No Pressing Challenges For Marketers In AI Adoption Anymore: Neel Pandya

Fueled by passion and backed by rich global marketing experience, Neel Pandya, formerly with L'Oréal, has now moved on to Pyxis One as the new chief executive officer of its APAC business. A seasoned marketing professional with profound experience in leading large teams and seeing ambitious projects to fruition, Pandya has been a part of the evolving marketing landscape. He understands the advertisers’ perspectives deeply and has always had a penchant for technology, which made Pyxis a natural choice for the evolution of his career. After all these years in research, media and marketing he looks forward to being at the forefront of the AI revolution taking place in marketing and for business growth.

In his new role, Neel will take over the APAC business to strategize and expand operations to manage and navigate Pyxis in APAC. Neel’s expertise will help Pyxis enhance current processes and protocols to build the future roadmap for the APAC region. He will also play a pivotal role in ramping up hiring for Pyxis One across departments which include marketing, sales, and operations. He will also be spearheading an initiative to build a community of AI experts within Pyxis.

Below are the experts from our recent chat with him on his very anticipated move:

Q1. How would you leverage your experience and insight to provide a strategic direction to create new opportunities for Pyxis One in India and abroad?

I bring to Pyxis deep knowledge of the advertiser’s point of view.

Pyxis as a brand bridges the gap between brand requirements and product deliverables. With my experience as an advertiser, working closely with the marketing and digital ecosystem, I will be able to provide comprehensive insights into the way agencies work, what brands expect from advertising and how marketing and growth teams function. This knowledge is what will manifest into the way Pyxis builds its products.

Q2. How according to you is AI infrastructure for marketing transforming the way we approach business?

This is something I may not be able to answer in a few words.

Every business process will now become truly and most profoundly data-backed. We will confidently be able to move from an “I think” approach to a “Data shows, therefore,” approach.

Brands have been accumulating all types of data, not just marketing, even before the advent of digital marketing. This data has grown many thousand folds with the advent and quick proliferation of digital over the past decade or so. So now, brands are sitting atop a goldmine of data that is humanly impossible to decode and justify.

Only a strong AI infrastructure can help brands mine insights out of the data they store and become agile and more efficient. The Pyxis One AI infrastructure is designed to help brands rapidly scale by improving their marketing delivery and team efficiencies.

Right from the market, sales and brand research to creative analysis and execution, branding and performance, and social media - all of it can be enhanced multi-fold with AI infrastructure. Think of it as training an AI system to learn from your customers, competitors and your data, to deliver excellent customer experiences. The bonus is, you will never have to worry about committing the same mistake again because our AI infrastructure has already flagged it off and analyzed all possible solutions!

In short, the role of the marketer itself will undergo a transformation - from that of a marketer to a marketing data scientist.

Q3. How do you plan to build strong partnerships for product integration and distribution at Pyxis One?

Brands are always in need of products like ours to transform their marketing and growth. Being in an expansion mode ourselves, we are bringing on expert partners who can help us reach multiple markets. Brands can leverage our AI expert community to help integrate our tools into their marketing efforts and customize them for their requirements.

Q4. AI adoption is burgeoning but at a slow pace. What are the challenges and opportunities for marketers in this space?

I honestly do not see any pressing challenges anymore. Yes, in the APAC region there is more staggered adoption as compared to Europe and North America. So, the problem is not of adoption but of know-how.

One potential reason could be that AI has always been perceived as a black box that only data scientists comprehend. And that is a pain point that our AI infrastructure solves.

The Pyxis AI infrastructure is designed by bringing data scientists and marketers together so that one can understand the other and build an environment that can be easily used by everyone. So, in essence, our AI infrastructure is literally something that was built with instructions from seasoned marketers about their pain points. So, marketers understand how it works and can use it as a tool to improve speed and efficiency.

As for opportunities, AI is becoming a core requirement of marketers. With AI infrastructure, marketers can innovate and build new strategies that help companies scale and drive efficiency at the same time.

Q5. How can AI enable faster marketing decisions?

AI can crawl through data and understand it at a pace that is dizzying for humans. However, the elegance of the AI infrastructure, especially for business growth, lies in the fact that data can now inform not just one function of an organization but pretty much any department that requires insights to implement or test new strategies.

Even today, research is viewed as a mammoth task and is quite often alienated. In fact, each team views their data in silos. Now imagine those walls were broken down and teams were able to share and learn from each other’s data. Everyone knows this is desirable, but it was difficult to achieve. Although, with AI infrastructure, teams have started sharing and communicating data with each other. Thus, insights from marketing and growth teams can inform marketing decisions in real-time and creative data can give birth to brilliant campaigns, in addition to giving us information on consumer behaviour. The possibilities are endless. The bonus is now all teams will begin to understand how working together can advance the larger business goal immensely.

In essence, margins of errors are lower, there is enormous space of quick AB testing with results being seen almost overnight. All these are direct contributors to ROAS and overall business growth.

Q6. What does the growth playbook of Pyxis One look like in 2021?

Our biggest strength is a strong, extremely talented, passionate and growth-oriented team. Every member of the Pyxis One family understands and contributes to our business growth. I know without an iota of doubt that we have excellent products which bridge some very real and crucial gaps in the business growth landscape. In addition to a talented team and excellent products, we also have solid support from our network of highly experienced and seasoned investors whom we never hesitate to utilize as our sounding boards.

I would say that our growth playbook majorly involves nurturing our talented team, giving them every opportunity to continue upgrading and innovating more excellent products, and leveraging our investors knowledge and expertise to ensure we are growing and expanding in the absolute right direction.