Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a path-breaking technology marvel that is forging its way to gradually become a necessary tool for almost every industry vertical. In this post, we speak with David Baranes, founder of Armis.TECH, an innovative Adtech brand, to shed light on how retailers can use AI to conduct large-scale local advertising. Read on!
What inspired you to start Armis? Tell us the story.
ARMIS was co-founded by Dan Gomplewicz and me. I was VP Market Development at AppNexus, the world’s leading advertising technology company, and, Dan was Director of Strategy & Innovation at E. Leclerc, France’s largest retailer.
In 2010, when Dan took the job at E. Leclerc, they were trying to shift their paper catalog spend into digital marketing channels. However, it did not work as the technologies were not ready. A few years later, we thought that the development of intelligent automation in advertising would make digitalization of paper catalog possible. And indeed, it worked!
David Baranes and Dan Gomplewicz, founders at Armis.Tech
Tell us about your Multi-Local Advertising technology. How does it work?
We empower physical retailers to advertise locally on a large scale via an AI-powered platform called Multi-local Advertising. Our technology leverages geolocation which gives the ability to target people around shops. Our programmatic advertising and AI gives the ability to create smart robots that can buy digital advertising. We can, therefore, help every retailer to advertise on the internet (Google, Facebook, Display via AppNexus & desktop, mobile, tablet) with local-optimized advertising.
How is Artificial Intelligence slated to transform our everyday lives?
We believe that AI should be used to do things that we were not able to do without it. In our case, it is not viable from an economic standpoint to hire people for managing the advertising of each and every shop.
Hence, we use AI to build this capability. But it still has to be controlled by humans and so, we have a team that monitors what our algorithms are doing every day to make sure they behave appropriately.
When it comes to indulging in AI solutions, what are some of the critical aspects that startups must keep in mind before starting up?
A few thoughts:
- AI is complex. It needs a set of combined skills that are still uncommon in the market such as math, data engineering, development, modeling, and business intelligence. So, brace yourself for it is hard to implement and an expensive activity at that.
- When you don’t have a specific business application in mind, AI is useless. In our case, AI is leveraged to detect the best messages/offers/products that would incentivize consumers to go in-store. So, figure out your AI application.
- AI needs a lot of data to work, therefore it is usually best to start with some simple statistical modeling and grow in complexity until reach you real a state-of-the-art machine learning level.
- AI still needs human intervention because the goal is to build intelligence that can complement humans in doing things that were too labor-intensive, too complex, and too expensive.
What are the trends you foresee in the AI space?
We’re still in the early days of Artificial Intelligence. People can now afford big data infrastructure to collect data and they are hiring specialists to create modeling with those data sets. However, several players are yet to scale and acquire the expertise to make a leap forward in AI.
That being said, we’re seeing the rise of the first efficient AI that has a business purpose and actually works the way is intended to work, and automation covering up more ground than before.
Why did you choose a .TECH domain name? How is it helping you develop a unique online brand?
The .TECH domain helped us materialize the tech DNA of our company. It has also been a way for us to create our difference with an unusual domain name. It has also been a powerful force in search engine referencing.