Regarding AI, Much of This Stuff Is Old Hat
Recently an investor mentioned to me that AI will finally enable companies to track user behavior and to deploy customer churn models. I hated to burst his bubble, but these two use cases in particular have been widely deployed for over a decade.
For example, most every Software company that was founded over the past 15 years is built on top of some combination of AWS, Azure and GCP. Netflix is probably AWS most notable early customer. Salesforce is another. Any customer-facing Website, Application/Product or Service (SaaS, PaaS and any other permutation of “aaS”), built on top of AWS, Azure, GCP, Oracle Cloud etc. has the ability to track user behavior and to dynamically engage the user based upon his/her real-time behavior. This is nothing new. Machine Learning is the “AI” that underpins this capability.
Similarly, Predictive Analytics is the Statistics-based discipline upon which customer churn models are constructed. Many of these churn models are imbued with Machine Learning so that the models evolve as customers engage with a company’s products or services (think of Netflix from a user perspective). Customer demographic data, usage data and more inform these models so as to provide a holistic profile of the customer. It is not only Technology companies that have deployed these churn models. Insurance companies, cable and telco companies, retailers and other industries have leveraged churn models for many years.
GenAI is but a new wrinkle to the broader AI category, which has been around for decades and has its roots in Predictive Analytics / Statistics. The company in this space that does not get the respect it deserves is SAS Institute.