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AI-Driven Marketing and Autonomous Vehicles: Applied Intuition's Innovations, Strategic Integrations, and Future Insights

• Evan Kirstel

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Ever wondered how AI is reshaping the marketing landscape and revolutionizing the autonomous vehicle industry? Join us for a captivating discussion with the CMO of Applied Intuition Surbhi Agarwal, as she takes us through her extraordinary career journey from developing the first Xbox One chip to spearheading marketing for AI-driven vehicle software. Get ready to uncover the secrets behind her impactful work at Google Cloud and how generative AI tools like OpenAI and Jasper are setting new standards in content creation and campaign strategies. Surbhi shares her insights on Applied Intuition's groundbreaking Copilot product, designed to simulate diverse driving conditions and enhance vehicle safety, all while accelerating the time to market.

In another engaging segment, explore the meticulous processes behind product development, marketing, and customer engagement in the tech world. We delve into the sophisticated go-to-market strategies that involve deep collaboration with select customers to tailor messaging and position products effectively. Learn about the shift towards personalized customer journeys and the game-changing role of advanced tools like Sixth Sense and Sprout Social in driving AI-powered marketing campaigns. Discover how technology is scaling operations, boosting brand impressions, and enabling global audience engagement. Tune in to understand how a unified brand message, strategic partnerships, and innovative tools are revolutionizing marketing in the tech industry.

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Speaker 1:

Hey everyone, fascinating guest. Today we're not only talking tech with the CMO of Implied Intuition, talking AI-driven autonomous vehicles, but the future of AI and Gen AI in areas like marketing Serbi. How are you?

Speaker 2:

I'm great. Thank you, Evan, for having me.

Speaker 1:

Well, thanks for being here Really intrigued by not only your mission and vision, but the work you're doing and your team is doing. Maybe start with introductions a little bit about your biography and background and journey to your current role at Applied Intuition.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, currently I'm the CMO of Applied Intuition. My background is electrical engineer. I started my journey as an engineer. I worked in small startups as well as large enterprises. I've designed the first Xbox One chip, the iPad chip, as well as the Snapdragon for Qualcomm. So I'm really proud of the project that I did earlier in my career. And then I shifted towards the business side, more onto the product development product management, did my MBA and got more into corporate strategy, general management and product marketing. Some of my notable roles were at Google Cloud, where I created a category on AutoML. It's a known thing in the industry. It's a category, not just a product that we launched and really proud of the work that the team has done there as well. So that's about me a little bit and, yeah, looking forward to being here.

Speaker 1:

Fantastic, well, wonderful background. I also started as an electrical engineer and here I am on social media, so you never know where engineering will send you. Before we dive into the world of autonomous driving software, maybe talk about your perspective right in the heart of Silicon Valley and how it's impacting AI, how it's impacting not just our business and personal life, but our professional life, maybe even in the world of marketing these days 100%.

Speaker 2:

I think AI has been around for 20 plus years. Right, as business leaders, we have been using AI, whether for doing predictive analytics or, you know, going deeper into the data side of things. But now, with generative AI since 2023, it's like the whole world has turned upside down. I specifically see that in the marketing organization that AI is used not just by marketers from creating content, but also doing analytics and going deeper into creating campaigns and so forth. At my previous company where I was the CM of yellowai, we were actually creating chatbots and conversational platforms which were actually used on consumer side. Like, whether it's an airline company or banking, you know they were actually using chatbots on their website to create more personalized journeys. So that's another great way for lead generation and using technology and AI to further your marketing journeys.

Speaker 2:

One of the mantras that I had, ivan, for my team, was to do not start with a blank canvas. The world has changed. Let's not start painting with a blank canvas. Let's start with something, and OpenAI has given us that power. There's this whole discussion on prompt engineering, and I'm really proud of like seeing through how the world has come through right All the way from text to like creating videos on SORA video editing with capsuleai. You know there are tons of things to be done out there, so I can give you more examples, if you like, on how we are doing that in my organization now and previously as well.

Speaker 1:

That's interesting. I mean you are at the forefront, the leading edge of AI in driving software that will one day lead to autonomous cars. Hopefully, I think we're on the path to autonomous cars. Hopefully I think we're on the path. But how do you use AI in marketing? What are some of the tactics and techniques and tricks, if you will, that you use to market your software in a B2B context?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, so our software at Applied Intuition, it's actually like something used by OEMs. It's a tier one software supplier to OEMs and other suppliers, and we actually recently announced a product called Copilot, so kind of like something which we all know. There's tons of Copilots out there, but this is a Copilot specifically for the automotive world. So imagine a time like if you are a car manufacturer and you want to sort of like understand road conditions, whether it's in snow or different terrains, Using this software you can actually create these scenarios on the fly by using tons of data which can be tagged data, or also real time data can be coming from the customer or something that is a synthetic data set that we provide or something that is a synthetic data set that we provide. So that means that you're reducing your time to market in terms of testing, validation and bringing more safe and secure modern vehicles on road. So that's the genesis of the software, and there's a lot of work happening internally in terms of building amazing machine learning capabilities within our tools and making the software even more stronger to accelerate this journey of development of these vehicles.

Speaker 2:

On the other hand, like my team being on the marketing side, we use a lot of tools outside as well. So there are products like Jasper right. They have evolved from being just content editing to now using AI for doing a lot of content editing and copywriting and things like that. So some of that is used as well, In addition to you know, using, like I was saying, like prompt engineering in OpenAI. That's something also very interesting for us to see.

Speaker 2:

We don't start off like by creating just our copy using OpenAI, but we definitely validate it, seeing like are there different ideas and options to look at? Because what's happening is, if you just copy paste something directly from created these which these tools are creating, you would not be able to get any unique value proposition. And as a product marketer myself, I really feel proud that we have to create solutions which are unique to the customer that we are talking to right. So understanding the target audience and creating solutions which would matter to those customers are really important. So we use a lot of different customizations on top of it, but there is always sometimes a start point to trigger some creativity on the team as well.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I bet it's a fun experience, experiment, if you will. Of course, we've all read about the challenges of developing autonomous vehicles in the news, but you have a firsthand view of those challenges. Where are we in terms of rolling out autonomous vehicles? And also, what are the challenges in marketing? That's software. That's not something that you can touch and feel per se.

Speaker 2:

Got it, yeah, so I think the autonomous vehicle journey has taken us, you know, I mean it's a regulated industry. It's taken us a long in terms of you see Waymos on the roads In San Francisco. We have Waymos driving completely autonomous. I really encourage our listeners to come in whenever they're visiting San Francisco to take a ride, which is really fun and also nerve wrecking, sometimes for the first experience. Somebody's crossing the road and there's traffic. San Francisco is a busy, high-density city and these vehicles have been performing amazing in those situations, whether in high-traffic environment, even during the night as well. So, whether it's like up and down roads and you know different terrains, it has been doing amazing.

Speaker 2:

From a mass market standpoint, we at Applied are actually taking our approach to doing more broad, because autonomy happens in all formats, you know. Approach to doing more broad because autonomy happens in all formats, whether you're hands-on, eyes-on, hands-off, eyes-on, hands on eyes off, hands off, eyes off right. So there are different combinations and these are called different levels of autonomy. Some of our vehicles already have some of the lane assist and some capabilities. There are vehicles on the road where you could literally go full autopilot and so forth, and I think, as the world is more maturing. We've recently announced, like you know, our stacks which help uh, automotive you know manufacturers to go into exploring the breadth of that level, uh levels of autonomy with more safety and security. I think that's something which is the mantra of our company.

Speaker 2:

Um, the other part of the question you asked was marketing into those, I think, software by itself. I've been on the hardware side and now on the software side for a few years. Definitely, software has a different kind of like touch and feel to it. You know you can't really touch the product, but you can see the end product and the value it creates, right? So I think that's where our products come into feel. We are also very proud of creating like consumer experiences and that is very native into the automotive, right?

Speaker 2:

Whether you're looking at that big screen like a display over the head display in your cars, or actually like thinking about touching those screens, or multiple displays in the front, in the back, in the rear, like you know. So there are multiple ways of thinking through. What's your display looking like? How easy it is to play music from your Spotify onto your cars, is it through Apple Play, is it native to the car, and how does that kind of like navigate your experiences. So that's something also we focus on.

Speaker 2:

The other part is like the OTA piece, which is over the air, which means, like your car gets automatically updated. It's connected to a fleet. You know different OEMs have different models of how they're using the OTA and that is also adding to the ease of, like you know, updates to your vehicle. More and more the vehicles are becoming like phones, devices in your hand, like an iPhone. You know it's not like you buy a car and it stays like the same vehicle for next 10 years. With all this technology and the cloud technology in addition is creating a lot more dynamic updates to our vehicles which keeps them current. You know whether it's a software update on your Rivian, adding newer technology overnight. I mean I really enjoy seeing that, that my vehicle is updated in the morning when I wake up first and it's ready to go. So that's really cool about it.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, no very exciting times. And you mentioned your technology supporting safety and compliance, which is great to hear. We've seen some folks out there, like Mr Musk, maybe getting a little ahead of his skis in terms of promises around autonomous driving. As a marketeer, how do you make sure you're not over-promising or over-hyping the technology and you're balancing the reality versus the ultimate goals that you have in mind?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, we are a very product-first company. We truly believe in creating solutions which actually work for the manufacturers, the OEMs, and then deliver the value to the consumer. So we deliver the AI-powered ADA-dask solutions which help our consumers and customers shorten their time to market for generating next-gen customer experiences and bringing more reliable and safe vehicles on road. We really sort of promise on that, and that is why 18 out of the 20 top global automakers are using Applied Intuition. We serve into not only just on-road automotive, but also go into construction, mining, agriculture, and we also have a defense arm as well. So, yeah, so it goes beyond. Just like the end user and consumer, we actually feel proud that we are bringing this technology to make a large impact beyond just the consumers, but also in the defense space as well.

Speaker 1:

Wow, that's really exciting. What are some of the biggest challenges as you roll autonomous software out at scale? Obvious safety, but there must be a ton of challenges on the product side and also on the marketing side, in terms of getting the messaging right to the right people at the right time as they make decisions about their roadmaps, etc yeah.

Speaker 2:

So one thing is like we obviously hired the best of the minds, you know, entrepreneurial mindsets. Uh, we recently published a blog about the company. We have 31 former founders who work here. Um, we have almost 80 percent of our staff which is product and engineers. 50% of our staff is like PhDs and master degree holders from top technical universities. So that's something we definitely anchor on to make sure that we are building the best of the product out there.

Speaker 2:

Obviously, there's a lot of complexity in terms of getting the product right, software right, getting it tested internally with our customers. Our launches include alpha beta testing and then going more GA, which is general availability. More than that, we are also very sophisticated in the way we approach our customers and work with them in a very white glove approach. That's kind of like the mantra for the marketing team and the sales team. So our entire go-to-market function works with very select and few customers, but very closely with them. So we truly understand what is our ICP, which is the ideal customer profile, what is their pain points and how are we addressing them right. So that is where our messaging comes through.

Speaker 2:

When I joined the company, there was not a marketing leader for over two years. So the first thing that I had to do was write a message house like a framework. What does this mean, right? So we did that at the brand level. At the brand level, who we are, what's our positioning, who are we selling to, what's our key value proposition? And then started doing that for all the products. So we have simulation products, simulation and data products. Almost 10 of those products had to kind of like root them, because what a perception engineer is using is very different from a system engineer, so have to kind of like explain in their language what are they looking for. And then also to business decision makers, like VPs and above, to thinking through what is the value that we are driving out of it. So that was very important. Then we opened up our positioning.

Speaker 2:

So in March we opened up and launched Wagle Platform is what we were talking about? About consumer experiences from OTA and others. So that was a big reveal. We did that with announcing our partnership with Porsche. We talked about Audi, like a lot of customer experiences that we talked about, so bringing more credibility back to the company, which was not done in the past. And then, as a third piece, opened up to the stacks, which is what was announced very off late and very proud to kind of like bring in some more customers to it and so forth.

Speaker 2:

So telling a better story, a narrative, is very important and that comes from understanding your customer first.

Speaker 2:

And that is super important to me because I started working in a customer org, in a sales organization, as my first job, so I think customer first is having that mindset is very important to me and that's how I lead my team as well. Start thinking through what is the customer that you're talking about. Many a times, like if you're just a product heavy org, you push out product because you think like you have the best product in the market and you want to talk about product, your product, it's the best product in the world. But when a customer goes with you and talks about your story with them and how it's benefiting with them, it brings in a lot of credibility. And we tie it up with media and you know working with top reporters whether getting coverages from tier one news reporters landing articles in VentureBeat and so forth right Brings in a lot more credibility to our technology as well as showcasing to the world that we are ready. We have this technology going really well.

Speaker 1:

Well, fantastic. So you're pretty dynamic perspective on this industry. What's most exciting to you? Not just about the autonomous industry, but marketing in.

Speaker 2:

People were traditionally running marketing all in different silos where there used to be corporate marketing and product marketing, I think everything is now getting merged very quickly, taking the same thing about talking about the customer right. The customers are looking for a more personalized journey, like who am I? What am I looking for? Do you even understand my intent? At my previous company where I was CMYT, yellow AI, we were using a tool called Sixth Sense, which was amazing to think about. What is the intent, what are the enterprises who are actually looking for this particular solution in a conversational AI space, and how we could be targeting them. You know how LinkedIn has been around for I don't know, maybe decades right now but how they have evolved. You can run account-based marketing, like ABM campaigns, using AI, so it's AI powered setup. It's really amazing that you don't need a large set of teams to be trained on running these campaigns. You could probably need a one or two people team, but using these tools, you can scale so fast and I'm really passionate about like scale whether it's scale through technology or up-leveling your existing team that you do not need to like invest too heavily in hiring large teams, and you could do so much more with less, and that's something which is really powerful.

Speaker 2:

I'll give you another example. So in our company, we recently deployed Sprout Social for social media. So that's another tool which we have just brought on and it's been a quarter now that we have been testing it, trying it. We have over 60% of adoption rate within the company of our size, which is not terrible. So I have one person running all campaigns on LinkedIn, on Twitter, through social media.

Speaker 2:

What she does is like analyze the audience. Who's our target audience? Who are seeing these organic ads per se or posts that we are posting? We do run paid campaigns when we are doing audience acquisition, but I'm just talking about something unpaid, right, completely free, that you're posting. We have seen a 40% increase in our brand impressions and how we are reaching out to these audiences, which is very relevant to us. Our followers on our LinkedIn page has increased multiple folds in less than a year, just because we are sending the right message to the right audience at the right time, and the timing is super important.

Speaker 2:

What Sprout Social also does is it enables us with AI-powered scheduling. So this person on my team she knows exactly when is that audience, because we have global teams, we have customers in Japan, we have in Germany, like car manufacturers across the globe in Detroit. When should we be posting what post and when should we be getting the most engagement out of it, and what are the key metrics to look at and measure? And that's where the marketing team is really thriving, because we are being data driven. We are looking at the right audience at the right time and attacking them with the right messaging, and that's the win for us and hopefully a win for them as well.

Speaker 1:

It's an exciting time to be a marketeer, and I also enjoy getting out into the world. Events like CES and Mobile World Congress in Barcelona have almost become like mobility and automotive shows, not just mobile phone shows. So what are you looking forward to in terms of getting out at events and meetups? Get togethers togethers.

Speaker 2:

Great point. We actually participated in CES earlier this year, so 2024 was big for us for CES because we did a private preview and a review. It was eye-opening for me to just walk the floor and see some amazing showcase in the mobility section, like you said. You know, I still remember, like the ones from BMW, from Hyundai. That was amazing, like Hyundai booth had literally like a tank which was displayed there. Somebody was operating it autonomously and the action was actually happening in a field in Texas, in an open field. So it was a kind of like agriculture scenario that they were showing and it was amazing to see that in the show.

Speaker 2:

I would say that for us, events definitely are a part of demand gen but also a storytelling.

Speaker 2:

You know, we actually just last week did a flagship event called Intersect.

Speaker 2:

This was our second year of running that in Silicon Valley, where we bring in luminaries and leaders and, you know, professors from top universities to talk about automotive software and AI, and it is an open platform. We are not using that as talking about just applied intuition, but really advancing the industry and having people have a neutral point of view and talk about it. A neutral point of view and talk about it. So we had speakers like Sebastian Thrun from Stanford, we had speakers like Doug Field, you know, and that was like those amazing fireside chats and lightning talks that people were able to see through and so forth. We're really proud to be that thought leader in the industry, while we are not just like tooting our own horn, but being neutral and bringing these thought processes together and bringing amazing attendees together, like business decision makers and leaders to come together, network, learn from each other, and you know, because this whole industry is moving at a very, very fast pace. And what does that mean? As we are all working towards achieving, you know, powerful, modern, vehicles out there.

Speaker 1:

Well, it's so exciting. You're doing amazing work and thanks for taking the time to share your insight and vision. Can't wait to see what's next and hopefully we'll meet at CES this coming year as well.

Speaker 2:

Yes, CES is coming up super fast. Just a few months out, we're already in ticks of planning and next steps on it. So I look forward to seeing you at CES, Ivan.

Speaker 1:

Likewise. Thanks so much. Thanks everyone for watching. You know, follow Applied Intuition on all the social channels. They put out some really fascinating content. Thank you, Take care everyone. Bye-bye.