PARTNERING WITH VENDORS Vendors must counsel. Vendors must establish a form of intimacy with their clients. What I mean by intimacy is to step in and be a part of the team as much as they can. What an outside vendor should and can bring to a client is, of course, their expertise, but also this voice of reason: “I’m an outside third-party. I don’t have skin in the game. I’m your vendor, but I’m here to counsel on what I believe is best for you.” That’s what we want to keep doing and keep doing even better. In an even more personal fashion, what we think we’ll have to do more of next is integrate data. In the context of Ipsos, we provide brand health tracking data and programs to our clients. The opportunity is to integrate this data with whatever else our clients are doing. We can track the health of your brand. Now we should integrate this with advertising exposure, ecommerce data, click-stream data, and your CRM system—with all those other data silos that the client has access to and make a stronger value proposition if we onboard all this data and merge it all into one.
THE SEAMLESS INTEGRATION OF AI AI still comes across as a technology for early adopters and some experts brag about knowing how to write prompts and all that. AI is soon going to be seamlessly integrated. AI did not start with ChatGPT. We were already using AI when you pull up Google Maps and you enter “pizza,” and Google Maps will populate pizza parlors around you. We were also using AI when searching for terms in Firefox, Google Chrome, Safari, or whatever browser. You type a few words, and the technology completes your sentence. That’s AI for you. There were already many applications. Today, those who claim to know how to use AI position themselves at a competitive advantage, as in, “I know how to write prompts and you don’t.” Fast track six months, this won’t matter anymore because we won’t have to write that many prompts because the technology will be integrated into the software and the tools we use. It will be accessible to all.
FEI 2024 & Key Innovation Perspectives
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