Assaf Baciu, Co-Founder & President of Persado – Interview Series

Assaf Baciu has nearly two decades of experience shaping enterprise strategy and product direction for market-leading SaaS organizations. As co-founder and President of Persado, he drives the progression and advancements of Persado’s growing product portfolio and oversees the company’s customer onboarding, campaign delivery management, Center of Enablement programs, and technical services.

Persado offers a Motivation AI platform designed to enable personalized communications at scale, encouraging individuals to engage and take action. Several of the world’s largest brands, such as Ally Bank, Dropbox, JPMorgan Chase, Marks & Spencer, and Verizon, use Persado's platform to create highly personalized communications. According to the company, the top 30 Persado customers have collectively generated over $4.25 billion in additional revenue through the use of the platform.

Can you share the story behind the founding of Persado and how your previous experiences influenced its creation?

My co-founder, Alex Vratskides, and I founded Persado 12 years ago. We were at Upstream, and became fascinated with how text message response rates changed with even minor tweaks in the language. Given that the number of characters is limited for SMS, we started thinking about text messages as a mathematical problem that has some finite number of alternative messages, and with the right algorithm we could find the optimal ones. We evaluated some approaches and saw that there is a way…and the rest is history.

Persado’s Motivation AI Platform is highlighted for its ability to personalize marketing content. Can you explain how the platform uses generative AI to understand and leverage customer motivation?

GenAI, on its own, via a foundation model, cannot motivate systematically. It’s a component with a stack of data, machine learning, and a response feedback loop.

Persado has been generating and optimizing language using various approaches for over 10 years. We’ve accumulated a unique dataset from one million A/B tests from messages, across industries, designed to connect with consumers and motivate action at any stage. We leverage this data to finetune a foundation model with Supervised Fine Tuning (SFT) and Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF). We've also adapted a second transformer model to be able to predict message performance based on language parameters. On top of that, our machine learning (ML) algorithms understand—in real time—which language elements resonate with a given individual, then adjust the copy within the communication to that person or segment.

By continuously learning the most effective combination of message elements for each consumer, and dynamically creating the most engaging content, Persado-generated content is able to outperform human and other AI-generated copy 96% of the time.

How does Persado’s Motivation AI Platform differentiate itself from other generative AI tools in terms of driving business results?

Persado is unique on many fronts.

• Purpose-Built – Persado has the only models specifically trained and curated with 10 billion tokens of marketing enterprise communication, coupled with behavioral data.
• Emotionally Intelligent – Our AI is designed to understand and generate language that elicits specific emotional responses from target audiences. This capability is grounded in advanced ML models trained on extensive linguistic and psychological data.
• Precision – Our platform leverages the most powerful model architectures and is trained with statistically valid customer behavior data. We have executed the equivalent of more than 1M A/B tests, which enables us to generate the specific words, phrases, emotions, and stories that drive incremental impact 96% of time.
• Knowledge Graph – Persado developed a representation of key concepts expressed via language and their relationship with the market vertical, type of communications, customer lifecycle journey, and channels. We use advanced NLP techniques to classify, identify, and make use of these concepts (emotions, narratives, structure of message, voice, and more) to generate and personalize better performing messages.
• Predictive – We use predictive analytics to forecast the performance of different messages, empowering marketers to create content with a high probability of success. This predictive power is unique and offers customers a great competitive edge.
  

What are some of the key capabilities that Persado’s AI platform offers to ensure a seamless integration with existing marketing technologies?

Our platform securely integrates with a brand’s existing tech stack to simplify marketing content generation so brands can easily generate the highest-performing digital marketing messaging they need to boost results. We combine custom, non-PII user attributes, and Persado’s award-winning language generation models to more effectively communicate with every customer across channels, at any stage of their journey.

Motivation AI is compatible with over 40 martech solutions to ensure each brand can use their existing martech stack to generate the most relevant, personalized outputs for their customers.

• Content Delivery Platforms – Our processes and tech enablers are designed to streamline the configuration of Persado-generated content in your deployment platform
• Customer Data Platforms – The platform facilitates a regular update of non-PII data with Persado as an input for relevant and personalized content generation
• Analytics Platforms – We provide processes and data flows to seamlessly integrate results and reporting back into the Persado platform, supporting continuous learning and enhancing machine learning capabilities

Can you describe the process of onboarding a new client and how Persado’s AI helps in their campaign management and delivery?

Prior to formal onboarding, Persado ingests all relevant brand voice materials from its clients, such as style guidelines, information on segments, language restrictions, and more. This trains our model on how to write for a business’s particular brand on day one. We hit the ground running with a partnership kickoff to define KPIs and campaign focus areas as well as to educate users on Persado Portal, our centralized platform where all content is generated, approved, and deployed. In addition to hosting weekly check-ins during onboarding, we close out onboarding with an executive business review summarizing performance thus far and next steps.

Our teams help brands get the tone or brand voice correct across channels by grounding all of their outputs in emotion—a key element of language that motivates customers to engage. By leaning into the emotions and narratives most likely to resonate with each customer, brands can create more effective, revenue-driving campaigns while staying true to the brand’s values.

Scalability is one of the biggest ways we’re able to help businesses with their campaigns. Personalization is a key tactic for marketers to reach key audiences and attract new customers. However, true personalization is challenging to achieve at scale. Using Persado’s knowledge base of 1.5 billion real customer interactions, we help enterprises uncover which versions of a message resonate best with their customers, so they can personalize these messages in real-time at each stage of the customer journey.

You’ve worked with top banks and card issuers, driving significant revenue increases. Could you provide specific examples of how Persado’s AI has enhanced marketing performance for these clients?

Yes, while we work with many industries, we have deep experience working with 8 of the 10 largest U.S. banks and 6 of the 7 top credit card issuers. Here are a few examples of impact:

Chase has used Persado to generate and optimize marketing messages for consumers in its Card and Mortgage businesses. They have been using Persado since 2019 to write personalized market copy by analyzing massive datasets of tagged words and phrases. In pilot tests run by Chase, Persado AI-generated ad copy delivered click-through rates up to 450% higher than copy created by humans alone.

Ally Bank uses Persado to enhance cross-sell opportunities. Our Motivation AI platform has helped Ally understand which marketing communications resonate well with their customers across key channels like email and web. By knowing the do’s and don’ts related to targeted conversations with customers, the product marketing and CRM team are able to deliver a better CX and unlock double-digit improvement on KPIs like clicks and actual conversions.

How does Persado’s AI ensure that generated messages remain on-brand and comply with industry regulations, particularly for highly regulated sectors like finance?

As you noted, because sectors like financial services are highly regulated, it can be challenging to implement AI across business functions. In financial services and beyond, brand and legal compliance are a major piece of the AI puzzle. Although compliance and establishing AI governance can seem daunting, whether you’re part of a large enterprise or small business, it shouldn’t be a reason to not implement AI, or at least test it out.

To ensure copy is aligned with best practices and regulations, we ingest compliance and brand guidelines into Persado’s model. Our built-in tools allow for easy compliance and brand review, feedback, and approval before deployment.

We adjust our approach to help financial services brands remain compliant. While we can’t target specific demographics, such as age, for personalized marketing in financial services, we create high-performing narratives or emotional tones that resonate overall. From there, we observe which messages resonate with a bank or card issuer’s different segments.

What are some common challenges businesses face when trying to prove the value of AI, and how does Persado address these challenges?

There is a “opportunity lost” cost of enterprise inaction. A few changes in word choice can mean the difference between a completed transaction, application or enrollment and money being left on the table.

Persado’s impact is easily measured. We integrate with analytics systems and continuously evaluate success via automated A/B tests that show the performance of our more engaging, personalized content, vs what the brand initially created. And, we measure the difference via the conversion funnel. On average, Persado increases content performance 43%, compared to humans alone or another AI solution.

Our purpose-built AI is not only impactful, but easy to measure, which empowers business leaders to make better decisions about the technology investment—and quickly prove its value.

Given the rapid advancements in generative AI, what steps is Persado taking to stay ahead of the curve and maintain its industry leadership?

We’ve been leaders in AI for over a decade; long before it became popular following the launch of ChatGPT. As GenAI curiosity has increased across industries, we’ve been excited to bring and expand our marketing-specific capabilities among large enterprises needing a proven solution for creating high-performing, compliant messages at scale. We do this across channels as well: email, websites, social media, SMS/push notifications, and even IVR.

Our global product and customer success teams are continually listening to our customers—who are among some of the earliest, and most successful adopters of AI–and shaping our roadmap to help them deliver a stellar digital customer experience that also drives increased sales, loan application completions, on-time, payments, or other actions.

For example, we recently released new pre-built audience segments to speed personalized content generation for marketers across financial services, retail, and travel. This feature helps brands increase engagement with specific groups of customers by making it even easier and faster to generate marketing content that will resonate with customers.

What is your vision for the future of marketing and AI?

The possibilities for AI in marketing are only expanding. AI can serve as a helpful asset for marketers to enhance experiences and reach audiences in new, more personalized ways. I think we’ll see marketers shift from expecting (and using) GenAI to improve efficiency and productivity, to also ensuring AI tools deliver measurable increased performance.

Establishing AI governance and standards will also become more important as companies expand AI use cases with an eye on responsible AI. If they’re not careful, brands can risk not being compliant with regulations.

Companies will need to be vigilant and use guardrails to ensure models can be tested to ensure they are free of biases, and that content outputs are accurate, relevant, and on-brand. Applied properly, AI has the potential to turbo-boost marketing performance and customer experiences, which generates the most valuable benefit for businesses: increased revenue.

Thank you for the great interview, readers who wish to learn more should visit Persado.

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