By Michael Bürgi • January 26, 2024 • 3 min read •
Ivy Liu
Publicis Groupe may have snagged the headlines yesterday with its massive investment into AI, but it’s far from the only agency that’s putting together an AI-driven platform to help clients unlock new value.
Digiday has learned that independent agency group CourtAvenue — which has invested in social media shops, e-commerce and other burgeoning areas of marketing — has quietly assembled a generative AI-driven platform it has dubbed Genjo (soft G).
A mashup of the phrase “generative journey,” Genjo is the result of CourtAvenue seeking client input as to what they are looking for, then assembling the pieces and expertise to execute on those goals — it attempts to take all the lanes that generative AI travels today and coordinates them to generate even more knowledge, creativity and power. Kenny Tomlin, CourtAvenue’s co-founder and partner, describes it as sort of what Salesforce did for using the cloud for marketing, Genjo does for generative AI.
“We’re creating the rails and the infrastructure to be able to quickly and rapidly roll out AI experiences both internal or external [for clients], and know that it checks the security box, as well as the boxes on brand, on context, on data sources, on dealing with hallucinations,” said Tomlin. “Then it has the backend system that manages all the collection on data and basically informs the insights so it points towards the ROI metrics.”
Perhaps the most unusual goal of Genjo’s application to clients is to better understand intent on the part of customers, explained CourtAvenue’s CTO David Dettmer. CourtAvenue execs declined to talk costs except to say they’ve made a considerable investment.
Genjo “leverages the language power and the knowledge power [of all the forms of generative AI available] and combines it with specific information that an organization has in order to create a digital experience that’s extremely specific for their customers, or prospects, or their users,” said Dettmer who joined CourtAvenue in spring of 2023 from a long stint heading engineering at Rev.
Dettmer noted automaker Kia as an example of where Genjo can shine. Dettmer explained Kia has something in the neighborhood of 20 different models, each one with 10-15 different trims that each have over 200 specifications — which adds up to a lot of variations. “If you walk into a dealership, no one salesperson knows every one of those specifications for every one of those products, but Genjo can not only do that crunching, it can turn it into a communication platform that allows you to have real life conversations with it to figure out what product actually matches” the customer.
To that end, Genjo will launch as a generative AI platform for Kia dealerships starting sometime in the next few weeks, he added. “Genjo leverages that large language model capability, combines it in this particular case with all of Kia’s information around every single vehicle and then on top of that, creates a personality.”
Kia executives were unavailable for comment.
Tomlin also pointed to Genjo’s application in the short term in the e-commerce space as a means of optimizing efforts, while and longer term conversations with clients in healthcare and government are on the horizon. “We will have multiple projects in the space within the next two months, based on active conversations with clients and next steps they’re already wanting to take,” he said.
Dettmer explained the goal with e-commerce clients is threefold: increase conversions, increase the order value and, most importantly, create higher product credibility, which translates to fewer product returns, which he said is a major cost center for a lot of companies.
“One of the biggest reasons why people return products is because they buy it knowing that they can return it,” added Dettmer, “versus getting all the knowledge that they need in order to make the right decision and returning less.”
https://digiday.com/?p=532952
