“Elementary, my dear Watson”- TEXTIENT

Sankar Nagarajan, Co-Founder and CEO, TEXTIENT talks about his IBM association since being selected in the Global Watson program.

What are the TEXTIENT’s offerings. How is it different from what other players in the market who use AI?

TEXTIENT is a Software as a Service (SaaS) platform for brand, marketing and customer insights. It allows marketers to quickly gain strategic and actionable insights from social media posts about the impact of a marketing action or the competitive differentiation of their brand.

The company specializes in understanding consumer psyche by collating and analyzing unstructured data from the web, social media and online video and deliver insight reports tailored to the needs of its clients. Using these reports, brands can get a better view on attributes such as brand appeal, attractiveness quotient or brand stimuli.

At Textient, we use IBM Watson to develop our own cognitive analytics platform that provides strategic brand and consumer insights in the form of unstructured and text data.  We were one of the first Indian companies to adopt the Watson platform to develop smart solutions for their customers, allowing companies insights for growth strategy and to build emotionally engaging brands, products, services and marketing basis the Voice of Consumers.

What is your association with IBM? How has the IBM technology deployment benefited your company? How have you leveraged Cognitive technology?

We were selected in the Global Watson Program in the year 2015 and with the help of IBM (US), we then built our Cognitive insights platform and launched it in the market in early 2016.  IBM technology has helped us extensively by putting us in the forefront of innovation. The company also helped us to accelerate our product development and market launch. Through With IBM’s Cognitive technology deployment, we have been successful in improving the customer business value. Deriving insights using IBM Watson's cognitive services, we simplified complex machine learning architecture, thereby helping  us develop innovative solutions to solve and also save time.

In order to drive advanced cognitive brand and consumer insights models that predicted insights about what is in the minds and hearts of the consumers, we developed our platform by using a combination of IBM Watson's Natural Language Understanding, classification and personality services APIs, deployed on IBM Cloud. It allows us to quickly gain strategic and actionable insights from social media posts about the impact of a marketing action or the competitive differentiation of any brand. TEXTIENT uses Watson’s Personality Insights API along with other APIs to automatically generate a comprehensive Brand-Essence Report in a matter of minutes. The report reflects dimensions influencing a brand's strength and equity such as dominant brand personalities, emotional and sensory brand experiences, customer engagement and brand credibility.

What are the key trends that you are noticing in India when it comes to companies leveraging AI?

The growing appeal of AI solutions will massively change how consumers interact with brands, it will not only accelerate decision-making, but will also drive customer success manifold times. The adoption of AI technology has already gained marked prominence in the global market and Indian firms, too, are looking into this potential treasure trove of innovative assistance. We believe that the greatest strength of AI in the marketing sector is its ability to adapt quickly to fluid situations where customer behavior is erratic at large.  This trend is forcing companies to revaluate their strategies and put newer plans, ensuring that the consumers are reaping the benefits of technology advancements.

What is the potential in India for cognitive technology adoption?

With companies like IBM infusing the power of cognitive computing with its enterprise-grade AI capabilities, focused on solving deep industry issues in healthcare, education, fintech etc., the potential in India is immense. We are seeing cognitive technologies being leveraged across industries and businesses of different scale - both large and small organisations as a part of their digital transformation journey. Organisations and institutions grappling with shortage of right skills are adopting new business models using cognitive assistants and advisors.

On the other hand, we are also seeing organisations adopt cognitive technologies for specific use cases, applicable to a particular function or business issue. We are working with brands and companies, across sectors and are helping them uncover the trends that are impacting the markets, brands, products, services, lifestyles from Human-generated data.

For instance, we  worked with an MNC in the personal care business which has a strategic emphasis on listening to its voice of consumers . We helped them to leverage the data to gain unprecedented insights and help improve  and formulate new products by decoding the "human-truth" from thousands of consumers that drives the preferences and consumption patterns of specific personal care product category. To gain such a deeper understanding of the human-truth which is all about the mind and heart of the consumers (cognitive aspects) through traditional methods, it would have taken weeks or months with subject matter experts and analysts to decode this, whereas with IBM Watson, TEXTIENT samples thousands of consumer experience feedback from public and private customer data sources in  a matter hours to decipher the personal care product's product success code and the human soul code that can help develop , market  next generation consumer products with a competitive edge.