AI Shapes Marketing Discipline and Scale at Broadridge

Jeff Mosier:

Hi, I'm Jeff Mosier. I'm the marketing content lead for the Infosys Knowledge Institute.

Dipti Kachru:

I'm Dipti Kachru. I'm the global chief marketing officer for Broadridge Financial Solutions.

Jeff Mosier:

Where are you guys as far as your AI journey in marketing? Where do y'all stand?

Dipti Kachru:

I would say we're somewhere between crawl and run. Crawl and walk, I should say. We're not running yet, we're not crawling. We've gotten past the crawling phase and we're starting to walk.

Jeff Mosier:

Are you surprised that you're at that stage right now? If you would have thought about it a few years ago when things really kind of got going and everyone was talking about AI, would you think that you'd be more advanced, or where did you expect?

Dipti Kachru:

No, I think we are where we need to be. I think we're where we need to be. And again, AI is not new. AI has been around for a long time. So you think about analytical use of AI, machine learning, predictive AI and now, generative. So I think the generative side is the newer side that we're starting to unlock. But again, how we were using machine learning has been in the system for years.

Jeff Mosier:

Yeah. But also, that generative AI kind of opened up I think a lot of new use cases.

Dipti Kachru:

100%.

Jeff Mosier:

And that's been the difficult part I think for a lot of organizations, to figure out what use cases make the most sense.

Dipti Kachru:

Yeah.

Jeff Mosier:

So how do y'all approach experimentation and figuring out what you think will work, determining whether it does work?

Dipti Kachru:

Yeah. I think the word is experimentation and that's the phase we're in. But I can give you a little context. So we're a technology company. We have a heavy investment in AI and how AI helps solve our clients' challenges and opportunities. So I have the benefit of having an incredible team in-house that lives and breaths this every single day. Not for marketers, but for the industry and financial services at large.

And so we then tap into their capacity to help us build very specific pilots, look at very specific aspects of the marketing workflow to see where we can make some differences, make some changes and start to experiment new things. So we are looking at partners on the outside, but most of what we've been able to deploy effectively has been ingrown.

Jeff Mosier:

How important is that internal collaboration? We've heard a lot about how important it is for the CMO and CIO to have a good relationship and be able to work together to be able to make the best use of it.

Dipti Kachru:

Mission critical.

Jeff Mosier:

Yeah.

Dipti Kachru:

Mission critical. Listen, you can't be a CMO today without being deeply rooted in tech and data. It's just the nature of the CMO's role and the marketer's role today. So that connectivity with the technology team and to be able to tap into their expertise and knowledge is I think priceless.

Jeff Mosier:

What have you seen as being the most value you've gotten from AI so far in marketing?

Dipti Kachru:

So our focus when we've experimented in very different places, the things you would imagine. We're looking at data to pull insights through more effectively. We are doing a lot of content development testing with generative AI. And then our creative teams are exploring how to make the creative process more fulfilling, faster, more effective, more efficient. So we've got a lot of irons in the fire across the board.

I would say the place we've seen the most amount of traction and momentum is content.

Jeff Mosier:

Yeah.

Dipti Kachru:

So we have a couple of tools that now we've deployed at scale across the marketing organization where we are using generative AI to make our process both, like I said, effective and efficient.

Jeff Mosier:

Are there some use cases you've found that are not particularly effective or have disappointed or not really lived up to the expectations?

Dipti Kachru:

Well, I think it's the framing of it. So I'll give you an example. We have a tool internally called the Social Drafter. And we called it Social Drafter for a reason, because we're using generative AI to get us to early drafts, not the final content. So that framing actually changes what you're expecting of the outcome and it helps the marketer also understand what role AI is playing in helping them get better at their jobs. So that's been a very important nuance that we've brought in and that's helped us think differently about efficacy and effectiveness.

Jeff Mosier:

Setting expectations, not assuming that AI is this-

Dipti Kachru:

Magical. That's right, it's not the magic wand.

Jeff Mosier:

Yeah.

Dipti Kachru:

And there are days you want the magic wand and there are days you don't want a magic wand. But I think it's about, again, for me it's been about efficiency and effectiveness. Really understanding where does it add value, where does it facilitate better outcomes for us as a marketing organization, and then as an enterprise, and then deploy those use cases. Because otherwise, it's really easy to get distracted because there's a lot of bright, shiny objects around.

Jeff Mosier:

Yeah. And I think a lot of people will say that efficiency is the easiest first benefits they get from this. Where do you see the benefits coming from in the future, and how do you think those benefits might evolve as you get new tools, new use cases and new ways to approach AI?

Dipti Kachru:

Yeah. Hey, listen, I look at it as another spark provider when you look at it beyond efficiency. You think about the creative process, the ideation process. It just gives you more stimuli to respond to, react to, to evaluate as a marketer. Whether you're a designer looking at concept work, whether you are a writer starting to think about creative ways of framing something, I think generative AI gives you the early input, which is much broader than what you would probably do if you were just working on it yourself.

I use it a lot for the same thing, it's an idea generation opportunity sometimes. Based on the questions you're asking, based on the angles you're trying to take, it makes the process faster. I don't need to talk to five people, I feel like I can have five people talk to me within one interface at my pace and my time. And that's a little bit of what I'm trying to bring across the marketing organization, is to embrace it, and experiment, and test and learn. And then we'll start to find use cases, like I said, that we then deploy at scale broadly.

Jeff Mosier:

I love that approach, that makes so much sense to me. And that feels like how I interact with AI as well a lot of times. So tell me about responsible AI and risk. How do y'all approach that? Because obviously, that's a big concern.

Dipti Kachru:

It is.

Jeff Mosier:

In financial services, that's very important.

Dipti Kachru:

It is. And that's one of the reasons where most of our solutions have been ingrown, quite honestly. Because the process of onboarding an agency to then take on our data is harder and it's longer, it's more risk fraught. So for us, A, like I said, because we're a technology company and we have our own ecosystem of data and our LLMs, that's where we start. So we're called Broadridge, we have BroadGPT within our ecosystem so we can operate, and play and build within that, just like we're doing for our clients. That's step one of risk. Data accuracy, data safety.

Then there's I think the other side of reputational risk from a hallucination perspective and that's why we call things drafters. We don't call them, "Here's your answer," we call it a draft. The accountability still sits with the marketer or the product person, whoever's managing the program, whether it's marketing or not, to take on the responsibility of validation.

And then last, as a brand person I'll say to you I worry about differentiation in the marketplace. There's a lot of conversation at the ANA this week about content and thought leadership as a differentiation in driving consideration in the B2B purchase cycle. Now you think about how AI, the press of a button, the amount of proliferation of content that you're going to start to see at scale, so that'll be tremendous. So how do you preserve your voice? How do you break through? How do you bring on differentiation? I think that's where there's still going to be work that needs to be done, which is more human-led, to find the angles and find the difference.

Jeff Mosier:

I wonder if that's an opportunity though. If there is a wall of content out there that all looks the same and it's not differentiated, that gives you an opportunity to differentiate yourself.

Dipti Kachru:

100%, 100%. But listen, at the end of the day, as marketers and I see this as a CMO, there's a lot of pressure in driving efficiency.

Jeff Mosier:

Yeah.

Dipti Kachru:

So the attractiveness of what AI can do for you as part of that creative process, the agility it can give you, the speed it can give you is a very attractive proposition. And at the same time, you don't want to compromise on just the process of listening, and learning, and connecting dots, and being able to develop platforms, and stories and narratives that are truly authentic. I think we're going to have to be disciplined about that on the journey.

Jeff Mosier:

Yeah, it sounds like there's a real fine balance to strike there and it sounds like you're going to need a lot of processes and structures in place to figure out how do you navigate that. How do you go about thinking about creating that structure in place to make sure you take full advantage of AI, but not let it become something that's just only efficiency, but saps this spark or creativity?

Dipti Kachru:

Yeah. Listen, it's a work in progress.

Jeff Mosier:

Yeah.

Dipti Kachru:

And that's why we're in the, what I'd said the crawl-walk process, not the run process. Because if you just expose yourself to the tools that exist, you want to start running. We've been very intentional about saying, "Let's define where we need to solve certain use cases. What are the roadblocks of efficiency? What are the roadblocks on effectiveness sometimes?" So the flip side of that is empowering junior marketers with the insight that now is at their fingertips with a safe content hub which is powered by AI.

So we're working through it. I don't think we've got the right answer yet, but like I said, it's about steady investment. It's about very active experimentation. And it's about a culture of being open-minded about the art of the possible. And I think that's really, really important because if you walk in either saying, "This is going to completely change the way we do things," or, "I don't want to deal with it because it's fraught with risk," you're probably likely to lose on both sides of that equation. So you've got to be able to just have the open mind, listen, learn, watch.

That's one of the reasons that I encourage our teams to watch what our partners are doing or our peers are doing in the industry. And it's been great. It's been great that the industry itself, the marketing community, is very open about talking about what they've learned, what they're discovering, what's worked, what hasn't worked, versus being more closed door about it.

Jeff Mosier:

How much change management do you see being needed to navigate this new hybrid human-AI world that we're all going to live in?

Dipti Kachru:

Listen, from my perspective, I think change is just a part of our ecosystem. And I think about the marketer I was 20 years ago and the marketer I am now. We talked about the role of technology and data in enabling better marketing outcomes. So I think as marketers, if we're just open-minded about the fact that the ecosystem is going to continue to change and what we need to do and how we operate is going to continue to evolve. That just makes you more ready for what AI can do today versus what AI can do tomorrow.

When you think about we're talking about generative, I'm excited about what agentic can do for us.

Jeff Mosier:

Yeah.

Dipti Kachru:

This is what makes it exciting, at least from my perspective.

Jeff Mosier:

What are your thoughts on agentic? That's something, again, is really futuristic sounding right now, but it may not be that far off. What's your view on that and where do you think that might be able to help in the future?

Dipti Kachru:

For us at Broadridge in marketing, we're in very early days, but I've seen the art of the possible in what we're doing for our clients. We have an operation console that has agentic capabilities now that make it easy for operation leaders to understand what's going on in their workflows, which is fantastic. I've seen what Salesforce is doing with agentic across the sales and marketing and CRM ecosystem. So there's a lot of use cases out there that I'm pretty eager to get my hands on. But we're, again, we're taking it one step at a time.

Jeff Mosier:

You haven't gotten your hands on it quite yet.

Dipti Kachru:

Not yet, not yet, but we're getting pretty close.

Jeff Mosier:

How soon?

Dipti Kachru:

Listen, I get it. It's certainly something next on our roadmap.

Jeff Mosier:

Sure.

Dipti Kachru:

So for us at Broadridge, our fiscal begins July so we're getting into a new fiscal year. And I've told my team, we had a goal of having three AI tools, new AI tools deployed this past year, we did that. As we go into next year, I want three more deployed as part of ... Again, we're not saying it has to be done for efficiency, or it has to be done for insights, or it has to be done for the creative process. We're saying let's experiment, let's find things that scale and then let's deploy them at stage.

Jeff Mosier:

And it sounds like to be able to get to that point, you have to be willing to try out some tools, have them fail-

Dipti Kachru:

100%, yeah.

Jeff Mosier:

... and be able to move on to get to that three that are actually deployed.

Dipti Kachru:

That's right, that's right.

Jeff Mosier:

Tell me a little bit about how you approach skills and talent and having that part of the mission be prepared for AI?

Dipti Kachru:

Yeah. I'll take it back to, again, one of the core values and cultural principles we have as a marketing organization is intellectual curiosity. And that intellectual curiosity is opening yourselves up to seeing what's going on outside of your day job and your to-do list. So that's the starting point of embracing things that are new and that can change and seeing what's possible.

I think the second is more, I would say, structured training. So we as an organization have deployed structured training around AI across all functions. Not just technology, not just the data scientists, not just the product folks, but every single person in Broadridge is being trained. This is a big training knowledge base around AI, which the marketers are part of as well. And then there's very specific use cases that we're pulling them into. AI for marketing, what our data science and operations teams are doing, what our creative teams are doing to test their ways with their small unit. So there's a lot of I would say structured and then unstructured, go dabble, look, learn, share that's happening as we speak.

Jeff Mosier:

Do you feel like you have the approach and structure in place to keep that going? Because obviously, the kind of training, the kind of skills that are needed are going to be changing quickly.

Dipti Kachru:

Yeah.

Jeff Mosier:

Sometimes by the month, it seems like.

Dipti Kachru:

Yeah. Listen, I won't say we're on the cutting-edge of it. I think we're somewhere in the middle and there's work to be done.

Jeff Mosier:

Fantastic. Thank you so much.

Dipti Kachru:

Yeah, not at all.

Jeff Mosier:

It was a pleasure.

Dipti Kachru:

Likewise.