Saurabh Garg on reshaping and revolutionizing the marketing landscape with AI

The 2024 edition of CMOs’ Charcha – Bengaluru Chapter, on September 25, brought together the country’s top marketing leaders to chart a transformative course for India Inc. This year’s summit revolved around the theme, ‘Revolutionizing Marketing: The Fusion of Data, Creativity, and Technology’.

Among the key highlights of the event was an insightful keynote address by Saurabh Garg, Co-Founder & Chief Business Officer, NoBroker.com, who spoke on ‘Marketing in Times of AI’, offering a comprehensive view of how AI is reshaping the marketing landscape.

Garg began by reflecting on the widespread adoption of AI. He said, “Everybody is talking about AI these days. So, we’ll just try to cover what’s happening, what we are doing at NoBroker.com,” he said. Sharing how AI plays a pivotal role in NoBroker’s operations, he highlighted its application in customer recommendations, whether it’s pricing strategies or finding the ideal locality to live in.

“A lot of things at NoBroker happen with AI. Whether it is recommending the right price, the best locality to live in, or understanding customer needs – AI is actually changing everything, including the way we live and work,” Garg said. He emphasized how AI’s influence is pervasive, from smartphones with advanced features to autonomous cars in the US.

He also stressed on the need for companies to embrace AI fully to remain competitive. He pointed to Intel’s missed opportunity in the AI space compared to Nvidia, stating, “Intel, which was much bigger than Nvidia till almost three years back, missed the entire AI wave. Now, Nvidia is three times the size of Intel.” This underscores the importance of AI as a game-changer across industries.

Garg underscored that every company must have an AI strategy. “If we don’t use AI to make our processes more efficient and faster, we’ll lose,” he warned.

Explaining AI’s role in marketing, Garg emphasized that it extends across the entire marketing funnel, from customer insights to execution. One of NoBroker’s standout AI-driven tools is ConvoZen, which was originally developed to enhance call center efficiency. “We realized that it was a very powerful technology and could be used for more than just call center operations,” he added.

ConvoZen captures insights from conversations across multiple platforms like LinkedIn, email, and calls. “All that insight is filtered by AI and presented to us,” Garg explained. The tool has become so integral that other companies have started adopting it to boost customer satisfaction and other business metrics.

Addressing the unique customer life cycle in the real estate market, Garg shared that AI models at NoBroker are designed to predict customer needs at various stages, whether it’s finding a home, acquiring home loans, or requiring moving services.

“We use AI models to predict when the customer will need a packer, removal services, or rent agreements,” he said. This predictive model helps NoBroker offer relevant services precisely when customers need them, thus increasing the lifetime value of each customer.

Continuing further, Garg also discussed the drastic changes AI has brought to performance marketing, where AI has become far more efficient than manual targeting. “In the past, we focused on whom to target and what creatives to put on. Now, it’s more about just the creative,” he said, adding that AI has optimized targeting to a degree where human intervention is becoming obsolete.

The AI tools at NoBroker continually optimize ad bidding, targeting, and creative variations, drastically improving the Return on Ad Spend (ROAS). “Our ROAS has grown drastically, and AI helps us focus more on the creative rather than who to target,” Garg shared.

Despite AI’s growing role, he emphasized that human insight remains irreplaceable. “AI can help you get a lot of insights, but it’s your human connection that can give the best results,” he maintained. While AI is a powerful tool for improving efficiency and ROI, human intervention is crucial for driving deeper customer understanding.

Garg concluded by urging marketers to embrace AI’s potential while balancing it with human expertise. “AI is changing the world and how everything happens for us. We should maximize its use for our own advantage,” he emphasised.

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