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How A Startup Used ChatGPT To Raise $120 Million And Transform Customer Experience

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SOCi, a leading marketing platform for multi-location brands, announced today a fundraise of $120 million to develop a transformative line of AI-based marketing products and grow into new markets. The venture round is led by JMI Equity. I interviewed SOCi’s CEO and Co-Founder, Afif Khoury, to get his view on how AI has changed the company’s product strategy.

SOCi’s platform enables brands to manage the online presence of multiple locations, infusing in local content while also keeping core elements consistent. Think Jersey Mike’s sub shops, for instance, which is one SOCi customer. Ford is another. They have hundreds or thousands of locations to manage, and they want to feel local while also having the authority and reliability of a national brand. SOCi now has a new partnership with OpenAI, enabling it to infuse the technology behind ChatGPT into its product suite. For instance, if a customer leaves a review of a location on a platform like Yelp, the brand can instantly respond with tailored language.

Our interview follows. It focused on the five approaches I’ve laid out elsewhere in Forbes on how to factor generative AI into your product strategy. The text has been lightly edited for readability:

How is AI going to help SOCi get enterprises’ jobs done better than previous approaches?

AI’s large data models got their first traction in image interpretation, and then they went to recommendation engines like Netflix and now to language models which tell you what the world is thinking. We wanted to figure out what enterprise customer needs could be satisfied by bringing these advances together.

Our customers are national or global brands that transact locally. Digital marketing created a problem for them because it used to be that webpages or social pages made up just 20 or so pages to manage. Then everyone started engaging locally including on social media, so this quickly became thousands or even hundreds of thousands of pages. It’s a huge problem and it met human capacity issues. Fundamentally, companies needed to know what to post, when to do it, and what to change. This is where we chose to deploy AI.

Are customers’ expectations likely to change regarding how they interact with products like yours? How has that impacted your product strategy?

For the end customer, the results from today’s interactions are suboptimal. We search for things locally but it’s hit and miss, some sites have inventory feeds while others don’t, and many reviews don’t get responded to. And, for the companies, it’s really hard to keep up with everything everywhere all the time. AI will greatly enhance the experience for both, giving customers the answers and information they’re looking for to make decisions. That will make their digital journey with a brand much more powerful than it is today.

How did you go about considering how generative AI’s capabilities will intersect with your business?

It used to be hard to build your own data model. We did it ourselves internally. Then software became much more prevalent and so much cheaper to develop. ChatGPT and OpenAI started to really show the power, and the tools were so easy to adopt. It’s written in the structure of prompts, not data tables. So now we could apply an approach that wasn’t available before, then build the next layer on top. We could quickly make ChatGPT the foundation.

How is the customer experience and journey going to change with these new AI-enabled products?

The typical customer journey has many phases, and we use so many different channels in every stage: company websites, social media, Google, reviews, you name it. We wanted to pull all that data into one place, giving companies the tools to manage major channels, and then enabling them to see what is resonating where. If you can interconnect information from Point of Sale, leads, loyalty programs, and other datapoints to see, for instance, what particular searches led to foot traffic, that’s huge. Even better, you can then model recommendations on what a brand should do, down to the local level.

Previously, Google would tell you the top keywords that drive people to your site, but for a multi-location brand that’s not too useful. A top search in one place might be surf boards but in another it’s snow shovels. AI can look at the store level, figuring out how to optimize every field that Google gives you so that you’re now optimally showing up for any customer in any month. It’s the same for responses to reviews, which are sometimes done by local managers inappropriately or not at all. You need to respond in a prompt and brand positive way that drives the customer to the right behavior. With AI, you can do that.

As more companies build generative AI into their product suites, how will you sustain your competitive edge?

Ultimately, software has to solve workflow problems and deliver efficiencies at scale. The companies that work with us have massive size, complex problems, approval processes, compliance – lots of issues. Then layer on top of that all the decision making and execution challenges for these brands, and it’s a great way to separate ourselves from the pack. Just having ChatGPT as the solution might make you stale in a month. You have to layer on top of that, putting the customer in the front and building the whole solution of workflows, experiences, visualization of data, and ROI. AI is the foundation, but our understanding of the customer enables us to deliver the full solution.

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