The Future of Intelligence at DXC Technology Starts with Adobe Experience Platform
Data is a valuable resource for companies, and the more integrated, accessible and actionable it becomes, the more value it generates. The ability to sense, understand and respond to data in real time can be a powerful engine for generating dynamic, personalized customer experiences — and artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) have a crucial role to play here.
Companies are exploring AI and ML to varying degrees, but some companies stand out from the pack as they build their own models to meet specific business goals. DXC Technology is one company doing just that. At #122 on the 2019 Fortune 500 list, DXC Technology is a powerhouse of IT solutions and leverages innovation to gain a competitive edge. In many respects, AI and ML are already embedded in the company’s marketing environment.
“We’ve had pockets of ML in these products for many years, especially within Adobe Experience Cloud solutions,” says Chris Marin, director of Digital Marketing at DXC Technology. “For example, our social publishing systems can predict optimal posting times. Complex algorithms optimize advertising bids. We also use lead scoring, propensity models, algorithmic attribution and recommendation systems. The list goes on and on.”
Those pockets of intelligence are all part of a larger vision at DXC Technology — one that aims to connect an entire marketing ecosystem together with intelligent models that can interpret data and act in real time.
“Our end vision is to join relevant systems and centralize data, with models that learn and react as events bubble up across the ecosystem,” Marin says. “The idea is to bring everything together in harmony.”
Unified data sets the stage for AI and ML
Although there is already extensive integration across the DXC marketing ecosystem, more work remains to be done.
“When data streams are unified, we can tap into the true power of AI and ML,” Marin says. “By taking all relevant data sources into account, ML models can better reflect the complexity and interdependent nature of our operating environment.”
Unifying data is a challenge, but the pay-off is enormous. “There are non-trivial challenges around data quality and taxonomy alignment,” says Marin. “But once everything is in a central location, we can create 360-degree views of contacts and accounts — and start to build models that can help with real-time personalization and other important tasks.”
With Adobe Analytics as its system of record for web statistics across digital marketing properties, DXC Technology has gone a long way toward setting the stage for ML. Thanks to a unified dataset schema, the platform organizes and make sense of data across Adobe Experience Platform, so data analysts don’t have to spend time on base layer work. “That saves us from reinventing the wheel with every project,” Marin says.
Start small, stay focused, and keep learning
DXC Technology is bringing its vision to life by building ML models in Data Science Workspace powered by Adobe Sensei — complementing a set of rich reports that Marin and his team already generate in Adobe Experience Platform. Through Data Science Workspace, DXC Technology is focusing on a few narrow use cases, to start. The first case happened to coincide with a major initiative already underway — a website redesign.
“We wanted to see if we could reduce bounce rates on our soon-to-be-launched website,” explains Marin. “Building a random forest model, we pinpointed factors predictive of bounces — things like geography and browser type. Those insights helped us address hotspots on the new website.”
In the future, that model could help drive personalization on the website by watching for indications that a visitor might leave the site and by serving up proactive interactions, such as a chat window, to prevent a bounce.
Given the success of the first use case, Marin and his team decided to try something unconventional. The goal was to route website visitors to the right contacts within DXC Technology, which is challenging, given that the company employs 130,000 people across 70 countries.
“When someone fills out the contact form, we want to send that submission straight to the right department, whether sales, human resources, public relations or IT,” Marin says. “We built an ML model that predicts the best place to route an inquiry based on the form inputs — and then auto-generates executable code to make it happen in real time.”
These small pockets of ML go a long way toward making DXC Technology an innovator in Customer Experience Management (CXM) — an approach that can sense and respond to customers across touchpoints and learn from every interaction to drive continuous improvement.
For other companies eager to start the journey, Marin offers some advice. “Focus on the basics first, especially clean and rich data, then start with simple models from a single data source and go from there,” he says. “There really is no limit to what’s possible with a system as flexible as Data Science Workspace.”
DXC Technology uses Adobe Experience Platform Data Science Workspace powered by Adobe Sensei to apply AI and ML to customer experiences for greater personalization and efficiency. Learn more.
