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The Agile Brand with Greg Kihlström®: Expert Mode Marketing Technology, AI, & CX
#632: Driving measurable retail growth with Cédric Chereau, EagleAI
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To realize the future America needs. We understand what's needed from us to face each threat head on. We've earned our place in the fight for our nation's future. We are Marines. We were made for this the Agile Brand.
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Welcome to Season seven of the Agile Brand where we discuss the trends and topics marketing marketing leaders need to know, Stay curious, stay agile and join the top enterprise brands and Martech platforms as we explore marketing, technology, AI, e commerce, and whatever's next for the Omnichannel customer experience. Together, we'll discover what it takes to create an agile brand built for today and tomorrow and built for customers, employees and continued business growth. I'm your host Greg Kilstrom, advising Fortune 1000 brands on martech, AI and marketing operations. The Agile Brand Podcast is brought to you by Tech Systems, an industry leader in full stack technology services, talent services and real world application. For more information, go to teksystems.com to make sure you always get the latest episodes, please hit subscribe on the app you listen to podcasts on and leave us a rating so others can find us as well. And now onto the show. Retailers are sitting on a gold mine of data, but with only 20% leveraging it to its full potential, can AI bridge the gap between potential and action and drive measurable revenue growth? Today we're joined by Cedric Chirow, Managing Director at Eagle AI, an industry leader specializing in loyalty, personalized promotions and omnichannel marketing solutions for retail, travel and hospitality brands. With extensive experience and expertise in optimizing marketing spend and driving customer loyalty, Cedric has been at the forefront of leveraging predictive AI to transform data into actionable insights that deliver tangible business growth. Welcome to the show, Cedric. Absolutely good to have you here. Looking forward to talking about this topic with you. Before we dive in though, why don't we start with you telling us a little more about your background and your role at Eagle AI?
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Absolutely. So about my background. I have more than 20 years of experience now, probably more than I thought I had always helping retailers to make the best out of the data that they're collecting essentially from their loyalty program. First, I was a consultant for 15 years helping retailers, mainly grocery retailers by the way, and health and beauty retailers in Europe. I'm from France, as you can probably guess from my accent, but also in North America and Canada and in the US where I helped Walgreens or Target to make the best out of the data that they were collecting through their new what was new at the time loyalty program. And today I am the managing Director of Eagle AI and Eagle AI is the data science department of the EagleEye group. And what EagleEye is doing is creating building completely personalized offers and loyalty from the loyalty ecosystem and also promotions and executing those personalized offers for retailers around the globe. Eagle Eye is operating the loyalty programs of Loblaw in Canada, for instance, Woolworths in Australia or ASDA in the uk. So the most advanced grocery retailers in terms of personalization are using the Eagle Eye platform to operate their Lotte program.
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Great, great. So yeah, you're the right person to talk about this topic with then for sure. So let's dive in here and I want to start by talking about the, you know, just the power of predictive AI in retail. And you know, despite the benefits, and I'm sure you know those listening, they've read plenty of statistics about, you know, the power of data, the power of analytics. But despite those benefits, only 20% of retailers are using data analytics to its fullest potential. Can you describe what are those 80% missing?
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I would say that what is interesting is that they're not doing nothing. The remaining 80%, they're not doing nothing. They're probably just using AI on some pieces of the puzzle. And the problem is if you don't look at those use cases where you want to use AI as an end to end pipeline that you want to cover, it will be as weak as the weakest link in the whole system. So for instance, if you build the best predictive AI to completely personalize offers for customers, but you can only execute a few hundreds in your post system, then you don't need to build the whole very, very smart AI to personalize the offers. And I think that's where the piece is missing is most of the retailers are not looking at this, I wouldn't say problem, but this thing as a global thing and they only do bits and pieces. What is very important, and that's what we've been doing for the last 15 years, is making sure that every time we're using AI we're not slowed down by something at the end in the pipeline. So everything is connected, everything is important and you need to cover the whole thing as an end to end solution to make sure that you can deliver a completely personalized experience for customers.
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Yeah. So approaching that, that end to end, you know, approaching that in an end to end way. What, what are some of the barriers that are getting in the way of, of companies achieving that?
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I think it's a question of prioritization. Retailers, they want to build everything or they want to control everything. I think it's a question of being able to choose the most important battles. It's not make or buy. I think at the end all retailers should make and buy. When you have very strategic topics, very, very important and strategic thing that you want to do as a retailer that then of course you need to build it to protect what you think is the most important for you as a company. But sometimes it's very important to go as quickly as possible and therefore buy the solution that is already available, that has been developed by experts on the matter, on solution that will deliver within a few weeks what you will be able to deliver within a few months or years if you start from scratch. So it's just a question of balance. I think for those retailers what is very important is to understand which pieces are the most important and where they should focus their investment and attention and which other pieces are also very important but little less strategic and maybe they need, just need to move faster. Yeah, and I think that's the most important thing. I think the best retailers are making the right choices in terms of make and buy regarding AI solutions.
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Yeah, that's great to hear because yeah, I think there are a lot of retailers out there that, I mean they understand that, they read all the statistics and all these things. But actually moving from interest to actual adoption is a different thing. One other aspect of this is AI is talked about everywhere. You know, we talk, I make a joke that we talk. We have to talk about it on every episode and sure enough we, we do. You know, AI is as, as we all know, like it's a blanket term for a lot of things. And I think, you know, I think a lot of what's been talked about lately is generative AI, you know, with ChatGPT and, and, and many others. But predictive AI is a very powerful, maybe not as, as new as generative AI, but very powerful thing that's been around for a while and is a game changer for retailers when done well, for those that just kind of say, hey, I want AI in a more broad. How do you differentiate and kind of articulate how predictive AI can benefit as different from generative AI in terms of functionality, outcomes and things like that.
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I think predictive AI is less cool than gen AI. Obviously it's less new, as we just said, but I think it's more important especially when we're talking about personalizing, offers personalizing experiences, personalizing key deals for customers. Because what predictive AI does is helping us to predict how the customer will behave in the future. And because we understand better how the customer will behave, then we can personalize the offer to drive the behavior we seek as retailers. Genai is very cool because it will create content, can be text, it can be pictures, it can be videos. But as a retailer, you're not here to tell, I would say to tell stories. Of course you can personalize the image, of course you can personalize the message that you're sending to customers. But if you personalize the promotion that you're sending to your customer, that's where the money is, that's where the profitability is. That's where you can make a success out of the personalization. So that's why I think predictive AI is more important, even if it's a little less cool than Gen AI. That said, Gen AI is new. Gen AI is bringing something new, different. And it's also making a difference if tomorrow as a retailer, I'm able to send offers that are completely personalized in the parameters of the offer, how many products will I need to buy to get the reward or get the discount that is personalized to me. And if on top of it, I have a picture of that product that I really like that is adapted to what I. I can react to, it's even better. But the basic is in the predictive AI.
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I think, yeah, I think, I mean to build on what you're saying. I mean, as someone in my consulting, I've spent a lot of time thinking about next best action, next best offer, things like that. What I was most excited, I use Genai tools in my daily grind, so to speak. But what I was really excited about was, okay, now we can actually, we know what the next best action is for or offer or whatever from predictive. Now we can actually personalize. You know, we've been talking about personalization for decades, but doing it at scale was also a challenge. So now we can, you know, have propensity or churn or whatever, whatever we're trying to predict matched with personalized content. Like to me that's. That seems like the game changer is that. Would you agree?
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I completely agree. But I think things that have to be done in the right order, you could do Gen AI without predictive AI to personalize. Once again, I'm focused on promotions and loyalty offers and all these things. If you do Genai, you will do something that looks cool, that looks nice, but it's probably a little less efficient than predictive AI. So for me, being able to personalize the parameters of a Coupon might be a little less sexy, but much more effective than being able to adapt the right visual to each customer. But you're right, the combination of the two is the holy grail. I mean, that's how you completely personalize something for a customer.
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Let's talk more about driving revenue and driving revenue through, through these methods. So, you know, studies suggest AI driven personalization can increase revenue by 40%. What specific aspects of personalization make such a dramatic impact possible?
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I think that the impact is huge because now, thanks to AI, we're able to make sure that every offer, every coupon, every personalized challenges, because this is what we're doing. Building personalized challenges for customers are now driving profitability by design. Before, it was very difficult to know exactly how efficient was a promotion. You were more or less shooting in the dark. Let's say that we offer 30% discount on that bottle of soda. It will work for some customers, it will work for some stores, but at the end, we don't really know how well it will work. And sometimes it doesn't work, by the way, but we don't really know. The great thing with predictive AI is that we can really measure very precisely that customers would have spent $5 on that product. His natural behavior, thanks to predictive AI is $5 next month on that soda. But I also understand that he has the ability to spend a little bit more because he has the potential to spend a little more. And that once again is given by the predictive AI will say, well, he spent already a little bit more in the past, so he has this ability to go one step further. If we give that specific customer on that specific product an offer that will say, well, maybe natural behavior is $5, but if you spend $8, then you'll get $1 discount. Then it is incremental by design. And therefore the whole offer is a win win for the, for the customers and the retailer and the brand. By the way, everybody's winning in this situation. And that's how you duplicate completely the performance of those campaigns. Because customers will receive nothing unless they do a little bit more. And by default, they have to do a little bit more. All of them, on all offers, on all coupons, on all brands. And that's how you make sure that you hit the target and that you reach the level of performance that is unheard of. For instance, with the personalized changes that we're operating for Carrefour, for Leclerc in France, for Tesco in the uk, for every dollar that is distributed to customers, As a reward, it will generate at least $7 of incremental sales. And if there's no incremental sales, then there's no reward. So the main risk that they're taking is it will do nothing, but it will cost nothing. At the end, we know that it's working and that it will generate. It is generating incremental sales and for a fraction of the costs. That was the promotion in the old times. I would say.
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Yeah, I mean, to that point and maybe even to oversimplify here, but you know, to me this begs the question of, you know, using the right metrics. Right. So in other words, if our metrics were coupon adoption, right. Then you could be off the charts, but lose, lose a bunch of money, you know, again, to oversimplify things. So, yeah, I mean, so using predictive analytics, if I'm, if I'm hearing correctly, you know that not only are you safeguarding against, you know, potentially, you know, losing, losing profit, but also, you know, the, the only thing to lose is, is, you know, some potential revenue gain. Right?
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Yeah, no, absolutely. Yeah, you're right. I think one of the toughest thing that we're doing right now is to explain how we measure things. And sometimes it can be sophisticated. I wouldn't say complex, but it can be sophisticated. And it's a challenge to explain to the retailer that we're talking to what is our statistical approach, why we're doing things like this? Because we know that the way we measure is more precise than what was done in the past. And it is a challenge and I think we're educating the retail ecosystem in that direction. But it's very important because if we know how to measure things, then we will be able to evaluate much better everything that we're doing together.
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Yeah. And I think this speaks to just the idea of being ready for AI and being, I would even say being ready to be data driven. Right. Because again, in my very simple example, if your goal is to make sure people use coupons, they could be for anything and have some adverse effects in the short term at the very least. But if your goal is to maximize adoption plus revenue and profit, then whole other scenarios. So to be ready to not only be data driven, but also to be AI ready, what advice would you give to an organization to start moving in this direction?
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That's a very good point. That's a very, very good point. I think the magic will work when the AI based solution will leave the control levers in the hand of the retailers or the brands because you can do plenty of things with AI. So exactly what you said, you could say, well, I want to maximize recruitment of new customers on that specific brand or product, or I want to maximize profitability. It's two different things. I'm not saying one is better than the other. It really depends how you want to act on, on your product or your customers, on your stores. And that's for me, that's the right way of building solutions is to make sure that it's not a black box, that the final users. And when I'm saying final users is usually the marketing guys are able to say, well, this month I want to do this with this brand, with this category, I want to push that button a little further. I want to remain in control. But I have a strategy, I know what I want to do. And that tool is helping me to do what I want to do, not doing some dark magic that I don't really understand. And I think that's very important for AI solution provider to understand this. You can have the most advanced AI. If it's not designed to answer business questions, business problems that marketers are facing on a daily basis, it will be very difficult to make them adopt your solution. Yeah, yeah.
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So I'm wondering if you could, in line with that, do you have maybe an example or where, you know, you've seen some of this AI driven. These AI driven marketing strategies lead to some significant roi.
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Well, the best example I have is this personalized changes solution that we developed for our client. Yeah. Grocery retailers around the globe. The idea is to find the right products. Which brands am I the most interested in as a customer and what are the right thresholds? Spending thresholds that will be defined for each customer individually to nudge the customers to do a little bit more for them to reinforce their loyalty. And if I reach certain threshold of spending, then I will get a specific reward. Can be points or it can be cash back or whatever. And it's also completely personalized based on the promotional sensitivity of each customer. I think that's an interesting example of how you want to play this. Because if you want to recruit more customers in that kind of program, then you make the challenge easy for customers. So you stretch my shopping behavior because you're looking for incremental sales, but not too much because you want to maximize the recruitment of new customers in the program. Once you have hooked them in the program, then you might want to action a little bit the profitability lever and increase a little bit. Not too much, but the level of difficulty of the challenge. Meaning that the stretch required to earn a reward will be a little higher. Yeah. And that's how you as once again, as a marketer, you make sure that you define the right level of difficulty to maximize either recruitment or profitability or a good balance between the two. Because on the long run, you want to make sure that the customers will participate, will remain in the program and will continue to spend a little bit more with you, meaning a little bit less with your competitors. And that's precisely, I think, one of the best example of how you can enable retailers to remain completely in control of the promotional initiative. Yeah. You give them the neighbors to activate. Yeah.
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So one more question for you here on this topic. You know, as someone who, you know, AI is in your, your, your realm, you know, again, lots of people talking about it, but this is, this is your focus. What are you paying attention to? You know, what, what do you predict the, you know, as far as trends in this, in this space? Like what, you know, what, what's. What should we look forward to in, you know, 2025?
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Everything. Everything. Because I think we're just at the beginning. It's impressive how small we are for the moment. I think it will become massive. You're absolutely right. I just came back from the NRF in New York. Everybody's talking about AI, but I can bet that in five years it will be even more than this. So it will be everywhere in everything. I think what we're doing in terms of personalizing the offers, the promotions, the loyalty programs, we're just at the beginning, so we're able to completely personalize the parameters of an offer. But you just mentioned it, with Gen AI, we will be able to go 1, 2, 3 step further because we will personalize the picture, we will personalize the message, we will personalize the recipe, we will personalize plenty of things, and that's just for personalization of promotion. But AI, I think will be also here in the voice commerce and all the conversational bots and everything. We're just at the beginning, we can see that it's, it's very cool and we're getting there, but it will be much, much better. Another example, which I think will be a huge revolution also is everything that is linked to supply chain. Being able to predict how many products, how many units you need in the backstory. All these things will, will increase profitability and revenues for retailers. And I think we're just at the beginning.
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Yeah, agreed. Love it. Well, one last question for you. I like to ask everybody here, what do you do to Stay agile in your role and how do you find a way to do it consistently?
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It's a very good question. I love this question. I think what I'm trying to do is to continue to prioritize the different tasks that we have. We need to remain flexible. When I say this, I think staying organized is very important. But if you schedule everything and you over schedule everything then you lose flexibility and you need to remain agile. And I think the other thing is I rely on my incredible team also. So empowering them help me and help us to remain agile because the right ideas will come from everyone and that's how you really remain agile is making sure that you hear all the good ideas from everyone and there's not like the big boss and everybody else execute what he's saying. I think it's very important to empower an amazing team and we have an amazing team that makes our life easier.
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Love it. Yeah, no, I love that. Love that approach. Well, again I'd like to thank Cedric Chirow, managing director at Eagle AI. You can learn more about Cedric and Eagle AI by following the links in the show notes. Thanks again for listening to the Agile brand brought to you by Tech Systems. If you enjoyed the show, please take a minute to subscribe and leave us a rating so that others can find the show as well. You can access more episodes of the show@theagilebrand.com that's theagile brand.com and contact me. If you're interested in consulting or advisory services or are looking for a speaker for your next event, go to www.gregkilstrom.com that's G R E G K I H L S t r o m.com the Agile brand is produced by Missing Link, a Latina owned, strategy driven, creatively fueled producer production co op. From ideation to creation, they craft human connections through intelligent, engaging and informative content. Until next time, stay curious and stay agile.
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The agile ground. With the all new Audi Q3, the answer is always yes. Yes to adventure, yes to escape. Yes to right now. The all new Audi Q3 made for the yes life. The wrongs we must right. The fights we must win. The future we must secure together for our nation. This is what's in front of us. This determines what's next for all of us. We are marines. We were made for this.