DEPT®: Leading digital innovation

Meet DEPT®

DEPT® is a pioneering technology and marketing services company with expertise in experience, engineering, and growth marketing. They create end-to-end digital experiences for brands worldwide, including Google, KFC, Philips, eBay, and more. We’re excited to announce that they’re our September 2024 “Partner of the Month”!

We spoke with Katy White, Client Development Director & Partner at DEPT®, who has more than 15 years’ experience working across experience and engineering. She shared insights on the latest trends and successful strategies for tackling common digital challenges and explained how to leverage AI to deliver personalized content at scale.

Key trends

How is generative AI reshaping the way businesses operate, and what should organizations focus on to stay ahead?

In the blink of an eye, new technology—generative AI specifically—has reframed how we think about the future of business. Everyone is working hard and fast to understand AI and, more importantly, leverage it. 

While digital transformation in the early 2020s helped meet consumer expectations around convenience, today’s challenge is to harness big data to fuel AI effectively. In a world where customers’ expectations are always increasing, AI-powered digital experiences will not just be a nice-to-have but a necessary technology.

Data, AI, innovation, and personalization are the successful ingredients every organization is going to need to tackle to thrive in the next wave of digital transformation.

Those companies that already unlocked the value of generative AI have been able to do so because of previous work on data hygiene and strategy. Now, they can provide applications far better than their competitors.

The future will bring quicker and quicker advances. Organizations must keep this re-evaluation process at hand to ensure they are nimble enough to realize their full potential.

Challenges and solutions

What barriers are preventing companies from fully embracing AI, and how can they overcome them?

Compliance and security requirements, organizations’ complex and rigid structures, and dated technology result in barriers to entry. Many established institutions lack the agility needed to adapt quickly to technological advancements, especially at the pace that they are coming.

To reap the benefits of AI and secure your AI future, you need to invest in your data. While AI offers immense potential, navigating these complexities requires a data-first approach. By finding the right partnerships, addressing potential challenges, and building modern data platforms, organizations can unlock the true power of AI and stay ahead of the curve.

Organizations have spent years trying to excel at data collection, but data quality and understanding are key to implementing AI. 

Can you share examples of successful strategies or solutions to overcome these challenges?

Today’s digital landscape demands flexibility, consumers today shop and research products across many touchpoints. With so many opportunities for engagement, we need flexibility in how we go about crafting experiences for our users. Modern technical architectures need solid technical foundations of business empowering capabilities.

Decoupled touchpoints using microservices and APIs need to be there to support providing consistent content and data collection across all channels, ultimately allowing brands to dynamically adjust the journeys, personalize at scale and activate AI.

Getting these foundations right and having a clear target architecture is the first step.

Best practices

What strategies can organizations adopt to create effective and scalable processes in today’s digital landscape?

The opportunity for all brands is to create and fuel personalized, human-first experiences. As customers become disenchanted, standing out is critical. 

The bar for creating a compelling digital experience is higher than ever, amplified by changing consumer engagement and business operations. 

On one hand, modern-day consumers don’t have the same attention span amidst a barrage of choices. They also spend tons of time on social platforms, with newer ways of interacting with systems. For them, the definition of “intuitiveness” has changed, and today the experience is more governed by frictionless-ness than the traditional focus on UI design. 

These changes have not only weakened the personal connection with customers but also diminished companies’ ability to distinguish themselves from competitors. 

We see some core categories wherein AI can be used on a daily basis to create personalized experiences at scale:

AI for personalized content at scale

The creation, quality control & translation of different types of content. Generative AI empowers organizations to accomplish more with less. In 2023, generative AI unleashed massive creativity and productivity potential. Consumers will expect personalized content in many forms and different digital environments. To tailor to that need, assets at scale generated by bespoke AI systems will become a necessity. GenAI empowers you to do more with less while taking scalability into account.

Get inspired by the JYSK case study and explore how they revolutionized their content creation at scale.

AI for personalized marketing journeys

Using AI to find patterns, predict behavior personalize, and optimize so that brands can predict what the next purchase will be and personalize the experience (and marketing). Customer 360 data is used by the AI to learn customer-specific purchase patterns. 

The AI model can predict in real-time which products will be purchased next with a specific %, or what message is going to resonate with the buyer. Based on that the experience is personalized showing the best product match. These predictions are then used for micro-segmentation and dynamic remarketing.

DEPT® has worked with the brand Rituals to accelerate their digital business via data & intelligence:

• Building Rituals AI platform to enable omnichannel personalization fuelled by unified customer data
• Creating an audience perspective instead of a channel perspective, multi-disciplinary team, use-case approach, quick experimentation 
• Accelerating technology with cloud-first, serverless architecture, centralized data (Web - App - Offline - Email - CRM), continuous machine learning model (custom deep learning model) training, activation of data, and real-time predictions in all channels (this changed the technology landscape to make use of cutting-edge Google cloud architecture).

This resulted in a +68% uplift in omnichannel transactions.

AI for personalized experiences

Generative AI unlocks the ability to dynamically change the user’s experience based on their behavior. By developing large language models, we can create AI assistants for all sorts of applications. However, prompting is the dumbest interaction ever invented, for the smartest technology ever invented. 

Therefore, brands must approach UI design in a way that combines traditional UX, which customers are familiar with and know how to use, with conversational elements and AI-powered content decisions based on contextual understanding of the individual. 

We strongly believe AI should be considered a design material, just like shape, color, content, and motion.

To allow clients to experiment with this, DEPT® has built their own AI Accelerator, The Greenhouse. The Greenhouse provides the building blocks for large language model (LLM) powered websites and allows us to customize models with enterprise data in weeks instead of months.

Impact on business outcomes

How does excellence in this area contribute to broader business goals, such as market expansion or brand consistency?

As many as 76% of consumers say that personalization is a key factor in their purchasing decisions. Additionally, personalization has also been linked to a 50% reduction in customer acquisition costs and up to an eight-fold increase in return on marketing spend. 

Future outlook

What do you foresee as the next big development or challenge in this field? How should companies prepare to stay ahead?

As technology continues to advance at lightspeed, brands must adapt to meet the evolving needs of customers.

Continued digital transformation offers enormous opportunities to leverage data and turn it into personalized experiences. By harnessing the power of AI, you can gain deep insights into customer behavior, preferences, and needs, delivering delightful solutions. This level of innovation and personalization will be crucial to differentiate yourself in a crowded market.

However, the path to digital transformation is not without challenges. To charge forward, brands must invest in fostering a data-driven, innovative, and continuous learning culture. 

The future of all industries is digital, driven by emerging technology, changing behaviors, and an insatiable demand for innovative products. Brands and organizations that prioritize AI (and the required organizational changes to leverage it) will be positioned for success in the 2030s. So embrace these changes and secure your place in the future of the industry.

Discover how DEPT® can help your company succeed here.

Transforming digital experiences with AI

Generative AI is transforming business operations, making it crucial for companies to harness it effectively to stay competitive. The demand for AI-powered digital experiences is rising, but challenges like compliance and outdated technology can hold businesses back. Focusing on personalized, user-friendly experiences and using AI to adapt in real time is key. DEPT®’s expertise in AI-driven personalization makes them a great partner for navigating digital transformation, and we’re thrilled to celebrate them as our Partner of the Month!