AI Scales Personalization, Content Operations, and Marketing Agility at Shell

Nakeya Bennett:

Hi guys, I'm Nakeya Bennett here at the ANA Masters of Marketing Conference. Super excited to be here talking all things AI and uncovering insights. And I'm joined here today with Rahul from Shell, who I'm super excited to speak with today. Rahul, would you like to introduce yourself?

Rahul Malhotra:

Hi, I'm Rahul. I'm based in Singapore, but I'm the global head of brand strategy and stewardship for Shell.

Nakeya Bennett:

We're getting a lot of great insights on AI and how AI is being used within the industry and among marketers. How are you leveraging AI in marketing to drive business growth, not just efficiency?

Rahul Malhotra:

We have about 15 to 20 pilots over the last couple of years that have been running and some of them have now expanded into full time sort of usage.

Rahul Malhotra:

Obviously like most companies we started with efficiency and are now finding effectiveness. One example of driving effectiveness is in our loyalty app and payment app in our retail business for example. As the world's largest retailer with 40,000 plus gas pumps worldwide. We also have a very large database of people who use our app for payment and loyalty. The GenAI now is able to customize the offer for individuals on a personalized basis.

Based on their past habits and then learn on what converts and then next time improve on that. So, that's an example of something that drives upselling, cross-selling, loyalty. So, that's, I'm quite excited about that as an easy to understand example and I'm sure there are many others in our book that will give us good returns.

Nakeya Bennett:

In terms of marketing workflow across your business, how are you embedding AI there?

Rahul Malhotra:

So that's a huge opportunity for us because we are a large organization with operations in 40, 50, 60 countries and literally thousands of people creating content on our behalf. Whether it's our own employees, but it's also agencies, it's distributors, it's dealers, it's franchisees, licensees.

Rahul Malhotra:

And so that machine of content creation, insight mining before that and then approvals and then release into media, then measurement again. All of that has very complex processes built over decades. And so that's where digitization over the last couple of years and now AI and now GenAI is going to sort of help us dramatically. And we're doing that already.

Rahul Malhotra:

I mean, the couple of things that we're doing, for example, we have a database of more than a million images which are royalty free, owned by us, but nobody could find anything they needed because nobody ever tags it. That's human, right? But now AI is able to search what you need and that helps drive reuse. So we measure the increase in downloads because that means you're not paying a creative agency to develop the same image.

Rahul Malhotra:

And things like that. So we have lot of improvements in process, whether it's approval. So we have something called machine vision, Shell machine vision, which we took actually from the manufacturing lines. Where you can have a camera looking at quality control if the logo is wrong or something is wrong in the packaged good. And we just say hey, why can't you check artwork with that? So now we have AI checking if somebody's got the wrong logo, wrong font, wrong colors stuff like that.

Rahul Malhotra:

So which frees up the human beings that I have in Poland and Manila and Shanghai to do more meaningful checking. Yeah, you know is this on brand strategy? What about personality? You know, is this going to move the business creatively.

Rahul Malhotra:

So I think it's magic honestly the fact that machines can take over the more mundane work while freeing up humans for more meaningful work.

Nakeya Bennett:

1000% and that's exactly how AI should be used and that's in conversations and in workshops, that's exactly what we're telling people. Use AI for the mundane things, the things that you don't necessarily want to do day to day so that your team can focus on more strategic tasks. And that's where you're going to find the strength.

Nakeya Bennett:

I want to switch gears a little bit and talk about just across the enterprise. How are you ensuring alignment from marketing to technology to finance to prove ROI on your AI investments, how are you guys making sure that the money that you're spending on AI, that it's being spent in the right way and in the right areas?

Rahul Malhotra:

It's honestly been much easier than I thought it would be. Okay. Just because people have been extremely collaborative and have bought into the need to learn on and then bring AI into our day-to-day operations.

Rahul Malhotra:

Okay. So we actually have a cross-functional team. I help drive that. And I have colleagues who head of digital, social, colleagues who head of IT. And we bring it together. We just literally, we gave it a nice fancy name, Brand Operations 2.0, and we kind of said, what do we do as one team together?

Rahul Malhotra:

Created a Microsoft Teams group and we meet virtually and we have one common definition of value and one common definition of ROI. So there's no sort of debate when you're comparing one versus the other. And then there's what we call post investment reviews, which is a very methodical, thorough way of saying, we've implemented it, but then are people actually using it are people getting any value from it?

Rahul Malhotra:

So from a customer point of view internal customers we say is that tool easy to use? Are you using it? And then we also check usage rates and so on so we have a common dashboard across the integrated team IT, digital team, my team and so on. And then we sort of look at it.

Finance gives us the budget's once a year. And we manage it.

Nakeya Bennett:

And you decide how to allocate it. Okay, I like that. So on the other side of that is governance, right? How are you guys, how are you governing AI? Who owns the decision making for what can be used, making sure like platforms and tools are approved. How is that working?

Rahul Malhotra:

So our IT team has a very robust way to assess which vendor we go with. Because of, especially in our industry, all the stuff on obviously cyber security and data privacy and all of the considerations around that. So there is an entire validation process before a vendor is even considered by us.

Rahul Malhotra:

So once that is done, then our commercial machine takes over. And then at the very central level, there is a central AI governance board which looks at AI applications, not just in marketing, but in dozens of other applications, including at our factories and plants and operations and so on supply chain.

Rahul Malhotra:

And what that does is it makes sure that we have obviously procurement efficiencies, but also from a legal point of view, there are certain geographies such as the EU where you need to actually articulate how are you using AI and how are you managing all the risks associated with that. And so that allows us to make sure that we stay ahead of any regulatory challenges and we don't have to backtrack later.

Nakeya Bennett:

In your industry, what does that data privacy, regulatory, what does it look like?

Rahul Malhotra:

Well, actually there's nothing unique about the energy industry in all of those areas versus say FMCG where I come from or other places like that. It's all the same. Honestly, it's the principle.

Rahul Malhotra:

If you have a human being's data, are you protecting it? Yeah. If there's accessibility issues, are you making sure that you're meeting the rules around accessibility? If it's AI, are you being conscious of things like copyright? Are you being conscious of all the other stuff that you can be accused of from stealing other people's ideas to whatever.

Rahul Malhotra:

So it's common sense, honestly, and I think the regulatory rules are there for a reason, and we just buy into that.

Nakeya Bennett:

I like that. Thank you. How is AI changing the way you measure marketing effectiveness?

Rahul Malhotra:

Honestly, it's just giving us data real time and faster as opposed to changing anything else. I think the metrics are the same. Penetration, consumption, loyalty, pricing, stuff like that. So I don't think anything changes. You just get real time feedback. Yeah.

Nakeya Bennett:

And in terms of talent, we know that AI will impact talent over the next several years. Who we hire, what roles we hire for, what skill sets we need on our teams. What's your talent strategy?

Rahul Malhotra:

So my observation is that we need two different types of upskilling. One is around functional skills, around marketing, because as AI takes over mundane things, the humans in our marketing teams need to be able to do better quality brand strategy thinking, sort of just the quality of brand and marketing thinking has to improve now.

Rahul Malhotra:

And that's something that in many companies, they don't teach very well at the entry level. So if you've hired somebody, say, from another company and that person's not trained, then that's something they are now expected to do. Yeah. And you can't hide behind the veneer of operations anymore. So the quality of thinking has to improve. Yeah. Insight mining, data analysis, stuff like that.

Rahul Malhotra:

The second area is really change management leadership influencing because as marketing technology changes and processes change your ability to be not just be receptive to change and be agile and resilient, but also drive change is a skill we need. So we need good project management and things like that. Yeah.

Nakeya Bennett:

What's your favourite thing about AI? What are you most excited about?

Rahul Malhotra:

The speed with which we can go to the market and learn new things. 10 years ago there was this concept called A/B testing when Facebook launched it. Now you can do A to the power of 1,000.

Rahul Malhotra:

I think that's so cool because you can get feedback on ideas very, very, very fast. All of the stuff that I wish I had research budget for, I can now literally test, learn and so for a creative person like me, I have an idea on what I can do with a product. I can learn on it.

Rahul Malhotra:

And within, in a low-cost manner, either through AI in a synthetic audience or in real life by placing it out there on Google or Facebook or Instagram and seeing what happens and two days later you pull it out. Absolutely. And I think that's fascinating.

Nakeya Bennett:

How are you evolving the way your marketing organization operates to support AI?

Rahul Malhotra:

AI will support us. We will not evolve the marketing organization to support AI.

Rahul Malhotra:

But as I said, the marketing organization's expectations are changing. So whenever I talk to my team worldwide, I just say, here are behavioural expectations that I have. Yeah. I want you guys to work better together, more strategically, longer term, and find more waste and more opportunities to go faster to the market.

Rahul Malhotra:

And that's what's changing, given that we have a machine that is able to do some of that work for us.

Nakeya Bennett:

Absolutely. Well, thank you so much for your time. It sounds like Shell is ahead of the curve on a lot of just AI and reporting and uses and use cases and really realizing value from AI. And we appreciate you sharing with us the insights that we're going to get from this interview.

Rahul Malhotra:

Thank you very much for the time.

Nakeya Bennett:

Thank you.