The Future Of Personalized Engagement Is Augmented Intelligence With Greg Segall
AI is becoming more prevalent in the business world. One place where we are seeing this happen is customer engagement and customer service, where augmented intelligence is being used to create personalized solutions. Join Chad Burmeister as he interviews the founder and CEO of Alyce, Greg Segall. Greg and Chad discuss the emergence of AI and other technologies that make the creation of personalized solutions for customer engagement a snap. Tune in and listen to their insights on the future of AI.
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The Future Of Personalized Engagement Is Augmented Intelligence With Greg Segall
I've got Greg Segall with me. Greg is the Founder and CEO of Alyce.com. It's a cool platform. “Always be personal.” That couldn't be truer in this highly-crowded marketplace that we're working in. Greg, welcome to the show.
Thanks very much. It's nice to be here.
It's great to have you. It's a beautiful day in the world here in Colorado, as it looks like it is in your world as well. Greg, where are you located?
Here in Boston. It's about 87 degrees, continuing the heat wave.
Let's dig in. Tell us a little bit about Alyce before we get into knowing who you are. Tell us about what you're working on. What does Alyce do?
Alyce is a platform that helps and allows you to use gifting, swag and direct mail to invest into relationships all throughout the life cycle of your sales, customer and employee journeys as well. You think about sending gifts at the right place at the right time. Swag, direct mail, all those things are important as you're thinking about the investment you're making into those relationships. Alyce fully automates that and makes it feel one-to-one in every single step of that case. You can embed that into any systems of record automated through those systems and have that also triggered one-to-one by any sales reps, marketers or HR folks as well.
When you invest money into an individual, it changes the psychology of how you're interacting with them.
I think of every case that I've gotten something in the mail that's personalized, CSU Golf Balls. I met with the salesperson. I gave him 30, 45-minute sales call, a bottle of wine. That was pretty fabulous and yet people don't use swag to the level of personalization. Some companies will say, “Let me send you something that's generic with my logo on it.” That's not the same as sending something that's personal.
It's hard to scale that too when you think about what Alyce does and you think about the impetus for Alyce. It was much more about you don't care about what the thing is. You care about the action that's happening on the other side of it. You care about the evolution of the relationship. If you send me golf balls or wine, you struck out with me. I'm a baseball guy and I'm not a big drinker when it comes down to it. It's the same thing with the amount of cookies and brownies that I also get, where I'm a crazy fitness guy. I don't put a piece of junk food in my body.
Alyce flips that dynamic where it allows the person to get something that is seemingly personal to them but they can exchange for anything else on this marketplace that we've curated around all these different interests or they can donate to a charity of their choice. It puts the power in their hands, instead of it being something where I have to pick the perfect golf balls for you every single time. If that doesn't hit 8 out of 10 times, you wasted 80% of your money.
Now that we started with the end in mind of what your company is doing, I like to rewind the tape and go back to when you're younger and running around the neighborhood that you lived in. Where did you grow up? What were your passions? I like to connect the dots for our audience because there are a lot of people who are thinking of, "Maybe I'm not in the right lane. How do I get into the right lane in life?”
I grew up in Connecticut. I had three big passions when I was younger. The guitar was one of them. I started playing guitar at an early age. I don't even like to say how long I've been playing the guitar but that's been a big thing. I wanted to be a rock star when I was younger but that didn't plan out as well as I was hoping. I was big into art. I ended up going into art school at Boston University. Also, I fell in love with computers and computer science. I was a huge baseball guy. I played on all the varsity teams and was a pitcher growing up. It helped to be left-handed as you can imagine. That was it but I was always enamored by the business aspect of things. Even back when I was in middle school, I was running a little baseball card trading ring or I'd buy low, sell high and was the center point for buying and selling all the baseball cards at the time.
I started my first company when I was nineteen, while I was in college, to help me pay for college. That became my first company I ran for a little over a decade. I sold that company. I was looking for a business that I could start after having my daughter that was going to be much more about building impact in the world. When I looked at Alyce and came up the whole idea for that, I had this concept of, “Could I build a business model around these things?” What I called the three pillars of giving. One was, “Could I make giving between people this truly authentic experience where you're bringing people together to get to know each other better and understand each other more, especially in business, which is so wrought with inauthenticity?”
Augmented Intelligence: When people say AI, most people are really referring to something like machine learning, where you are actually using data to actually help to evolve something.
The second pillar of giving was giving back to those in need. How do you also make the donation aspect came in from day one? We've donated a huge amount of hundreds of thousands of dollars back to charity as Alyce. How do you give back to the planet? Also wrought with the corporate spend with gifting, rewards, swag, meals, trips, tickets and events is a huge amount of waste. How do we make that experience something where you're saving the planet and building sustainability into everything that you do? That was where the impetus of Alyce came from. The business model that I wrote down on a whiteboard years ago is still the business model that carries through.
In this world, there are so many emails, LinkedIn connections, automated everything. The more it moves towards automation, if you can be personal, you standout above everybody else. It's all about creating the personal connections. No doubt about it. How does AI play a role in what you're doing? How does that fit into realm?
There are a few different models in terms of how Alyce uses AI. There’s also something here to be understood. AI, in most cases, is not true AI. Most people are referring to machine learning, how are you using data to help to evolve something. In our specific case, there’s one key thing to understand in terms of what we believe is the difference between being personal versus personalized. Personalized is when you’re customizing towards a persona. Meaning, you generally know the behaviors and the patterns of an individual and you’re trying to match towards that. It’s like Netflix telling you what you might be interested in. It’s like Amazon saying, “You might be interested in this,” because of your past purchase behaviors that are there. That’s personalized.
Even to the point of personalized being, “Hi, first name, I see you’re with company X and are looking to do Y,” which is what people making fun of that and that’s what most of your spam is. Being personal is when you are investing time in trying to create emotional resonance with somebody. You can use data to help with that but at the end of the day, you have to invest time and/or money into that. It’s super easy. People can tell within fractions of a second whether somebody invested time in somebody else.
As you mentioned with emails, LinkedIn messages, text messages, name any digital channels that are out there, those are all wrought with, “I’m going to sequence and cadence the living crap out of you.” Everyone knows whether you’re in a sequence or not. It’s like, “Do you want to A, B or C? We’re eaten by a tiger,” whatever the cheesy sales things are. It’s like, “What’s the kitchen’s next thing? Show me that you care about me as a human being and how we drive that forward.” If you take that as the context, everything we’re building at Alyce is to figure out how do you get to that level of showing somebody you’re investing time and money into the person. That’s it.
Alyce has this whole model where it can help find out what a person is interested in by going out to the public web and being able to find all those interests of that person and then using that as a way to surface up what’s the right way and right thing to invest into this individual person. It takes a lot of that time that you’d normally be spending on those things and then putting it towards the ability to invest in that person that’s there. We use that in different capacities in terms of what to invest in the person, when to invest in the person, those types of things as well. As we continue to grow the business, there are going to be a lot of other places we’re already investing in that machine learning and AI is going to be playing a big part of that story of how do you get to a one-to-one level with individual people as well.
AI is not true AI; you might call it augmented intelligence instead of automated intelligence.
Over years of selling and building teams of over 100 people, when you try to train someone on the simplicity of going to their LinkedIn profile, Facebook page or Instagram and seeing like, “I got back from Telluride.” Someone could have easily gone to my Facebook profile that I believe is open and say, “Look at those cool pictures. It looks like you were fishing with your dad. Let me send you a fly-fishing hook.” As simple as that is showing me that you listened or you did your research. Not just to connect with me as a CEO but as a person. That’s super powerful that it serves that up automatically.
To your point, AI ranges a broad range. Machine learning and being an intelligent AI, we’re a few decades away from that but certainly, the first inklings of AI of what we’re talking about here are hugely powerful. I talked to one of the early VPs at IBM Watson. He talked about the power of this and I said, “What do you think in terms of comparing it to the internet? How much more powerful will AI be?” He goes, “That’s the wrong comparison. Compare it to electricity. It will be 5 to 10 times more powerful than electricity.” I was like, “You got to be kidding me.” It’s such a huge impact that the internet and electricity had. AI is going to have even more of an impact.
We’ll take that and run with it. Electricity was a foundational platform to build off that allowed so many other innovations to take place. AI is the evolution from automating activities to automating intelligence. If people are doing it right, automating intelligence is so powerful because it's getting into the human psyche. It's using all the different components to help to drive decisions inside a business. Once it gets to the scary part, it will be when it's driving emotional decisions. We're a long way away from that but that is going to come. It's going to be this place where people are already playing around with. How does AI affect the psyche of the person you're buying with that's there? The stage we're at where people are calling it AI is much more around the decision-making around intent but eventually, it will get to decision-making around emotion as the trends continue to play on.
If you think of any psychologist, if you’ve ever been to one in your life, what do they ask? It’s, “How does that make you feel when your wife says something like that? How does that make you feel, Tracy, when Chad says that?” Feelings are how people make decisions. It is generally not analytics. Getting the arms around that feeling part of the equation, you’re right. It can move. I do think if you look at Facebook Advertising, LinkedIn, Google and everything that’s going on in the world, that’s why this bill is so interesting. On both sides, you can understand, “I’m a business. I discovered how to move people on their emotions.” Private citizens are like, “You’re ringing the dog whistle here.” It’s an interesting time. It will require some level of ethics oversight, a chief ethics officer in companies to pay attention to this stuff.
One of our chief privacy officer’s friends is the head of that Facebook so he took that over. His name is Pedro. It’s super interesting talking with him about what are the ethics? How do you build trust inside of people? That’s all about the governance of data. It’s also about how you govern AI too, because AI can get to the creepy side very quickly. It’s the same thing when we’re dealing with gifting with people. There’s a talk about feelings. When you invest money into an individual, it changes the psychology of how you’re interacting with them. Email is super transactional. Maybe you can eke out some feelings inside of there but it’s nowhere near as powerful as a video. Then you go from the video to the investment of dollars into somebody.
It totally changes the psychology because you go immediately to the memories and the feeling that something made to you. You connect that to the actual experience you’re having with a person. There’s a lot of evolution to happen as you think about that as time plays on. That’s there. That’s the exciting piece of this as you go forward, which is reps try and do that. How much are machines going to be able to take over a lot of that as time goes on? Look at the trends. People are buying software without talking to people. The whole product line growth movement, as you look at this but people are also getting more in tune with the brand and understanding what that is. You’ve got to be able to create that feeling and emotion. How can you do that at a higher level, especially when you’re dealing with marketing organizations? They’re going to have to own more of that relational emotion as time goes on.
Augmented Intelligence: Automating intelligence is so powerful because it's getting into the human psyche and using all the different components to help drive decisions inside a business.
Layer that with virtual assistants. That’s what we’re helping a lot of customers set up. Instead of hiring Josh Smith, you can create Josh Smith. Josh does the outreach and then one person manages Josh, Marissa, Alyssa and five other virtual assistants until that sales rep’s calendar is full. Email, social outreach, voicemails. You can have one person pull the strings of five virtual assistants. Five VAs would cost you 1/5 or 1/10 of the cost of a person. Layer on personalization but personal outreach and mapping that. Look out the world. You can be more personal with the use of virtual assistance, which is an interesting combo. Without AI, does your product exist? Probably yes but it would require a lot more manual research by people, I would think. Talk to us about that.
We do have people that are behind the research because you can’t be 99.8% accurate. If you get that 0.2% wrong, then there’s automatic distrust. We still have humans behind it, which is why I say, “True AI is not true AI.” You might call it augmented intelligence instead of automated intelligence as you think about it, even with ScaleX.ai. Think about X.ai. They had 3 or 400 people that were reading every email and they’re responding back to train the system because it’s all about the critical mass of data that you can use to train machine learning, the algorithms and the models behind it to be able to act like a human being that’s sitting behind that as well.
To answer it, yes. Our platform would exist because part of the thing that we solve is the logistical nightmare of having to be able to facilitate gifts, swag, direct mail through the process of these organizations. I was talking with a potential customer and they’re like, “We do this whole thing manually.” They’ve got 5,000 reps. I’m saying, “How are you doing this manually? It’s mind-boggling.” This space is very nascent and it’s coming up. There’s a lot of motion that's happening inside of it because people realize you can be programmatic while being personal but there’s a balance to that as you continue to scale this.
When you think about this as a big chunk of your budget, events and marketing budgets specifically, even when you get into the sales side of things, there’s a lot to be done there. We already can exist without the AI and the machine learning stuff that’s sitting behind there. It’s the data that helps you be better at doing what you do because you’re trying to help optimize the relationships between these people and your customer’s dollars at the end of the day there.
One of our services is an AI powered warm introductions platform. You pick 500 accounts. We’ll get you about on average 65 warm introductions of the 500 people. That might be a good first pass but then what about the 435 that you didn’t get? You could do a voicemail drop. You could do an email and a cadence. If you’re going for the personalized approach and these are accounts that could be $50,000, $100,000, $2 million, then you don’t want to burn them out with a sequence or cadence. They’re going to opt out and you’re no longer legally allowed to send them an email anymore.
I have to believe 58% to 75% from the math I looked at over the last couple of years are opted out. That’s why when reps would come on my team and their BDRs, they're like, “Chad, I can’t even use email because 60% of the datasets are gone. It's non-usable. That’s why LinkedIn became so popular first so quickly because I can legally reach out to you again.” Pretty soon, that channel is going to be crumpled on. It’s already saturated.
I’ve been staying away from LinkedIn on purpose. The amount of spam that I had in there was asinine. I had my executive assistant going through LinkedIn for me to clear it out. I didn’t even have to deal with it because it’s stressful. People are connecting and you’re like, “Why are you trying to connect with me?” Then two seconds later, you have the pitch sitting in your inbox. There are LinkedIn bots where they’re sending the repeated things after that. I’m like, “For God’s sakes, LinkedIn, give me a spam button.” You’re right about the opt-out. You need to be creating a mechanism to opt-in. That is everything that we’re doing at Alyce. It’s always giving somebody the power of choice in terms of how they want to interact and then they can decide to opt-in or not. Once they opt-in, then they’re marketable. That’s the beauty of what Alyce is able to allow you to do.
People realize that you can be programmatic while being personal, but there's a balance to that as you continue to scale this.
I'm eager to continue the dialogue with our head of channels and partnerships. When I discovered tools like yours and approached like yours, chapter 21 in our book was the AI automation that helps you do with warm introductions. I left the book open while I went on a cruise ship because I found it was so powerful and amazing and then we ended up purchasing that technology a year and a half after we wrote the book called AI for Sales. If I could add a chapter 22, it would be on what you're doing at Alyce. It's obvious. Thinking about years into the future, even a level above Alyce, based on the niche that you're focused on solving, how do you see AI playing a role in sales years from now?
There’s a lot of different ways to tackle that. One is, in general, how is AI going to affect sales? Let alone our niche because in reality, it’s not a niche. It’s fundamentally the approach that everyone is going to end up taking through this. Yes, it’s gifting, swag and direct mail but there are so many other channels and so many other things that we’re tying into. As you look at some of the vision and some of the things that we’re looking at instituting, it’s going to affect every single way that you do this. Whether it’s us or anything else, the approach that everyone’s taking is going to have to go from quantity to quality. If you keep up the quantity game, you’re going to end up opting out of your entire list. That’s a cliff. Everybody’s literally running towards and it’s scary as hell when you deal with that.
It’s fine that 60% of your list is opted out but what are you doing to reengage them and bring them back? That’s going to come through a major head over the next 2 to 3 years as companies realize that’s the approach. The progressive companies, the new game meaning is the quality game, the ones that are putting the time and effort in saying, “Instead of 1,000 emails going off in a sequence, I’m going to send off ten good emails and get four responses where they’re much more highly engaged because I took the time.” It’s much better than like, “I'm maybe in the right place at the right time to be able to take those actions that’s there.”
The AI piece where that’s going to come in from my perspective goes back to what I said before. I believe that it’s going to go from automating activities. The AI is going to be around the activities and about the win, the what to the why and the how pieces later on, which is going to get much more into the AI around emotion that’s there. I had an advisor I was talking with who was saying, “My premonition over the next 3 to 5 years is that BDRs are gone.” It doesn’t play any sense in any deals anymore as it goes because that role is going to be taken up by computers. We’re going to know exactly who to target, what their intent is, how to engage them and how to drive their emotional purchase intent. Match with that is the whole thing where software is going to be purchased without needing to talk to a sales rep, except for heavy enterprise stuff that maybe becomes less of a portion in there.
Augmented Intelligence: The data helps you be better at doing what you do because you're trying to help optimize the relationships between these people and your customer's dollars at the end of the day.
You see all these bigger companies that are going much more along those lines. It’s going to be much more around that, which is how do you make every one of those human interactions exponentially more effective as you specifically go and use AI to drive that and make you be able to scale yourself like you’re doing with VAs. Eventually, systems will be able to do that without VAs. You won’t even need people involved in that process as it goes.
I'm halfway through reading Halftime. It talked about efficiency versus effectiveness in the half of your life. Efficiency is doing things right, to your point, 1,000 emails a month, calls and voicemails. Doing the right things, which is that shift between your first half of life and the second half of life, from success to significance. The word you chose, effectiveness, is 100% right on point. When BDRs have doubled again and tools have given the BDRs the ability to go from 30 activities a day to 200, you've got double and then 5X on activities. You have to go from efficiency to effectiveness. Being personal is part of that journey.
Greg, it's an amazing conversation. We've been talking to Greg Segall, the Founder and CEO of Alyce.com. Like the shirt says, “Always be personal.” It's the new mantra for the new generation and what we need to do, especially when it comes to outbound prospecting. It's a pleasure talking with you, Greg. Thanks for being on the show.
You as well, Chad. Thank you so much. I appreciate it.
We'll catch you on the next episode. See you next time.
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About Greg Segall
Greg loves building businesses, e-commerce, design/UX, programming, guitar, baseball and anything involving technology. He typically hurt himself playing recreational sports because he needs to win.
He is the founder and CEO of Alyce - www.alyce.com. Alyce customers leverage human-enhanced artificial intelligence (AI) for gifting superpowers to send the perfect gift to their most important prospects, customers or employees, selected from over 30,000 products on the Alyce marketplace.
Alyce works like a psychic digital gift concierge, selecting the most relevant gift for up to thousands of gifts recipients at a time, each delivered personally to drive one-to-one engagement. The recipient is never disappointed because they can accept the gift, trade it in for something else, or instantly donate the cash value to a charity of their choosing.
Alyce creates measurable human-to-human engagement and ROI-focused customer delight through its modern, AI-powered corporate gifting platform. Businesses use Alyce to catalyze their marketing and sales funnel, and engage their best prospects and customers. Alyce aggregates corporate gifting spend to maximize marketing measurability, sales productivity and business results. Alyce makes gift giving simple, personal and measurable.
Prior to Alyce, he was the founder and CEO of One Pica (now Astound Commerce), a global e-commerce agency. He sold One Pica in December 2012. He worked on some of the largest commerce and supply chain infrastructures in the world including 3M and Scholastic. He has invested, scaled and aided the acquisitions of several smaller retailers, taking them from six digit revenue to hundreds of million of dollars within a few years.
