Customer Engagement Platform: AI, Data, and SAP Emarsys for CMOs

Chad Watt: Welcome to the Infosys Knowledge Institute Podcast, where business leaders share what they've learned on their technology journey. I'm Chad Watt, Infosys Knowledge Institute researcher and writer. Today I'm speaking with Joanna Milliken, CEO of SAP Emarsys. SAP is of course the ERP software Giant. SAP Emarsys the Omni-Channel customer engagement platform for SAP CX, or customer experience. Welcome, Joanna.

Joanna Milliken: Thank you for having me today.

Chad Watt: Joanna, you have built a career at the intersection of marketing and technology. You've played key roles at ExactTarget, Salesforce, SAP, and SAP Emarsys. What drew you to this field?

Joanna Milliken: I was there at the dawn of digital marketing, and I was generally a problem solver. And I was a traditional marketer, and I was doing collateral, and packing press kits, and selling things to franchisees where we were taking orders and filling out forms. And so when we first saw those first immersions of digital channels and opportunities, I just happened to be in the right place at the right time, and I was in marketing and I had technology to solve for marketers and just kind of went from there, and I've been really in the industry ever since. I was very fascinated also, I think by just how marketers can connect with humans and how we get that relationship between us and a brand, and a little bit of that psychology, and the creativity, and all of those things really, really drew me to the industry overall.

Chad Watt: Joanna, when I think of SAP, I think first of supply chain and enterprise resource planning. How does marketing technology and SAP Emarsys fit within that?

Joanna Milliken: Most people, if they know, the big mammoth, SAP, fifth-largest software company in the world, you think about ERP and you think about supply chain management. But really SAP has expanded that strategy and has evolved it more broadly. It's not just so much about operations and efficiency. I think they've learned that over time it's about connecting and engaging at every touch point. And so you see that even with brands under the domain like SuccessFactors, that's all about employee engagement. And then the other pillar now that's been added is CX. And of course marketing is a huge portion of that CX experience. And so when you think about it, then Emarsys really becomes that engagement layer, as you said, for the SAP ecosystem and our technology so that no matter if someone's engaging with an employee, a supplier, a customer, however they define it, we can put engagement anywhere that brand interacts across the whole supply chain for that brand.

Joanna Milliken: For the marketer, I think what's super valuable about if you're using SAP and Emarsys together is that we're able to take all that back office operational data that is often sitting there and not actionable and turn that into insights in ways that brands can actually leverage that more seamlessly. So a really simple, like an obvious sort of an example, if you will, is when you can do a very simply find out something that's out of stock or in stock. And so I can get a message on my application that says, "This product you were searching for is in stock at a nearby store." And I can help drive that foot traffic. In a typical scenario, that's a lot of orchestration, that's a lot of systems talking together, that's a lot of data going back and forth, and it's often not in real time. And so what you can do then when you're bringing that back office data together, combined with the marketing, you're able to create these really real time personalized experiences that I think other companies wouldn't be able to do as easily.

Chad Watt: From a customer's perspective, expectations have never been higher, and from a product perspective, data has never been more abundant, you know this information. CMOs should be doing just great, right?

Joanna Milliken: Yeah, and I think in many cases CMOs are. I think we should give them some credit in some cases for trying to keep up with the never-ending expectations and ever-increasing for consumers and customers. So we marketers have added new channels pretty quickly, we're seeing them consume these new channels. WhatsApp, we just released Mobile Wallet. Every time there's a new channel that emerges, marketers are taking advantage of that. And they're also, I think, starting to do things with segmentation and other areas a lot better. However, I think when it comes to personalization and orchestration and connecting those dots really across the whole organization end-to-end, our marketers really own the experience. They're expected to, whether it happens almost in services, or in a store, or online, people look to marketing for that experience, and so I think that there's still obviously never-ending work to do there. Marketers are using more technology than ever. There's so much in their technology stack, and each one of those pieces of technology creates data and needs data. And so then here we go, every time they add something, there's a new data source to connect, and it just becomes this never-ending challenge to harness and collect that data, and then how they action on it becomes even more challenging.

Chad Watt: Customer expectations are always kind of at the high watermark for the most delightful experience they've had. How do CMOs take all this data that's coming and keep matching or exceeding that?

Joanna Milliken: Yeah, I think the first thing is to recognize exactly what you just said, Chad, which is our expectation is based upon the last great experience that we had, and that doesn't mean it was with your brand. So if I had this amazing experience picking up something right at a retail store, that's my next greatest experience, even if I check into a hotel because it's like, "Oh, if they can do that, why can't they do that?" And so I think that acknowledgement from marketers that you're not just competing in your own industry, you're competing with me and all my collective experiences. And in order then to do that and to understand me, and then where I am, where I might be going, the things that are important to me, then that becomes where they have to use that data.

Joanna Milliken: The other thing I think that they can do to improve that is to make sure that they're doing that in that trusted way, they're getting the right opt-in, pulling that data together in a way that I know you're using it but it's a mutual value exchange. And so then you're kind of bringing the consumer along with you, and I think you can be more effective than if you're just taking all this data and just blasting it everywhere and putting in, "Dear first name." Into your marketing content and things like that. So I think it's just continuing to challenge yourself and really learning how to use the technology that you have. You have marketing automation tools, you have great CDP tools, you can do these things, and then you work with wonderful teams like we have at Emarsys, and we're going to help you as well.

Chad Watt: On this podcast, we talk a lot about data and how business leaders think about data. Joanna, can you give me your current favorite metaphor about data?

Joanna Milliken: Yeah, I think as a marketer, again, I'm coming at it from our customers' angles, when I talk to customers like Ferrara or Milton Brown or Wella, the thing that I think about with them and what we talk about is data should be like a referee. You know the rules, you've got the guardrails, you know the guidelines, and everyone on the field should know those rules, but you should not know that the referee is there. And so what I mean by that is that you need to be trusting, you need to be transparent about when you're using data, but also you don't want to know that I'm using all this data constantly. You don't want to know that the marketer's there, you don't want to be marketed to, and so I think that's what I mean when you don't want to put some of that data in people's faces, you want to use it for insights and things that are going to be relevant. And so that's why, yeah, the best thing I could think of was really like a referee.

Chad Watt: Joanna, what special considerations come into play when we think about data applied in marketing?

Joanna Milliken: I think the thing that's super important to remember is that data then becomes customer facing and it goes out into the wild and you can make mistakes with it, and marketers become concerned about that. You don't want to, whether it's something as simple as serving up the wrong product recommendation because using different data, or you're putting context with me that doesn't make sense. Because they're using data for targeting segmentation and personalization, and so the quality and the permission of that data has to come first. And then when it does come back to things like AI, I'm a supporter of things like the EU AI Act. Companies and people want those guardrails, they want some guidance of what's going to be okay and what's not as they all start to experiment. So I think with marketing, when it hits the consumer and the end result with the brand hits me, it needs to be working effectively and be correct. Yeah, that's one of the things I think about the most with marketers, is trust.

Chad Watt: We're kind of from a corporate perspective coming out of the sandbox phase with generative AI, people have experimented with it, and now we're moving to scale. Can you describe your experience in moving from experimenting with generative AI to using it at scale in the business?

Joanna Milliken: Yeah, absolutely, so like you said, it's about inching our way in some cases into it and evolving from that sandbox or playground. And we've seen people inch in by adopting certain individual features, if you will. So something as simple as a new way of doing product recommendations and product finder, a new generative AI to create things like subject lines, or create dynamic content, and merge and marry content based upon different rules in a very generative way. And so I've seen a lot of marketers, I would say dabble, do feature specific things, look at it from first and foremost about efficiency and all of that, and then we see more progressive marketers starting, to your point, doing this at scale, where what that means is that they're doing it in an automated way where they also have quality checks built in so that they're seeding email lists, or simulating websites, and things like that so they can, again, do the quality assurance on the outcome of that generative AI scale. So I think I see it, like I said, in bite sized pieces, and then some companies doing it end to end throughout their whole customer journey from deciding the data, deciding the content, next best action, all that good stuff.

Chad Watt: I want to ask you a couple of questions related to some recent research we did here at the Knowledge Institute around CMOs. Our CMO radar report found that marketers said that data privacy or security was the top external AI risk related to marketing. How do you view the challenge of data as a critical resource but also as a major kind of risk factor how do you manage that?

Joanna Milliken: That is a little bit what I was talking about in terms of they have this inherent risk about what it means when it reaches the external world because it can be very damaging to the brand if they don't do that. But this is where I really see, and one of the things that we're lucky, I think with, and really one of the reasons I even came to Emarsys and SAP was because of that work relationship, not just with the data and all the access to data that marketers would have, but how IT and the business work together. And so this to me is a really, really important partnership. And we need to, in marketing, really lean on those experts in security and departments of ethics and all these things that we have so we can do our job and we don't have to worry as much about that. We can go be creative and do things in a smart way and an intelligent way, and our business is helping protect us. So I see that partnership being really important to that.

Chad Watt: Much of the early benefits of AI in marketing has been on the efficiency side is what we're seeing from CMO radar. How do you see technology progressing toward efforts to boost sales and not just reduce cost or make processes run faster?

Joanna Milliken: Marketers need the time and the space to be creative, and they really have been mired in a lot of these tasks, but it does come back to driving revenue. And so if we're using AI in that smart way to put the right product in front of the right customer, at the right time, and give them that context that they need, we see that driving conversions and driving sales. So there's been tons of reports right over the years on the value of personalization. So it will create more efficiency, but that's so we can put more things in front of the customers, think about creativity, and really drive growth. And I think as it gets more evolved too, and it doesn't become about just changing the work, it becomes about predicting the next thing that customers are going to do and helping marketers think about what to do next. I think that becomes then really powerful in terms of driving the top line.

Chad Watt: We've talked about AI, we've talked about generative AI, let's talk about AI agents. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that every cloud platform that hasn't yet announced it, and every SaaS provider that hasn't yet announced one will launch an AI agent within a year or so. How do you view the potential of Agentic AI?

Joanna Milliken: I'm excited about it, I think like everybody, because we all see some of the benefit. From a marketer's perspective, I think the way that we're thinking about agentic is for the non-marketer actually. So if you think about what I was saying at the beginning about we can put engagement throughout an entire brand, so if you think about someone who's doing talent acquisition, they're not a marketer, but they're driving campaigns, they're creating relationships, and they want to do marketing but we don't want to tell them, or teach them, or train them to log in to a full instance of an Emarsys and create automated campaigns. But with agentic, they can prompt. Would serve them up things like your hiring pipeline is lower in this region, and it would give them recommendations, and then they can just create commands that create these campaigns and engage their end customer, and they don't necessarily know it.

Joanna Milliken: And so to me, that's how then we create that consistent experience really unified across the entire business. And so when we think about that, that really empowers then the traditional marketer to extend what they're doing and it marries back to the true platform. So you're catching all that data, all that content, but you're doing it in your context, and so I think that becomes really interesting for us from an agentic. Think about too, if you bring on board these huge brands that have hundreds of marketers using platforms, it's a great way for them to learn, to get started, that kind of thing.

Chad Watt: Thanks so much, Joanna. Is there anything I missed? Any topics you want to revisit or expand on?

Joanna Milliken: Emarsys serves all kinds of customers. We have things from utilities to travel and industry, and we're particularly strong though in retail and consumer packaged goods. And consumer packaged goods is so interesting because it's both B2B, B2C, It incorporates so much of a comprehensive marketing plan. And we dropped some new research today on CP, and I think it'd be really beneficial for companies to check that out. Even if you're not in that industry, you can see how the patterns, the tendencies, the need for data, data enrichment, coordination, collaboration, and so there's a lot of good insight in that research for you to check out.

Chad Watt: Joanna, thank you for your time today. It's great to hear about your work.

Joanna Milliken: Thank you so much, Chad.

Chad Watt: This podcast is presented by Infosys in partnership with MIT Technology Review. Visit our enterprise AI Hub at technologyreview.com to learn more. And be sure to follow us wherever you get your podcasts. You can find more details in our show notes and transcripts at Infosys.com/iki in our podcast section. Thanks to our producers, Christine Calhoun and Yulia De Bari. Dode Bigley is our audio technician. I'm Chad Watt with the Infosys Knowledge Institute signing off. Until next time, keep learning and keep sharing.