[DECODED] The Power of AI-Enabled Ambition

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[00:00:11] Phillip: From cultural programming to military motions, are our roles in society hard coded, or are they flexible? In the age of AI, we may be able to redefine what a role even means. Today, we venture beyond philosophy and into the engine room, where theory becomes execution, and execution becomes scale. Welcome back to Decoded, a FutureCommerce limited series in partnership with Optimove. I'm Phillip Jackson. And in this episode, we explore the actual tools and cultural dynamics that make positionless marketing possible. With us today is Shai Frank, the SVP of Product and the GM of The Americas at Optimove, someone whose own journey mirrors the evolution of the modern marketer, from drone command in the Israeli Air Force to orchestrating marketing intelligence for some of the world's top brands. And what emerges is a brand new blueprint, one where marketers wield three powers: data, optimization, and creative and use them not just to execute campaigns, but engineer relevance at scale. We'll explore how technology liberates time and talent, and how AI unlocks personalization through decisioning, and why being big headed might just be the highest professional virtue of them all. Together with my co-host, Pini Yaquel, we'll trace how deep cultural principles like initiative, improvisation, and versatility translate into software design, organizational philosophy, and product strategy. This is a five part series. And if Episode 1 was a thesis, and Episodes 2 and 3 were philosophy, today, it's The Playbook. Let's decode it. Pini, we're back.

[00:02:00] Pini: Hey, Phillip. How's it going?

[00:02:02] Phillip: Really good. Really good. Today, really excited to have with us someone you know, someone I think you know very, very well. Shai Frank, I'm just getting to know you. Shai Frank, welcome to Decoded.

[00:02:14] Shai: Hi. Thank you. Thank you, Phillip. Hi, Pini. Great seeing you again. Thank you for having me.

[00:02:20] Phillip: Yeah. It's so great to have you. I'm sure you have a formal title over there at Optimove,

[00:02:30] Shai: Yes. SVP of Product and General Manager of the Americas ever since I moved from Israel to The United States about a year and a half ago.

[00:02:37] Phillip: Good for you.

[00:02:38] Shai: We'll probably talk about that more later.

[00:02:40] Phillip:

[00:02:48] Shai:

[00:02:48] Phillip:

[00:02:55] Pini:

[00:03:02] Phillip: We have a lot to cover today because I know we're actually deep into the series. We're going to talk a little bit about the product because I think a lot of folks have heard a lot about what positionless is and this idea of we're moving into a positionless world. But I think in getting to know you a little bit, Shai, and getting to know more about Optimove's lens on the world and Pini, you and I talking, I think only Optimove and only you, you two, in particular, you've given me this sense that you have a cultural angle and a cultural background and have been able to bring this sort of perspective into the world. So I want to get into that today. But I also want to talk a little bit about your move here, Shai, some of your background. How long you've been in The States now?

[00:03:55] Shai: About a year and a half. In August, it's going be two years.

[00:03:59] Phillip: Very good.

[00:04:00] Shai: Yeah. And I've been with Optimove for six and a half years, give or take. All in all, I've been doing product management almost twenty years. Actually, my first real job as an adult was in product management, which is not very common. But it's usually a role that people move into from other positions. I was fortunate enough to land this job straight after my military service. I was in the Israeli Air Force doing drone operations. And at the time, a lot of aerospace industries, especially in Israel, were investing a lot in this technology, and there weren't a lot of people that knew this stuff. So myself and a few of my friends, as soon as we finished our service, we went to work in these grown up places, while our friends were bartending and DJing and stuff like that. So it wasn't called product management because back then the title didn't really exist in those companies. But in essence, it was product managing, you know, command and control systems for drones. And since then, I moved across different industries.

[00:05:09] Phillip: And how did you two come to know each other?

[00:05:13] Shai: That's a funny story. Pini, you can probably share your angle, but yeah.

[00:05:18] Pini: I was sitting in a bar in New York and all of a sudden this guy showed up. No, I'm kidding. We actually I was living in New York at the time and we actually Shai flew in for the for the process of the job interview. So I remember us having a couple of sliders in Chelsea, in New York City, right next to our office at the time. And yeah, just basically we did a search for somebody to lead our product. And at the time we had the COO managing the operation and him and our HR found Shai, and then that's how we got together.

[00:05:52] Phillip: Wow.

[00:05:53] Shai: So yeah, I saw the post, the job post on LinkedIn. And you know LinkedIn has this feature where it tells you how many degree connections you have in the company that posted this job. And I clicked it, and I saw this lady was the HR lady in The US office and also Pini's executive assistant. And she used to serve with me in the same unit in the army. Her husband used to be my soldier.

[00:06:23] Phillip: Wow.

[00:06:23] Shai: So I reached out to her and said, "Hey, what's up? I saw this post of your job. Do you know Pini?" And he's like, "Yeah, I do." So she probably put my CV at the top of the pile.

[00:06:38] Phillip: {laughter} So just gathering the story here, there's a little bit of serendipity there happening. But so you both served in the military. It's a requirement, right? If you're Israeli. What age do you go into the military?

[00:06:56] Shai: 18, 18 and a half. So after high school, right? The thing you do out of high school.

[00:07:02] Phillip: How long do you serve for?

[00:07:05] Shai: I was an officer, so I stayed for a bit longer. I served for five years. After I finished my service, I had this six months of gap, right, because you finish it, like, a random month in the year. It was March. And my university studies only started in October, so I had these six months. So I went traveling to South America for six months, and then I came back and started studying and then working in this aerospace industries. When I flew into New York to meet Pini, we realized that Pini was an assistant professor, I think, in my class. But he's like, "How come I don't know you?" And I asked him, "Well, which class was it?" And he and he told me, "Well, I probably didn't show up."

[00:08:15] Pini: He was he was my student on paper, but he never came to class, probably working for one of those product worlds.

[00:08:24] Phillip: Pini, what was the class? What was the class you were teaching?

[00:08:27] Pini: I was teaching one of them was in operations research, kind of like inventory management and things like that, and the other one was basically Monte Carlo simulation.

[00:08:40] Phillip: Sure.

[00:08:41] Pini: And he didn't show up to both.

[00:08:45] Shai: {laughter} Yeah. I was up for a test.

[00:08:47] Pini: Yeah. It was the same department in Tel Aviv University where we both went to, and I'm a couple of years older. So yeah. Funny. Small world.

[00:08:59] Phillip: Really small world.

[00:09:00] Pini: Yeah.

[00:09:02] Shai: Israel is a very small, very small country.

[00:09:04] Phillip: Yeah.maybe this is the natural evolution of Optimove and your lens on the world is that you make, you sort of have to forge a lot of good and a lot of sort of generalist tendencies, maybe out of that sort of experience because you have to draw on a lot of skills with very few people. Is that how you would characterize it? Would you say it differently?

[00:09:40] Pini: Yeah. I think when we came up with the notion of positionless marketing, we thought about obviously I'm a basketball buff and you have positions..

[00:09:52] Phillip: Yeah. We talked about it. Right.

[00:09:53] Pini: Yeah. That was kind of like the idea for the name. But apart from the name, like the question is why, why do we believe in this so much? And it got me thinking about kind of like, you know, my history and the company's history. And you always live in this fractals, right? So it's kind of like worlds within worlds, like everything impacts what you do because you're a part of this ecosystem. And I think both of us kind of like being Israelis, it's a kind of a place where it forces you to be more versatile and more positionless, even people in their day to day lives, but especially in the army and especially in startups. Maybe Shai can talk about how was it like for you in the army? Did you feel like why does the Israeli army actually embody that?

[00:10:41] Shai: Yeah. I think this notion of achieving more with less. Right? Small country, small population, small military. How do you achieve more with less? And so it's like a small startup where you don't pigeonhole people into specific positions and you expect them, and I think Pini, you mentioned, you actually reward them for playing a little bit out of their field, right? So you have your position. You have your main profession, but you are expected and rewarded to do more than that, to help with some other stuff. So just because, you know, we cannot afford having 20 different people doing 20 small things, we can afford five.

[00:11:30] Pini: So, yeah. And I think, Shai, we have this word in the army, which is I'm going to, I'm going to translate. It's very much slang, but we say about a good soldier or when they demonstrate good behavior, we say that they were just being big headed. Shai, can you explain what that is?

[00:11:48] Shai: Yeah. I tried well, the funny thing, when I moved to The US, I realized that when I speak Hebrew in Israel, I tend to use a lot of, you know, phrases and idioms and stuff like that. And while my English is solid, it's not as rich with idioms and phrases like my Hebrew. So I use ChatGPT all the time to look for "What's the alternative in English for this Hebrew term."

[00:12:15] Phillip: Oh, wow.

[00:12:16] Shai: Yeah, and it does a pretty good job with that. But big head, I couldn't find a good analogy. Being small headed means that you are not taking any initiative. You're doing what you're being told and no more than that. And being a big head means you're trying to kind of grow outside of your pigeonhole, essentially, and taking more initiative and try to anticipate what might others need or what might the organization need, and I wasn't explicitly told to do so. So, yeah, that's the... I don't know what's the right English equivalent of that.

[00:13:00] Pini: It's like saying like, Phillip, if you're small headed, it's like, you're just an order taker. Right? You told me to do A and B. I'm going to do A and B, but at the same time, it's probably going to be a problem that requires me to also do C and D. So a small headed person will just do A and B, and then you're going to face with a lot of issues later down the line. A big headed person is going to come back to you and say, "Look, you asked for A and B, but actually it's required to do C and D as well. And I need to prep for E. So I've done all of that," and you're like, "Oh my God, that's amazing." This is like really big in our culture. Like you look for people like that. But when, when I started Optimove and started to kind of like read about the criticism of Israeli high-tech was mostly around how Israelis can, they can be like the laboratory of the world and come up with great ideas, but they could never scale those ideas. We could never take companies. We would sell those companies very quickly.

[00:14:00] Phillip: Yeah. I've heard this before. Right.

[00:14:02] Pini: For like $10.20, 50, a $102,100,000,000. You sell it to a very large, typically US company and that's it. And there was a lot of criticism out there that we cannot scale. I mean, Shai, I don't know if you have some thoughts about... I know you do actually.

[00:14:16] Shai: Yeah. Well, I don't have the exact data, but I think directionally, in Israel, you can see a ton of small startups. I think it's like the startup per capita in the world after Silicon Valley or something like that.

[00:14:30] Phillip: Yup.

[00:14:30] Shai: A ton, a ton of small startups, quite a few, very few, big companies, like Israeli controlled big companies. So you've heard about Wix and Checkpoint and Teva, but not a lot of companies that were able to scale up. And we used to say that Israelis are really good at improvising stuff and getting stuff done quick, but we're not that good at scaling to larger operations. And the Americans are better than that. The US is a country of three thirty million people, and you need a system that scales to serve that kind of population, unlike Israel. It's a 10,000,000 people nation. We can get back. And many companies, as they grow up, they bring an American grown up. They start hiring American executives to make order in the chaos. I tell my people there's a reason why Americans were able to land a spaceship on the moon in the 1960s. Israelis could not. You need to have a ten year program, the Gemini program and the Apollo program and all of that. And there's a big chart. Israelis don't do that.

[00:15:54] Phillip: {laughter} You're onto something here is that there's sort of a cultural attitude toward maybe this this positionless, which you've given a name to. Right? So maybe that's maybe maybe you're finding this this word, maybe you're finding this name. I think positionless is one way to say it in the marketing or in business realm. And I think we you've convinced me up to this point that I think the world is becoming more positionless because of all the, you know, I think AI is definitely making the world more positionless. That's for sure. But trying to find more English language words, I'm like, I think there's a level of ambition. So there's ambitious people, but I don't know that they're necessarily strategic in their ambition. I see this overlap of what you're talking about. It's, I don't think that there are culturally attitudes in The United States that line up directly to this mode of thinking that you're talking about. I think that's why it's difficult to have a word for it. We don't actually have very many people and we don't prioritize the same type of strategic futuristic thinking, like planning ahead. And I think also being a team player that doesn't prioritize self and ambition at the expense of other people, which is what it sounds like you're talking about. That's not the cultural attitude in The United States. And it's probably why we lack a word in the English language, in Western society, to describe such a thing. Because that concept I don't think actually exists broadly here. I do think that there's lots of opportunity in organizations if more people behaved that way. And I think that we tend to, and this maybe is an opportunity to talk a little bit about some of the things you've mentioned a lot, I think in some of your keynotes and some of your podcast appearances, I've seen Shai, we've tend to use software to fill in the gaps for deficiencies for people, especially in not just in organizations, like as a marketer or in organizations as leaders in those organizations, but also in the way that we deploy strategies within those organizations. And again, This is what Future Commerce has always been about is that I think that the way that we develop vision, goal and strategy as an organization is a cultural outflow of both of where that business was built, who runs that business, and the attitudes and the customers to whom they serve. And so all of those things are interrelated. They're all contextual. And that's why you have all the problems that you have also in a lot of these businesses is because they become overly generous in their marketing. Become very like they devalue their own product and their own brand over time. They become very fear based in their marketing. So there's a lot of things that you fall into in traps. And then something we talk a lot about too, is we start to look at other organizations and competition as standard bearers. And so we start to copy each other. But we don't actually know that anything they're doing is working either. So we build up these narratives in our own mind. So what I've seen of what you've talked about, Shai, is really refreshing about how to reduce these burdens in the organization and also like maybe gain your own intuition about what works in your own organization. And some of that is gained through tools. Give us a little bit of that. I'd love to hear some of that.

[00:20:37] Shai: Yeah. Look, I think technology has always been an enabler and a way for people to bridge their skill gaps, ever since the dawn of history. You have a skill gap. You want to achieve something. Technology comes to help you. And in order for marketers or people in general to be positionless, you need to be ambitious, like you said. Big headed, as we mentioned before. Because if you don't wanna be, then no matter how much technology you have, you won't be. So you need to be ambitious. You need to have the enabling technology, and probably you need to have the enabling process. Because if your organization stops you or kinda does not reward you or penalize you for taking initiative or stepping outside your boundaries, it will be hard for you to operate at that level. And the consequence would be people, we like to take the path of least resistance. Just like any material. So if it's really hard to get a campaign or a promotion out the door, you have to go through an assembly line of getting IT to pull up a list, and they pass over the list to some creative people. And you wait for merchandising to come up with some promo strategy. And you have a developer to code your HTML templates. And you have an analyst to set up an A/B test and kind of figure out the campaign results, if it's so hard to get something out the door, you will take the path of least resistance. You say, "You know what? I don't know. I'll just take a larger segment. I'll just do a flat discount for everyone because it's really I want to get this thing out the door." In a parallel universe, if it's easier, if you have the technology and you have the ability to operate in a more independent way... You were looking for English equivalents. So before we coined the term positionless, we used to use a lot the term independent. So we want to empower marketers to be positionless, which means independent, enabled, and ambitious, probably, if you wanna look at those three things.

[00:23:00] Pini: Yeah. Sure.

[00:23:00] Shai: I just came up with this. Pini, I don't know if you approve. But if you can be more independent, right, if you have your own access to data, you don't have to wait for anyone to do it. You can gain insights quickly. Right? If you have technology that helps you understand data, if you're not really data savvy, if you have technology that can help you set up experiments without being an analyst, then you're freed up to do more interesting stuff. You can take care of other needs that were lower priority before because your top priority was get this campaign out the door. It was hard enough to do that. If now it's easier, then you're free, your mind is free to take care of lower priority issues, whereas let's personalize this promotion and make sure that we're not over discounting people that might buy anyway or under discounting people that need more incentive. Because, you know, the flat 20% off works on average on average Joe, but population is not average. You have a distribution. So it resonates with probably most people, but there is a long tail of people that might buy with a lesser discount or people that just need a little more incentives. And by not catering for them, you're essentially leaving money on the table or eating into your profit margins. It's hard to come up with a personalized strategy if everything you're doing is hard and takes a long time.

[00:24:38] Phillip: And you're saying because of the amount of friction.

[00:24:42] Pini: Yes.

[00:24:42] Shai: Some of it's in the tools, some of it's in the organization, right?

[00:24:46] Pini: Right.

[00:24:46] Phillip: But I would also propose that some of it is also in the fear of doing something that many people just I think some people lack creativity in the way that they think of and deploy creativity and offers creativity in the channels in which those offers are realized. I would say how to even create segmentation within the organizations. And then generally, the people that are doing that work have to advocate for this sort of change to uninformed decision makers.

[00:25:34] Shai: Right.

[00:25:34] Phillip: So it I think that to your point, I think a lot of people believe that these are tool problems, but I actually see them as much larger than tool problems. It's actually like organizational problems and often communication issues as well.

[00:25:48] Shai: It's probably true, but there's also an aspect of chicken and egg there.

[00:25:54] Phillip: Oh, for sure. Yeah.

[00:25:55] Shai: Yeah. So yeah, So if you think about the history of mankind, so up until, what, ten thousand, twelve thousand years ago

[00:26:05] Pini: That's hyperbolic. That's hyperbolic.

[00:26:08] Shai: Hunters gatherers, right? So every human being or every small family had to grow their own food. And this is the only thing they could do. They used their hands and some simple tools just to survive. So they couldn't deal with anything else outside of searching for food, making sure we survive. And then agriculture came in, and all of a sudden one person or two people can grow food for an entire village. So now there are a lot of people that don't have to worry about growing food, and they can start becoming more creative because they have the time, and we have the brains, apparently.

[00:26:53] Phillip: Mhmm.

[00:26:54] Shai: Become blacksmiths and artists and philosophers, something that couldn't happen without the enabling technology. So if you try to equate that, organizations that are still stuck in processes and rewarding systems that do not allow people to be more independent and move faster, I can see how that prevents them from becoming more creative and try out new things because they're so busy just doing the rudimentary thing and getting the promotion out the door. I have to send this promotion or else I wouldn't sell in the upcoming holiday. So I have to do it. It takes me eight weeks to come up with a brief and audience and the promo and the experiment and the setup and whatever and the performance metrics. So I just do that. But if it takes you two days in an alternative world, now you have a few more weeks left to be more creative. So I think it's a chicken and egg. If you're not trying to be creative, if you don't have the aspirations of achieving more, then you would probably not invest in technology that can help you do that. But once you once you do invest in the tools and technology that enable you to be more independent, to be more creative, to free up some of your mind to be more creative, then you would be more creative just because you have the spare time.

[00:28:35] Phillip: I think the so you're right there. To your point, and I think that's a really great reframing is the organizational will can overcome any of the other challenges as long as everybody had that will. And I've seen that happen, too. I've seen organizational will overcome tool and people challenges as well, like "We're going to find a way." And I think that that's also back to your prior point. That's how you also put a man on the moon. {laughter} So we're going to find a way. It's going to take a long time and a lot of money and sometimes a few disasters, but we're going to figure out how to do it. Just to follow-up on that point, Shai, to your point, did you ever play like civilization? You ever play like something like that?

[00:29:25] Shai: Yeah.

[00:29:25] Phillip: It's like building tech trees, right? We're sort of teching up and I think you see organizations tech up over time. Obviously, civilizations tech up over time. Like you free up resources by building technology and technology allows people to have more varied and diverse and more aspirational pursuits. Who wants to spend their life, you know, just as a blacksmith?

[00:29:48] Pini: I think if we go back in time and think about humanity and like the time of the hunters and gatherers, I agree with everything Shai just said, but I think on top of that, it does make you think about another thing. These guys and girls, they're like very diverse, so probably every person in the tribe could hunt. Every person in the tribe could butcher to a degree or could, I don't know, do a lot of things in camping or a lot of things they needed to. They had like so many skills that we have lost. We don't have those skills. We, as a society, we've become more and more specialized. And sometimes something happens and my kid looks at me and is like, "Dad, can you fix that?" I'm like, "I don't know. I can call a guy." {laughter} That's all I can do. You know? That's what I can do. So I think that now with the question is why? Kind of like, why are we talking now? Why are we in this positionless paradigm shift? I think obviously it's because of a technology jump in GenAI, which basically probably, I believe that because of that ultra intelligence that everybody has at the tip of their fingers, it can allow us again to be a lot more diverse and to be a lot more versatile. So I can very easily, the barrier of entry understand how to do more in camping or to understand how to do more in, I'm not sure I don't want to do any butchering, but whatever, is way lower. So there's this thing that Shai said before that it frees up your time. So you have the time to indulge in other crafts, but also it can help us become again, you know, who we were, right? So people that know a lot of things and do a lot of things, and I think it's time to basically relook at the model that was ultimately created in the industrial revolution. So it's kind of like this assembly line way of doing work. You know, you assemble a piece of work by moving between the stations of specialty, that thing can be relooked, and while it does still carry a lot of merit, I think we can have a little bit less of that and have a model which is a bit more fluid, right? So in each department of specialty, you'll be allowed to do a lot more things than you do today. So the dependency in the department after you or before you is much lower. And you're actually going to call up on them and you're going to call the specialist and look for help in really tasks that require deep knowledge and understanding.

[00:32:29] Phillip: So this is something that is like we're going to transcend into wild theory here. Forgive me. This is something we do a lot on Future Commerce, maybe not Decoded so much because I think it's much more practical, but as conceptually over the large, long scale course of human history, we're talking ten thousand, twelve thousand years now. This hundred year, hundred and fifty, two hundred year aberration of specialization in roles in society is actually a blip on the radar. It's like a very, very, very short period of time where you have a couple hundred years where people have these extremely specialized pursuits in things. Maybe that's the aberration in the large scale time frame of all of human story. We might actually just be going back to where we always were.

[00:33:37] Pini: And we needed that that kind of jump start in or maybe a kick in the butt with this general high-tech, this deep, deep, deep tech to bring us back to who we truly are.

[00:33:52] Phillip: Perhaps. And I read this book some time ago, which we've oft cited. It's called The Sovereign Individual, which makes a case that people are becoming much more individualistic and also like self sufficient over time. In the time in which it was written, I think it's also like making a case that you can't really rely on nation states for your own sovereignty. So the individuals becoming more sovereign unto themselves, which you kind of see playing out too. People can do more as an individual now than they ever could before. You see like smaller and smaller functional organizations, smaller corporations. You can see a lot. You can do a lot more with a lot less. And I see people every day. You can accomplish a whole lot with GenAI, like a whole lot. Right? And give someone a Stripe account and GenAI, and they can do almost anything. And you can launch LLCs. You could do it all. Stripe Atlas and GenAI and like you pretty much that's about it. So I really think it's interesting what you're talking about in the toolkit. Let's get into maybe the toolkit and how Optimove is like realizing this in your organization, because obviously your story is evolving here, too, because you want to empower these individuals to be more self sufficient within the larger scale of the organization. So let's talk a bit about that in terms of like products within a suite. How does that play out? How do you realize that? Because that seems like it's a big shift. I have to also believe that if this is really truly where the world is going, or if this is how we're tracking generally as like as a culture and society, that other shifts will happen in software as well. We're going to see this generally as a big movement. So you guys are kind of getting there. How did you get there? What are you doing in the product to help enable people to be positionless?

[00:35:55] Shai: So I think, Pini started Optimove twelve, thirteen years ago. It started as a data consultancy. So the product was productizing his consultancy work from before. It was all about predictive models and data analysis. That's kind of root of Optimove. And over the years, we've added more and more layers on top of that. So if you think about it, once you have good data and customer insights, what can you do with that? What are the things it unlocks? So over the years, we added this smart orchestration layer on top of it. So now that I have a lot of data and insights and can build a lot of segments, customer segments, really thoughtful segments about people that share specific characteristics or a specific point in time in which there's something to tell them, like a conversation starter. But once you start building all of these segments and assuming there is some campaign or an experience waiting in the end of each segment, people start falling into multiple segments at the same time, and they become eligible to multiple offers or messages or experiences at the same time. Now how do you handle that? So the the easy way of handling that is just put a cap no more than one or two a day or a week. That solves one problem. Solves the spam problem, but it doesn't necessarily solve the relevancy problem. So who said that the first message that you should be receiving is the right one for you or the best one for you. So frequency caps is all about, "Okay, I'm serving you the one or two, then I cap it. That's it." So Optimove has built a smarter decisioning engine, orchestration and decisioning to decide not just on the first, but to decide on the best. So let's say you're eligible to some welcome journey email, and also it happens to be your birthday this week. You also happen to be in a high risk of churn because of who you are and the product that you purchased ten days ago. Now which of these offers should you receive? Let's set a smart decisioning engine around that. So it could be that the same two people eligible to the same three campaigns and experiences, each of them will respond better to a different one because they are different people. So we've built all of these decisioning and priority and exclusion. Some of this is rule based. Some of it is with the help of machine learning over the years. And then we added another layer. Sorry, Pini, you were going to say something?

[00:38:48] Pini: These are I like to call them like, this is the probably the best example of what we call optimization power. Essentially, [00:38:57] when we think about the positionless marketer, we're thinking about three powers. So it's a data power, creative power, and optimization power. And Shai basically kicked it off with the best example of optimization power, which is like air traffic control and how which customer gets which message at what time, especially when there's ample messages in a healthy, mature CRM marketing program. [00:39:23] So Shai, maybe you can push further on the optimization power and what are the examples do we have? But then we can move over to the other two.

[00:39:32] Shai: That's a good point. [00:39:34] Yeah. So air traffic control is exactly that.  [00:39:37]So if you think about what air traffic control does, [00:39:40] you have a million airplanes in the air, and they have to depart and land in different airports at a very specific time and do not collide mid-air. So the analogy is that I don't want to send people conflicting offers that collide mid-air. If your birthday offer is some promotion and your risk of churn offer is a different promotion, and then I send you one email or two emails, they're saying two different things. And I click through, I go to the website, and I get something that says a third thing because I'm now caught up in some random website A/B tests that another tool is running. [00:40:20]

[00:40:20] Phillip: [00:40:20]Totally.

[00:40:21] Shai: [00:40:21]Right? So my customer experience is completely disjointed, and competition is literally a click away. So you want to create better customer experiences because not because it's something that people tell you you should do, because it's a necessity for your business. [00:40:40] If you don't create good customer experiences, then people will leave. So we invested a lot in this decisioning and optimization power over the years. So air traffic control deciding which campaign you should bet should receive based on your eligibilities. But even within a specific campaign, let's say you're running an A/B test. And you mentioned my previous discussions about or interest in generosity. I think it's a good example. So think about organizations know that they don't want to overspend on promotions. So one good way of avoiding that is run tests, run experiment, do a test and learn thing. So let's imagine I'm running a test. Let's do a discount affinity test. I'm taking a population of people, I'm running a couple of options or three options, I gauge the results, and I determine, "Okay, here is a sub segment of people that really need a lot of incentive, and here is a sub segment of people that need medium level of incentive." And then I use these test results to inform my future marketing strategy. But guess what? The world is complex, and there are some brands and some industries have a lot of seasonality in them, and some brands have a lot of changes in their product assortment. Consumer behavior changes because of external forces or just because of their own fatigue. So essentially, running a future marketing strategy based on test results from today, the test results are obsolete as soon as the test is done. It's like skating to where the puck is instead of skating to where the puck is going to be. And technology can help solve that. So at Optimove, we have what we call self optimizing campaigns. Think about such an A/B test, but it's always on. So you have a recurring campaign, let's say your daily promotion or your weekly risk of churn offer, whatever it might be, and you can test three levels of generosity: deep discount, medium discount, low discount, let's say even no discount, just educational content. Four options. If you run these tests continuously and let AI take decisions and optimize, AI can find the subsegment in every instance of this campaign that respond better to every level of generosity. And it might change over time. It could be that during... If you are a customer of a clothing retailer, it could be that you would buy winter apparel full price because you live in a cold place and you really want to get your quality stuff, your quality coat. I moved to The US a year and a half ago. Last winter was my first winter in The US here in New Jersey. And people in my office keep telling me, "Last winter was pretty mild."

[00:44:08] Phillip: Mild.

[00:44:09] Shai: And I'm like, "What are you talking about? It was the worst winter of my life." I'm from Israel.

[00:44:15] Phillip: I'm from Florida, and I know this feeling.

[00:44:19] Shai: So I went on and I bought the most ridiculously expensive coat because I had to. My Middle Eastern blood needed that. But I might buy summer stuff in sales. So my discount affinity changes over time, and it changes based on the different products that I buy. It's not just one thing. A self optimizing campaign, like I described, can put me in the high generosity offer at some point in time and over time gauge my engagement and realize, you know what? You're buying anyway. Let's try to send you some lower stuff. And then I buy anyway. And then a few months go by, and I stop engaging. I stop buying. So it will spike up and will put me again in the higher generosity offer. So this is just one example of optimization power. You essentially put a campaign on autopilot, an A/B test on autopilot, and it optimizes much better than a human being can just run more and more tests all the time. So it does a better job than manual tests. It also frees up the person to do other stuff and be more creative and put another experience to test. If I could only run one test or two tests in a month, now I can do maybe 20. And I just, you know, I learn more, or the organization gains more insights, and the bottom line is improving. I can improve profit margins really well if I react quickly to changes in your affinities, if I don't have to run these tests manually one by one and hire a lot of resources to make it happen. So this is really the optimization power. And then we started talking with with people and told them, "Look. If you start using Optimove this way, you can really scale your marketing and your personalization efforts. You can really grow from a few generic patch and blast campaigns and journeys to dozens or maybe even hundreds of segments and campaigns and journeys and experiences." And some people will say, "Yeah. Exactly. That's what I was always dreaming about doing." But some reactions that we got were, "That's great, but how will I have content to serve hundreds of different journeys? I'm still stuck to produce content. I have to go to an agency or hire my own designers." So that became a bottleneck. Content. And now with AI and generative AI, that bottleneck becomes looser. So people can create more content.

[00:47:14] Phillip: If I could even jump in, I think the bottleneck becomes, well, the bottleneck becomes looser. What I've been seeing in organizations is the organizational adaptation to guidelines at which you can produce massive quantities of content. Now they have to think in the way that they should have been thinking all along. Rather than hiring one person who owns the brand voice or who manages an agency who owns the brand voice, it's like we need to actually have an organizational standard by which we have tools that can generate content for the brand. And that has never really existed within a brand, they always had a person or group an agency, something that represented that for them. And this is such a profound shift. And one thing that I would love to ask you guys on is that what I'm seeing is, unfortunately, for a lot of companies, is that they're having to replicate this kind of framework around content generation or brand voice like brand viable. But they're having to do it because every tool wants them to use the GenAI content creation in their tool. And that's like a multichannel problem. Right? So that's happening all over.

[00:48:47] Shai: And to be fair, it's still hard to use generative AI to produce content that is spot on your brand.

[00:48:56] Phillip: Totally.

[00:48:56] Shai: It's still hard. So we're not suggesting that non designer marketers are now all of a sudden able to just produce massive amounts of content to hydrate their segments and experiences. We're still not there. We're not firing all designers just yet. But there are some mundane tasks that designers hate to do. So if I'm a marketer and I say, "Look, I want to run a four variant A/B test, so I need this product image, exact same product image, to sit on four different backgrounds because I want to test those variants." Background removal and stuff like that is not something fun for designers. They would rather much design a new banner or a new experience or something more creative around that. But if I keep hogging them with requests, "Take this shoe, place it on one background, and put it on another background, then put it on one model's foot, then put it on a different model's foot," it's not a fun job to do. So if designers are good at defining the guardrails, defining the brand guidelines, the tone of voice, the type of imagery, obviously the colors and the typography and all of that, then now they can offload some of these boring stuff to non designer people that are happily taking this on themselves and to move fast because people don't like to wait in line. "Oh, I want to have another A/B test, but my design team tells me, you know, we have to wait until the next sprint or whatever. Wait two weeks because we're backed up." So now with with GenAI, people can do stuff that they couldn't do before. It frees up the design team to do deeper work, more meaningful design work, and it frees up the non design marketing functions to do some design work within guardrails, within the boundaries of what they're allowed to do, to not go completely off brand and damage their reputation. It's a win/win situation. And all of a sudden, by giving marketers this creative power, you allow them to really do this personalization at scale because now they have the data power to come up with their segments and insights on their own. They have the optimization power to put air traffic control and just throw more experiences into the mix without being afraid that they will crossfire and create chaos because there is a framework that manages that. And the last piece that was missing was the content to hydrate that machine.

[00:51:58] Phillip: Yeah.

[00:51:59] Shai: Now you can do that. So by giving you all these three powers, we allow organizations to scale their personalization efforts to a degree that they couldn't do before.

[00:52:09] Pini: I think, Shai, when I think about creative power, while I agree with you that maybe today some of these capabilities of visual assets generation is not necessarily there, we're all seeing how quickly those things change. So in a span of like maybe in four months or six months, it's definitely going to be there where designers are probably going to be designing the brand style guide and all of the guidelines and how things should look. And the whole process should be designed for positionless. So the CRM marketers will have more capabilities to do more than kind of like background changes and certain types of visual assets. They'll even have a completely free rein. In other types, they're going to need deeper specialty. But in a world that I'm seeing, like basically every time you need to produce something, 80% of the times you can do it yourself. You can completely self serve. And then 20% of the time you need to go to the exports. So then there's a lot more types of tasks or campaigns that you can run yourself within this small organic team. It gives you the speed. When you have speed, you have a lot. When you have a lot, you need the optimization power to make sense of it all. And we believe that that can unlock a ton of value and really delight customers. If you think about it, how many brands are actually doing a really, really, really good job at kind of like CRM marketing, retention marketing. I mean, not a ton. I mean, most of them are still basically blasting. So that's how I see it. I think it changes very, very quickly. And we're not far from the day where we'll be able to even produce high quality visual assets.

[00:53:53] Shai: Yeah, I agree. And some of the stuff that we're working on right now on the product engineering side is how can we allow brands to input their brand guidelines and, you know, the brand book so the AI tools are doing a better job in the first place to producing something that's more on brand, both from an image perspective, but also from copywriting. So the the voice and tone, the type of phrases and the style of the text needs to resonate with the brand. So if you have your brand book as a PDF or a Notion file or whatever it might be, just upload it into the system. AI will figure out and then produce the right stuff accordingly. So again, it will get you to 80%, maybe 90%, then people will have to tweak. And if it's a really big thing or if it's a complex task, you will go to the expert. But again, if you can accelerate, to Pini's point, 80% of your tasks, imagine how much value it can unlock. So you can move really fast. You can experiment with more stuff. And over time, just improve your customer experience, improve your top line, your bottom line, because you're moving faster and you're experimenting and optimizing all the time.

[00:55:22] Phillip: Shai, thank you so much. It's been a pleasure. I feel like I've gotten to know you a bit here. Can't wait to get to know you a little bit more. I can't believe that we're closing out this series. It's been so deep and so rich. And thank you so much for coming on Decoded.

[00:55:35] Shai: Thank you for having me. It was a pleasure.

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