{"id":6604,"date":"2016-05-10T06:00:55","date_gmt":"2016-05-10T13:00:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/editor.thinkapps.com\/blog\/?p=6604"},"modified":"2016-05-12T14:12:53","modified_gmt":"2016-05-12T21:12:53","slug":"machine-intelligence-mariana-interview","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thinkapps.com\/blog\/development\/machine-intelligence-mariana-interview\/","title":{"rendered":"How Mariana Applies AI to B2B Marketing [Interview]"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>This post is part of an\u00a0interview series on\u00a0<span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><a title=\"ThinkApps posts on machine intelligence\" href=\"http:\/\/thinkapps.com\/blog\/tag\/machine-intelligence\/\" target=\"_blank\">machine intelligence companies<\/a><\/span>. We previously featured\u00a0<span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><a title=\"How Beagle Brings Machine Intelligence to Legal Tech\" href=\"http:\/\/thinkapps.com\/blog\/development\/machine-intelligence-beagle-interview\/\" target=\"_blank\">Beagle<\/a><\/span>, a legal tech startup,\u00a0and now we&#8217;re talking with\u00a0<span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><a title=\"Mariana\" href=\"https:\/\/www.marianaiq.com\/\" target=\"_blank\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Mariana<\/span><\/a><\/span>, which is applying AI to B2B marketing.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Marketing is all about finding the right audience. It probably isn\u2019t a good idea to advertise the opening of a New York restaurant to someone in Los Angeles or to attempt to convince an artisanal coffee maker that she needs to buy a Keurig brewing system. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><a title=\"Mariana\" href=\"https:\/\/www.marianaiq.com\/\" target=\"_blank\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Mariana<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to help marketers find the right audience for their message.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/d1vqbpto5tbbz0.cloudfront.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/05161940\/Screen-Shot-2016-05-05-at-4.19.19-PM.png\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-6623\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"1156\" height=\"533\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-6623\" src=\"http:\/\/d1vqbpto5tbbz0.cloudfront.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/05161940\/Screen-Shot-2016-05-05-at-4.19.19-PM.png\" alt=\"Machine Intelligence Mariana: Homepage\" srcset=\"https:\/\/d1vqbpto5tbbz0.cloudfront.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/05161940\/Screen-Shot-2016-05-05-at-4.19.19-PM.png 1156w, https:\/\/d1vqbpto5tbbz0.cloudfront.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/05161940\/Screen-Shot-2016-05-05-at-4.19.19-PM.png 300w, https:\/\/d1vqbpto5tbbz0.cloudfront.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/05161940\/Screen-Shot-2016-05-05-at-4.19.19-PM.png 768w, https:\/\/d1vqbpto5tbbz0.cloudfront.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/05161940\/Screen-Shot-2016-05-05-at-4.19.19-PM.png 1024w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1156px) 100vw, 1156px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p><strong>We recently asked Mariana co-founder and chief executive <a title=\"Venkat Nagaswamy on Twitter\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/VenkatNagaswamy\" target=\"_blank\">Venkat Nagaswamy<\/a> some questions about the inspiration behind the company, how it uses machine learning to accomplish its goals, and how it transitioned\u00a0from being a marketing company that uses artificial intelligence to an artificial intelligence company that happens to currently focus on assisting marketers.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><em>[Editor\u2019s note: The interview questions and responses below have been edited for clarity and length.]<\/em><\/p>\n<h2>What&#8217;s your role at Mariana? What does that position entail?<\/h2>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">As the CEO, I am, for the most part, the external face to the company. I deal with investors, customers, and potentially employees. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Sometimes I help think through some of the artificial intelligence and deep learning and product issues, but mostly the product things are taken care of by my co-founders. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><strong>Basically, anything that nobody else wants to do is my job.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/d1vqbpto5tbbz0.cloudfront.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/05151335\/venkat.jpg\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-6611\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"321\" height=\"321\" class=\"small alignnone wp-image-6611 size-full\" src=\"http:\/\/d1vqbpto5tbbz0.cloudfront.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/05151335\/venkat.jpg\" alt=\"Machine Intelligence Mariana: CEO Venkat Nagaswamy\" srcset=\"https:\/\/d1vqbpto5tbbz0.cloudfront.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/05151335\/venkat.jpg 321w, https:\/\/d1vqbpto5tbbz0.cloudfront.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/05151335\/venkat.jpg 150w, https:\/\/d1vqbpto5tbbz0.cloudfront.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/05151335\/venkat.jpg 300w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 321px) 100vw, 321px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<h2>What did you do before you joined Mariana?<\/h2>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Before Mariana, I ran enterprise marketing for <a title=\"Juniper Networks\" href=\"http:\/\/www.juniper.net\/us\/en\/\" target=\"_blank\">Juniper Networks<\/a>. There was also a previous startup I co-founded, which was a mobile payment company that made it so you could use barcodes to allow people to pay for things. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">We were way too early in the marketplace. But it\u2019s interesting to see how the idea we had in \u201801 or \u201802 is now being employed in the payment marketplace.<\/span><\/p>\n<h2>What&#8217;s the most difficult thing about your role at Mariana?<\/h2>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">This is my second go as the CEO of a startup after we did MVent a few years ago. So there are some things that I knew to expect. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">For instance, just as they say, it\u2019s the sheer loneliness of being at the top. There are certain things that you\u2019re responsible for and you need to get done. Those are things which I don\u2019t think have changed a lot since the last time I was CEO. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The first year or year and a half, the difficulty of hiring was something that we expected but didn\u2019t necessarily understand. So that\u2019s been something that was difficult to deal with, and I didn\u2019t understand the extent to which it was difficult. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Things started turning around about a year ago, when we noticed better and better resumes coming in, which implied there was some kind of softening happening in the marketplace, and that\u2019s something we\u2019re seeing right now. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">And I think now it feels better than it was in February and March, but the early fundraising, especially for someone in our state, has been not a shock, but something that has taken me by surprise.<\/span><\/p>\n<h2>What was the inspiration behind Mariana? What led you to combine marketing with AI?<\/h2>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">I was doing enterprise marketing for Juniper Networks before this. So I wore the shoe of a marketer and knew that there was a big gap that we felt needed to be filled. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">In addition to my own experience, one of my co-founders also worked in a product marketing\/product management job, so he understood the gaps in marketing as well. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">So the impetus was more in terms of <a title=\"Why Your Startup Should Solve Your Own Problem\" href=\"http:\/\/thinkapps.com\/blog\/entrepreneurship\/startups-solve-your-own-problem\/\" target=\"_blank\">scratching the itch<\/a> we had as people doing marketing, and that\u2019s how we got started.<\/span><\/p>\n<h2>How do you balance privacy concerns with running a smarter marketing platform?<\/h2>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">At the end of the day, we exist to target the marketing. <strong>How do you get the right content to the right person at the right time in the right way?<\/strong> That means understanding the people you\u2019re targeting, and therefore, it has the potential to creep people out. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">However, we are exclusively <a title=\"B2B Marketing Guide\" href=\"http:\/\/thinkapps.com\/blog\/launch\/b2b-content-marketing-guide-best-practices\/\" target=\"_blank\">focused on B2B<\/a>, and all the information we look at is B2B information. Even that has the potential to creep people out. But at the same time, we give marketers the ability to position themselves in a way that doesn\u2019t freak them out.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">If I put an ad in front of you that says, \u201cHey Nathaniel, I know you\u2019re going to talk to Wes and Venkat,\u201d that might freak you out. But if I put an ad in front of you that\u2019s just kinda related to marketing, it\u2019s not as creepy. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><strong>And the main thing I need to note is that when we gather data, we don\u2019t gather any personal info. All the data that we look at is public data that is accessible via Google Search, for instance.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"1106\" height=\"429\" class=\"extended alignnone wp-image-6620 size-full\" src=\"http:\/\/d1vqbpto5tbbz0.cloudfront.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/05161507\/Screen-Shot-2016-05-05-at-4.03.38-PM.png\" alt=\"Machine Intelligence Mariana: What Makes Mariana Different\" srcset=\"https:\/\/d1vqbpto5tbbz0.cloudfront.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/05161507\/Screen-Shot-2016-05-05-at-4.03.38-PM.png 1106w, https:\/\/d1vqbpto5tbbz0.cloudfront.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/05161507\/Screen-Shot-2016-05-05-at-4.03.38-PM.png 300w, https:\/\/d1vqbpto5tbbz0.cloudfront.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/05161507\/Screen-Shot-2016-05-05-at-4.03.38-PM.png 768w, https:\/\/d1vqbpto5tbbz0.cloudfront.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/05161507\/Screen-Shot-2016-05-05-at-4.03.38-PM.png 1024w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1106px) 100vw, 1106px\" \/><\/p>\n<h2>What differentiates Mariana from other marketing platforms?<\/h2>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Some of the motivations in why we\u2019re doing things the way we\u2019re doing is because, at the end of the day, deep learning and artificial intelligence allow us to be very targeted in terms of who we\u2019re going after. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Understanding people to target, combined with content in different channels, is what we\u2019re focused on right now. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">One thing we focus on is the account, in terms of size, company, vertical, etc., which a lot of companies do, and most of that data these days can be found in a structured format that anyone can use to target ads.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">We also understood that for any B2B sales you need to talk to 5.4 people or so for every sale, but how do you find them? How do you create <a title=\"How to Create User Personas\" href=\"http:\/\/thinkapps.com\/blog\/design\/user-testing-guide\/\">personas<\/a> to target people? So we knew that we needed to look at not just the account but also individuals at the account.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/d1vqbpto5tbbz0.cloudfront.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/05151335\/tablet.jpg\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-6610\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"1280\" height=\"853\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-6610\" src=\"http:\/\/d1vqbpto5tbbz0.cloudfront.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/05151335\/tablet.jpg\" alt=\"Machine Intelligence Mariana: Accounts vs Personas\" srcset=\"https:\/\/d1vqbpto5tbbz0.cloudfront.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/05151335\/tablet.jpg 1280w, https:\/\/d1vqbpto5tbbz0.cloudfront.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/05151335\/tablet.jpg 300w, https:\/\/d1vqbpto5tbbz0.cloudfront.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/05151335\/tablet.jpg 768w, https:\/\/d1vqbpto5tbbz0.cloudfront.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/05151335\/tablet.jpg 1024w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1280px) 100vw, 1280px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">A typical way to do it is to look at titles. And we realized that for a lot of people we\u2019re going after, titles don\u2019t mean anything. So what ends up happening is that competitors in the marketplace narrow the audience based on accounts, then have everyone with a certain title in the account, which is really not enough.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The reason we got into artificial intelligence and deep learning is the need to look at unstructured data about people and then say, &#8220;Who are the ones we need to target and how do you find them?&#8221;<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Account-based marketing is a big trend that\u2019s going on right now. Most companies \u2014 for instance, there are people like DemandBase \u2014 they are different solutions, not exactly competitors, but at the end of the day they can help you target everyone at an account based on IP address or on titles through a banner ad or some cookie-based mechanisms. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">What we can do is find not just the accounts but also the specific set of individuals that you need to target, so the focus can be extremely narrow compared to what others can do. And we\u2019re finding them on social channels, which nobody else can really do.<\/span><\/p>\n<h2>How is Mariana&#8217;s AI different from the popular idea of AI as Skynet from the Terminator movies?<\/h2>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Well, ours isn\u2019t after John Connor.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><strong>At the end of the day, if you boil this down to what artificial intelligence or deep learning engines actually do, they essentially figure out the semantic distance between two people. <\/strong><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Meaning if I give you a profile of one person, and a profile of another person, even if they use completely different words, if they\u2019re semantically the same or similar, we need to understand that. So often it\u2019s not so much that we are battling against Terminator, it\u2019s more like looking at, this is something that humans can do very easily. We have to explain why that\u2019s very different. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">People ask, \u201cWhy don\u2019t I just look at keywords?\u201d Then we have to explain why that kind of approach doesn\u2019t work. So then you have to talk about semantics. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Once you start talking about that and people understand it, then people get that what you\u2019re doing is what a human being would do, except you\u2019re doing it with up to millions of people instead of however many a human being could do.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/d1vqbpto5tbbz0.cloudfront.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/05171936\/Mariana-Personas.jpg\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-6633\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"1920\" height=\"933\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-6633\" src=\"http:\/\/d1vqbpto5tbbz0.cloudfront.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/05171936\/Mariana-Personas.jpg\" alt=\"Machine Intelligence Mariana: Personas\" srcset=\"https:\/\/d1vqbpto5tbbz0.cloudfront.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/05171936\/Mariana-Personas.jpg 1920w, https:\/\/d1vqbpto5tbbz0.cloudfront.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/05171936\/Mariana-Personas.jpg 300w, https:\/\/d1vqbpto5tbbz0.cloudfront.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/05171936\/Mariana-Personas.jpg 768w, https:\/\/d1vqbpto5tbbz0.cloudfront.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/05171936\/Mariana-Personas.jpg 1024w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<h2>Will there come a time when AI powers or assists all marketing decisions?<\/h2>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The short answer is yes. \u00a0I think even to the extent of automatically creating some content, AI is going to go there. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">If you break down the marketing thinking right now, you can start with a marketing strategy and understanding the audience you\u2019re going after. Second is making decisions. Then, finally, executing. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Most marketers spend most of their time in the last bucket, but the other pieces are important as well. So for instance, today in B2B marketing, a lot of \u201cHow do I decide what email to send to whom at what time?\u201d type questions are decided by human beings.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">That can easily be substituted by software. <strong>Even today, with the technologies that we have, a lot of the decisions made by human beings can easily be done by software.<\/strong> The reason why it\u2019s not done is more in terms of, &#8220;How do I bring this technology together?&#8221; That\u2019s an engineering problem, but it can be solved, and it is being solved. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Here is something\u00a0more fun thing to think about:\u00a0Let\u2019s say I\u2019m promoting a white paper for a given audience. Can I automatically generate a tweet summarizing that white paper? Summarizing content is something artificial intelligence can do.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Another one of the big problems today is that even if I have the ability to find these people, I as a human being cannot write emails to a million people. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">But I can customize the subject line, first block, etc. and target it to each person based on the unstructured data we gathered or the company they\u2019re in. All of this can be converted into a short form text, then the rest of the content can be the same. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">I don\u2019t think any of these things are beyond reach and, because you can gather and make decisions and execute in a timely fashion, we\u2019ll be able to do personalization at scale.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"1098\" height=\"579\" class=\"extended alignnone wp-image-6621 size-full\" src=\"http:\/\/d1vqbpto5tbbz0.cloudfront.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/05161508\/Screen-Shot-2016-05-05-at-4.03.22-PM.png\" alt=\"Machine Intelligence Mariana: Product Descriptions\" srcset=\"https:\/\/d1vqbpto5tbbz0.cloudfront.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/05161508\/Screen-Shot-2016-05-05-at-4.03.22-PM.png 1098w, https:\/\/d1vqbpto5tbbz0.cloudfront.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/05161508\/Screen-Shot-2016-05-05-at-4.03.22-PM.png 300w, https:\/\/d1vqbpto5tbbz0.cloudfront.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/05161508\/Screen-Shot-2016-05-05-at-4.03.22-PM.png 768w, https:\/\/d1vqbpto5tbbz0.cloudfront.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/05161508\/Screen-Shot-2016-05-05-at-4.03.22-PM.png 1024w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1098px) 100vw, 1098px\" \/><\/p>\n<h2>Was\u00a0Mariana&#8217;s tech\u00a0all built\u00a0in-house or did you use any open source tools?<\/h2>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">We built custom code on top of open source tools (e.g. <a title=\"Theano\" href=\"http:\/\/deeplearning.net\/software\/theano\/\" target=\"_blank\">Theano<\/a>, <a title=\"Gensim\" href=\"https:\/\/radimrehurek.com\/gensim\/\" target=\"_blank\">Gensim<\/a>, etc.).<\/span><\/p>\n<h2>What&#8217;s the most exciting trend in machine learning from Mariana&#8217;s perspective?<\/h2>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">This is a story I like to tell people. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">My son is right now 22 months old. When he was 18 months old, which was around Christmas, somebody gave him a bunch of cards. My wife was going through a bunch of them, and we got to one that had a &#8220;Z&#8221; for zebra. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">My son got up and looked at the Christmas tree, where we had a zebra ornament. As much as I like to think he\u2019s unique, let\u2019s be honest, that\u2019s not that special. But even with just one example of \u201czebra,\u201d he was able to map a 3D object to a picture on a card. That\u2019s called one-shot learning, and it\u2019s a really interesting topic.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><strong>To train our models on deep learning we have created 10 million profiles. Going from having to train something with thousands or millions of examples to being able to train something with very few examples is very cool.<\/strong><\/p>\n<h2>What advances in machine learning have benefitted Mariana the most?<\/h2>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Machine learning techniques focused on text and unstructured data. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The past few years have seen a flowering of work on word\/document representations, LSTM, and RNN that have pushed what&#8217;s possible with analyzing text data. We can now take massive volumes of text data available and make sense out of it with a reasonable amount of compute power and time. Something you could not do, say, five years ago.<\/span><\/p>\n<h2>Are there any limitations on machine learning Mariana would like to see removed?<\/h2>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Most techniques require a lot of data. That is probably the biggest issue. I would love to see more work that can get learnings from limited data.<\/span><\/p>\n<h2>Does Mariana consider itself a machine learning\u00a0company?<\/h2>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">We probably started off as a marketing company and came to artificial intelligence and specifically deep learning as a way to solve the problem. But at this stage, I would say we\u2019re a machine learning company focused on solving problems for marketing companies, as opposed to a marketing company using artificial intelligence to solve problems.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">We\u2019re more likely to use our artificial intelligence for things other than marketing than we would do something in marketing that doesn\u2019t use artificial intelligence. That\u2019s how I know we&#8217;ve changed.<\/span><\/p>\n<h2>How serious a threat do you consider machine learning initiatives from large companies?<\/h2>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Microsoft, Google, and Facebook have all done great work. They have also open sourced a lot of their machine learning work (<a title=\"TensorFlow\" href=\"https:\/\/www.tensorflow.org\/\" target=\"_blank\">TensorFlow<\/a>, <a title=\"Torch\" href=\"https:\/\/github.com\/torch\" target=\"_blank\">Torch<\/a>). So, the tremendous advances of the past few years have a lot to do with their openness. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">They are probably not a threat to us over the long term. We are in B2B marketing, and so far that does not seem to have caught their eye.<\/span><\/p>\n<h2>How do you mitigate the threat that other companies might pose?<\/h2>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><strong>Being a SaaS player, we believe stickiness ultimately comes from being embedded in the process of our customers.<\/strong> AI\/ML enable us to do a lot of things, but the stickiness comes from carbon, not silicon. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Over the long term, that&#8217;s how we seek to defend against the big boys.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><strong><em>This post is part of a series of\u00a0interviews with\u00a0<a title=\"ThinkApps posts on machine intelligence\" href=\"http:\/\/thinkapps.com\/blog\/tag\/machine-intelligence\/\" target=\"_blank\">machine intelligence companies<\/a>\u00a0that\u00a0are harnessing the power of machine learning and artificial intelligence in innovative ways. Stay tuned for more!<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Check out our interview of machine intelligence company Mariana, which is using artificial intelligence to make B2B marketing more efficient and effective.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":69,"featured_media":6630,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[535,536,510,511,301,534,540,545,76,509,508,44],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v22.6 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>How Mariana Applies Artificial Intelligence to Marketing [Interview]<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Check out our interview of machine intelligence company Mariana, which is using artificial intelligence to make B2B marketing more efficient and effective.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, 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