Tech

Generative AI costs have plummeted 80 per cent in less than two years since OpenAI launched ChatGPT. Some of the world’s biggest firms have rolled out company-wide use cases, saving hundreds of millions of dollars and driving new previously unimaginable revenues. What’s more, AI is fuelling itself. “We're using AI to build AI tools to build better AI”, per Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. Addo AI CEO and cofounder Ayesha Khanna says the costs will keep falling due to Scaling Law, AI's equivalent to Moore's Law.

The ways firms use data, and the technology architecture that underpins that usage has changed dramatically over the last 20 years. But one thing has remained constant, according to Sriraman (Sri) Annaswamy, a pioneer of the Australian analytics sector, whose firm Swamy and Associates has been a go-to service provider for some of Australia's biggest organisations in finance and healthcare. Value from each new wave of innovation, whether that be business intelligence, data science, or now, generative AI is realised when it is applied to very specific parts of the business operations.

Australian accounting software powerhouse MYOB was a pioneer in the use of customer data platforms (CDPs) in Australia. Even a decade later, the technology is still delivering new and impressive benefits, and equipping the brand for a new stage of technology innovation: Personalisation at scale.

Former GroupM stalwart and one-time Maxus Australia boss Dave Gaines has built a USD$400m-billing independent agency in New York that doesn’t make any money on media mark-ups. He thinks audience metrics may face redundancy – as do media buyers – and agrees with former UM privacy chief Arielle Garcia that the data underpinning the promise of personalisation at scale is woefully inaccurate. But marketers and their peak bodies are doing little to change the status quo. Act fast, warns Gaines, or get fleeced by machines as well.

There were audible gasps when the Treasury Wine Estates board saw the first non-red Penfolds Grange gift box designed by creative collaborator, Japanese artist, Nigo, earmarked for the ever-younger luxury market. But as chief data and technology officer, Kate Whitney, points out, all the consumer insights, demand zone mapping, consumption occasion trends, moments and retail markers make it plain: Disrupting the wine category by building cultural credibility and meeting changing retail experience expectations is critical if Penfolds is to win against declining wine preferences. The former CMO joined Mad Paws CEO, Justus Hammer, plus FiftyFive5 head of cultural forecasting, Michelle Newton, to debate the facets of future retail and changing consumer views of value on a panel at the recent SXSW Sydney event.

Personalised Plates Queensland (PPQ) has overhauled its data-driven approach to marketing on top of a new platform implementation built upon Tealium, Dotdigital and Craft CRM. It's part of a wider change which has also seen the creation of a digital experience team inside the group. And they are getting wins on the board with strong conversion rates and much higher visibility over the audience thanks to much more sophisticated approach to analytics.

Qantas' brand has taken a roasting in recent years. But thanks to artificial intelligence, it's no longer serving up dry chicken. Since taking the helm from Alan Joyce, new chief Vanessa Hudson has made customer experience key to the trust rebuild – and AI is playing an increasing role. Scott Wilkinson, executive manager, digital and direct customer experience, outlined three early CX use cases during a panel discussion at SXSW this week: Ticketing; giving customer agents additional firepower; and spotting and solving problems and complaints – e.g. paltry poultry – as they emerge rather than months later.

Artificial intelligence makes for solid panel fodder at an event like SXSW. The playbook goes that creativity and insight will overcome a sea of machine-generated same, and that humans will be masters of the machines and their prompts while everybody will upskill and adapt. But then someone asks an unscripted question: What about London's creative industry being decimated? Accenture Song's global and APAC creative chiefs didn't duck the question – but reckon there's a rebalance incoming.

Accenture Song ANZ has split the remits of the customer “promise and delivery” firm under two new leads to replace former regional boss Mark Green, who has relocated to New York to be Droga5’s global CEO. Bronwyn van der Merwe steps up from her current role in the high-demand customer service unit to run Accenture Song’s marketing, commerce, design, digital products and service business while veteran Monkeys exec, Matt Michael, becomes CEO of Droga5, officially rebranded from The Monkeys on 1 December. He also has responsibility for Accenture Song’s foray into media planning and buying.

If you’re in a marketing team still attempting to crack how AI can be deployed safely, effectively, and efficiently with some scale and real ROI scenarios, saddle up to an industry peer in the next six months who’s road-testing the “no code” drag-and-drop templates and process-collapsing, easy-build, AI capability claims launched last month by Salesforce across its multiple cloud offers. The customer tech giant this week is on the Australian leg of its “World Tour” to 3000 delegates and such is the pitch - that it has simplified and revolutionised “applied AI” for businesses that have struggled so far to cut through their hallucinogenic concerns and deployment complexity - that all industry eyes and ears in the next six months should be on whether early users agree with the bold claims pasted on the Salesforce can.

National Dental Care has been growing aggressively through a strategy of acquisitions. However, to mitigate the inevitable toothache of growing pains, it has embarked on an online transformation with its digital agency Nightjar, rationalising a network of 80+ sites under a master website, and delivering better customer services and efficiency gains into the bargain.

In the last six months, Salesforce ANZ chief Frank Fillmann has met 70 Australian CEOs. They're facing pressure to move on AI from four sides, but he says leading with cost-out won’t relieve that pressure. Leading with experience will. That’s what Hipages is now doing, cutting tradie onboarding from an hour to 10 minutes. Likewise Fisher & Paykel is using autonomous agents to cull service enquiries by 30 per cent, freeing 3,300 hours a month. Which means cost out, employee experience in, and customer experience wins. The trade-off between cost efficiency and experience, reckons Fillmann, “is rapidly becoming a myth.”

News Corp-controlled REA Group is reaping the benefits of a long-term CX investment strategy, with some key metrics powering by an order of magnitude. The firm was the first to combine Tealium's CDP and Braze's customer engagement platform – and the likes of Kmart have since followed. As well as soaring conversions and clickthroughs – and the Holy Grail of personalisation at scale – Audience and Marketing GM Sarah Myers says the stack now driving earned media she estimates is worth circa $10m a year. 

Marketing's adtech and personalisation obsession is blowing out brands' carbon emissions while accelerating generative AI use risks 10x increases. Relying on the renewable energy promises of SaaS vendors and hyperscalers like Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, and Google who host them or provide their LLMs won't solve the problem – because their own emissions are running out of control for precisely the same reason. But renewable generation means there is a new meaning to 'right ad, right place, right time' – and some agencies are starting to match digital ad buys to within-day periods of high solar and wind power.

Pinterest aims to put clear air between itself and rival platforms under pressure globally over mental health and algorithm-induced anxiety and the prospect of teen bans locally. It’s simultaneously making a play for more full-funnel ad dollars as performance media acquisition costs soar, doubling in the last four years and threatening unit economics, especially for ecom pureplays. The platform called out rivals at this week’s annual showcase, with global CEO Bill Ready talking up a “positive business model centred on emotional wellbeing rather than engagement via enragement”, and throwing down the gauntlet to Meta, Twitter and TikTok to use its third party-developed tools to gauge negative impacts on users. Local MD Melinda Petrunoff said it’s been private by default for under-16s for more than a year “before this was a discussion”, and advertisers are buying the positive vibe. Now it’s pushing performance and commerce capability – and the likes of Mecca, Pandora, Adidas and Walgreens are converts.

Google's fast-tracked legal battle with the Justice Department has ended faster than anticipated, just three weeks in, with Google putting up a remarkably weak fight, according to some observers. Tactical? Maybe. Whether it decides to appeal a guilty judgement – if given – will be telling. 

CDP uptake may have slowed in the US and Europe in recent years, but the technology remains high on the shopping list for APAC CMOs as they look to better understand their markets through customer analytics and adjust approaches to digital marketing in a post-cookie world where regulators are more focused on issues such as privacy according to a new Forrester report.

The blockbuster Google ads antitrust trial looks likely to end weeks early after the testy judge launched a series of attacks on the search giant’s witnesses yesterday. The inability of the tech giant's legal team – full of the most expensive big name lawyers corporations can buy – to match the Justice Department's case blow for blow left onlookers baffled.

The race is on to crack AI search before brand and publisher rankings slide. The latest version of Google's AI Overviews has Resolution Digital's David Castle optimistic that the SEO wheel won't need to be completely be remade when it lands in Australia within the next six months, with Google already testing AI Overviews ads in the US – but Castle fears deciphering chatbots will prove more difficult. Hotwire CEO Heather Kernahan claims the firm has managed to reverse engineer where AIs are pulling from and what’s influencing them – but it’s early days and only in testing with a handful of clients. Meanwhile, a new generation of search upstarts are eschewing the ad-funded model entirely: Andi Search CEO Angela Hoover suggest ads would lead to her platform's "ultimate destruction". But that’s what Sergey Brin and Larry Page once said. Perhaps they were wrong on the timing.

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff declared the end of 'DIY AI' at the cloud giant’s heaving annual tech conference in San Francisco last week, tapping already frustrated boards, c-suite and operating executives on the complexity, time and budgets to achieve meaningful AI deployments and business improvement. The only beneficiaries so far were “frontier” AI companies, Benioff punched home to media earlier in the week - hundreds of billions, he said, had been invested in these firms with little revolution for business to see versus the hype. Saks Fifth Avenue, Gucci, publisher Wiley, and ANZ’s Fisher & Paykel were among those in early trials for the biggest bet Salesforce has made since its early shift to a SaaS-based cloud model – autonomous, reasoning AI agents. "You don't need to DIY your AI. This is the big fundamental thought,” Benioff said repeatedly over three days. “Our job is to break DIY AI.” The message hit home with customers, say analysts, "But now he needs to deliver."

The blow torch is burning red hot on the bellies of digital giants around the world, and now a new report from the US Federal Trade Commission is turning the dial to maximum, accusing firms including Amazon.com (owner of Twitch), Meta Platforms, YouTube LLC, X, Snap, ByteDance (owner of TikTok), Discord, Reddit, and WhatsApp of posing unique risks to children and teens, and basically lying about the number of children using their platforms. The FTC suggests algorithms are designed to be addictive, and that data abuse is a tool to build market dominance. There is a special shout-out about automated decisioning that will no doubt catch the eye of Australia's Attorney General's Department, given its inclusion in the first tranche of privacy reforms. Indeed, many of the findings of the report reinforce the goal of the Australian Government to implement a social media ban.

"Every company is a software company," as Watts S. Humphrey once famously observed, but this is probably not what he had in mind. As brands bid to wring every ounce of profit from every dollar earned through the efficiency of automated decision-making that understands customers better than they understand themselves, they now face a new and potentially costly risk – penalties in the millions of dollars, and a regulatory regime that makes it easier for the market policemen to write you a ticket. What's more, it's not fully clear how broad the definition of what constitutes automated decision-making will be – which puts almost everyone on notice. Privacy specialists Mi3 spoke with stressed there's much more work to be done than simply writing a new privacy policy. For starters, you have to adhere to it. That might mean costly and complicated business and system process changes that move at the speed of compliance – but in a market powered by the accelerant of generative AI.

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff was itching for a street fight with Microsoft and Open AI at a press conference earlier this morning in San Francisco after his “Dreamforce” conference keynote. He claimed the “third wave of AI” had started with reasoning autonomous agents that blended with humans in meetings across every company function was already delivering substantial gains in early trials with Saks Fifth Avenue, Gucci and publishing firm Wiley. Benioff launched the company’s “Agentforce” this morning – the most important in Salesforce's history, he said – which sets autonomous agents into companies trained for business outcomes, not language processing. 

The digital transformation sprint left everybody with “bland” customer experiences, per Fjord founder turned Accenture Song’s global design and product chief Olof Schybergson. After the Covid hangover, he thinks the next wave is incoming, driven by ‘fluid experiences’ that cut through templated attempts at personalisation, where design leads technology, not vice versa, and creates new products, income streams and business models while delivering actual customer value. He reels off case studies for Fortune 500, beauty firm Shiseido and Saudi Arabia’s flagship airline as needle movers. Sydney-based APAC design and digital products boss Cristiano Dencker was shocked at the high penetration of recommendation engines in Australia when he landed last year. Problem is, he reckons, they are not being properly harnessed and personalisation as a differentiator “is BS” pushed by vendors and agencies. ANZ design lead, Fabio Buresti, thinks local airlines and streaming services are standout examples of ‘cut and paste’ homogeneity when it comes to UX and UI. But he says blue chips like NRMA, Qantas and Tourism Australia are busting to break the mould.

Australia's biggest companies are using AI to do everything from improving advertising targeting and generating news content to enhancing customer experiences in medical imaging and improving brand sustainability by cutting water and electricity costs according to their financial filings. Anyone involved in the preparation of a Board pack for an ASX 50 company understands how carefully curated the choices are about what to include. That's why the prominence of artificial intelligence - and increasingly generative AI - in the latest round of reports from Australia's largest listed businesses makes such interesting reading. Australia's Big Dogs see big gains in operational efficiency,  customer experience, cybersecurity, and productivity, and indeed many are already realising gains. And those advantages are found across the board, in banking, mining, retailing, health, and energy. The only sector holding back on the AI braggadocio was the telco sector. But there are also concerns about ethics and responsible AI, and a focus on equipping staff for the next wave of innovation.

IPG Mediabrands Chief Data & Technology Officer Clay Gill has jumped camps to join supply side platform OpenX as APAC Regional VP for Buyer Development. The move, he said, was due to a fast and material swing away from Demand Side Platforms by agencies and holding companies as they realise SSPs are closer to publisher advertising inventory supply with faster, more transparent visibility, control and reporting of digital inventory. It also will see downward pressure on the transactional fees and taxes many intermediaries feed off in the billions traded daily in digital media globally.