Partners in Digital Experience: How Blue Fountain Media Combines Artificial Intelligence with Human Insight

The COVID-19 pandemic has reshaped today’s global landscape, disrupting supply chains, altering consumer behaviors and pushing us all further toward a digital-first economy. During this time of uncertainty, leading digital agency Blue Fountain Media has seen increased demand for more personalized and intelligent experiences that can help global businesses stay connected to each of their unique markets and circumstances. 

Blue Fountain Media recently earned the “Most Wins'' award in the 2020 Acquia Partner Awards for their ongoing commitment to creating innovative, data-driven experiences with the Acquia platform for customers such as Avetta, Cathay Bank, and The Empire State Building.Together, Blue Fountain Media and Acquia provide the reliable support and fast performance needed to implement Drupal Cloud solutions and deploy digital experiences across multinational markets as well as the data-driven expertise needed to customize customer experiences to the pulse of a particular market. We recently spoke with Brian Byer, Vice President and General Manager of Blue Fountain Media, to learn more about their mission for helping brands use data and technology to create imaginative, forward-thinking experiences.

Executing Localization Efforts on a Global Scale

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For large global enterprises that serve millions of people across multinational markets, developing a nuanced, complex understanding of the needs of different regions requires both human insight and powerful technology automation at scale. “We believe in combining human understanding through a team of curated local speakers alongside machine learning capabilities to create localized content that feels personal, not like it was just run through Google Translate,” said Brian.

These personalized experiences are fueled by intelligent learning models and require brands to invest in their data collection, curation and labelling efforts to ensure the information fueling the predictive algorithms is in fact correctly classified, in turn producing accurate data sets and models. Blue Fountain Media and their parent company, Pactera EDGE, employ a team of data scientists and engineers who work with clients to process and verify large volumes of high-quality data and use this data to train and inform machine learning algorithms so that it can be applied to solve specific problems. 

“To generate the types of personalized site experiences and content recommendations that these multinational businesses are looking for requires technology like machine learning that supports insights fast and at scale,” said Brian. “Today’s expectations for personalization go beyond just serving up a landing page with winter imagery in December and summer imagery in June. You need to have large swaths of relevant, first-party customer data that can train your AI to predict what customers want on a deeper level,” he explained.

Applying Artificial Intelligence Across All Business Operations

For over a decade now, consumers have heard the promise of AI and machine learning technologies to completely transform how the working world functions and shake up certain industries with everything from self-driving cars to AI-powered butlers. However, the real value of AI lies in its impact to make people’s day-to-day lives easier by making manual tasks and operations far more efficient. “We work with a lot of major CPG companies on turning the consumer data they’re collecting into actionable, strategic insights that they can use to fuel their productivity and demonstrate ROI right away. People are more receptive to embracing things like artificial intelligence and a data-driven approach when they can see immediate impact and improvements beyond just the ‘robots taking over our jobs’ narrative,” said Brian. 

Blue Fountain Media has worked with businesses to construct digitally driven systems that solve problems faster than human judgement can. For instance, a grocery store chain can employ video monitoring technology that can inform workers when a queue at a grocery store is getting too long, so they can open up another line. For major shipping organizations, real-time data can help companies optimize their delivery routes across every point of the process. From reporting supply chain volume in specific warehouses to tracking drivers’ average delivery times based on geo-coordinates and time of day, AI helps companies design more seamless delivery routes and more accurately serve their customers. Rather than just tracking data, we can apply predictive analytics to recommend the most convenient path for future deliveries.

Artificial intelligence and predictive analytics should be seen as valuable for every touchpoint in the customer lifecycle ― not just personalizing your email campaigns. “We’ve seen a rising demand for digital transformation and predictive analytics in spaces like healthcare and life sciences to support things like real-time supply chain monitoring of drug development, patient portals and other research that requires a strong grasp of data quality and data integrity,” said Brian. In spaces like finance, tools like chatbots and conversational interfaces are increasingly growing to improve customer service. To grow your operations quickly and at scale while competing with digital leaders like Amazon that offer exceptionally personalized customer experiences, AI will be a critical tool for every industry to make their experiences as convenient as possible. 

Learn how Acquia and Blue Fountain Media are helping CMOs generate leads while they sleep in our upcoming webinar.