Digital Analytics Association NYC Symposium 2015
Last week I attended my first Digital Analytics Association (DAA) Symposium in New York City. The theme of the Symposium was “Beyond Measure” how we’re using our own and others’ data in ever-more imaginative ways to create new products, experiences and possibilities for consumers and businesses. This theme really resonated with me. In our day to day work as digital analysts we are often very heads down. We focus on implementing, reporting and analyzing digital data, but less time thinking about bigger picture uses of data. The keynote by Dennis Mortensen of x.ai a personal assistant that let’s you schedule meetings via email using artificial intelligence was inspiring. This post will tell Dennis’ story about going from founding two digital analytics companies to founding a company that schedules meetings.
From Web Analytics to Scheduling Meetings?
So how did Dennis Mortensen get beyond web analytics and move into artificial intelligence and create Amy an A.I. based personal assistant that schedules your meetings? He previously founded two digital analytics software companies. First he founded IndexTools a pure play web analytics tool and a competitor of Adobe Analytics (Omniture) and Google Analytics. IndexTools was acquired by Yahoo in 2008 and became Yahoo Analytics. Then he founded Visual Revenue which was a software company that used digital analytics data to optimize online content performance for publishers. Visual Revenue was acquired by Outbrain in 2013. Then in 2014 he finally made the jump out of digital analytics into the business of scheduling meetings when he founded x.ai. Why did Dennis Mortensen a successful digital analytics entrepreneur want to start a business around scheduling meetings?
Buying an iPhone or Selling Cocaine?
During his keynote at the DAA NYC Symposium Dennis told a story about how hard scheduling a meeting can be. He had just moved to New York City in 2008 after Yahoo acquired IndexTools. He was given a BlackBerry by Yahoo. He said he thought to himself oh wow, I sell my company to Yahoo and the gift I get is a Blackberry… So he decided to buy himself an iPhone and deal with the corporate IT policy later. Recall this was before the bring your own device to work days. He headed to the Apple Store and was filling out the paperwork for his shinny new iPhone when he realized that being from Denmark he had no credit history in the United States.
He wasn’t able to buy the iPhone from the Apple Store so he tried Craigslist. He found a guy with an iPhone and setup a meeting to buy it in Chinatown. He showed up late one night after work in a full suit and tie. He hung out on the sketchy street corner where the Craigslist guy told him to meet. He waited for a while and finally someone he thought was his iPhone guy walked up to him. Instead of offering up the iPhone the stranger asked Dennis if he knew where to buy cocaine. Dennis said he thought to himself, do I look like a guy who knows where to buy cocaine.
Dennis didn’t get his iPhone that night in Chinatown. Looking back he said that in this attempt to make a single transaction in a single meeting he thought he had all the data. He said this illustrates just how hard a single interaction between two people can be. If you multiple this problem exponentially you begin to understand all the data required to try and solve the problem of scheduling meetings. He also said that in 2012 he had 1019 meeting and 672 reschedules. That is a problem worth trying to solve.
Amy a Personal Assistant that Never Forgets
Amy, your Artificial Intelligence driven personal assistant schedules meetings for you based on your preferences. There is no website or app, you just cc Amy on your meeting email. Amy then handles all the back and fourth required to setup a meeting. Amy is what Dennis calls “invisible software”. To the person you are trying to schedule the meeting with Amy appears to be human.
When you hire a personal assistant you have to pay them and train them on your preferences. It can been a long and expensive process. Amy goes through your calendar and looks at all your historical meetings. From the historical data, machine learning is applied along with some configuration on your preferences. The beauty of Amy is that she never forgets. As you give her more data you train her to get smarter. For example, Amy runs through your historical calendar and learns that you like to schedule meetings between 10am and noon at Joe’s coffee shop. When setting up future meetings Amy asks if you’d like Joe’s coffee to be a default meeting location and if you’d like 10am to be your preferred meeting time. You tell her yes please.
Dennis explained that one of the challenges of training a computer to understand human interaction, is that humans often say things that are not true. For example you are working late one night to finish a project. At 2am you email your boss asking to move back your meeting tomorrow 1 hour. Well at 2am it is already tomorrow, but what you really mean is the meeting later today. Amy has to be trained to understand the actual intent of this statement. The team at x.ai needs to collect all these possible edge cases. There is a lot of data to understand and then to try to predict the intent in the context of the conversation.
Thinking Beyond Digital Analytics
Dennis Mortensen’s story and his journey hopefully get you thinking about other amazing things that data and analytics can accomplish beyond our day to day digital analytics world. It makes me think about companies like Spotify and Pandora that can take data on my music preferences and play new songs I’ve never heard before that I really like. Or a company like Waze that can take user generated data on traffic (road traffic, not website traffic) and helps me get to my destination as fast as possible, speeding ticket free. I am interested to hear from you. What companies have you come across that are using data in imaginative ways? What are some of your big ideas on using data? Please let me know in the comments or on Twitter @ryanpraski.
Attend a DAA Symposium in a City Near You
When I lived in Boston I was away both times the DAA Symposium came to town, so I was happy to finally attend the DAA NYC Symposium. The DAA Symposium is a great chance to connect with and hear presentations from a different, more local crowd than some of the larger digital analytics conferences. It is also a lot cheaper at $25 for DAA members and $75 for non-members and only a half day commitment. Here is a list of upcoming Symposiums coming to a city near you. Here was the agenda, topics and speaker list for the DAA NYC Symposium:
Opening Keynote: How AI is Changing Our Lives
Dennis Mortensen, X.ai
Changing Culture Through Data: The Effects of Ambience on Action
Collin Olan, Chartbeat
Chaos Theory: How Real-Time Data is Making Analytics and Product Design Obsolete
Beverly May, UX Awards
Data Analytics in the Sports World (or Moneyball Meets Friday Night Lights)
Alex Kirtland, Krossover
Data Democratization via Storytelling
David Milrod, Insight Rocket
Voice & Vision of Visitor: Harnessing Customer Experience Analytics to Drive Results-
Peter Malamas, Answers.com (ForeSee)