already have in Snowflake. We're not creating another place for customer data to live, we're helping businesses put the intelligence they already have to work.
That becomes particularly interesting as AI changes how easily marketers can interrogate customer data.
- Identify customers showing signs of churn. Build a retention audience.
- Understand which customers are most valuable. Use that intelligence to inform acquisition.
- Identify existing purchasers. Suppress them from unnecessary advertising.
- Find customers with the strongest propensity to buy. Prioritise media investment accordingly.
These aren't futuristic marketing use cases. They're things marketers have wanted to do for years. AI simply has the potential to make the intelligence behind them dramatically more accessible.
The next competitive advantage
There's a huge amount of attention being paid to what AI can tell us. The bigger commercial question may be what businesses are able to do with those answers. The organisations that get this right won't necessarily be the ones with the most data or even the most AI tools, they'll be the ones that connect intelligence to action quickly and responsibly. Because AI can tell you who your best customers are. The competitive advantage comes from what you do next.
