How He Did It: Leveraging Your Data for AI—and Propelling Business Growth

Every company, big and small, collects data—sales transactions, purchases, productivity, advertising performance, customer sentiment, and much, much more. Typically, they use this data to run reports to see how things stand: Did they meet sales goals? Are they holding on to market share? Did their latest advertising campaign reap a new list of prospects?

Smart businesses would then use that information to plan for the future: Where should they spend their marketing budget?  Do they have enough of the right inventory to capture sales without tying up capital? Is their workforce right-sized?

There are two problems with this scenario. First, the data is all in the past. As every mutual fund prospectus says, “past performance is not indicative of future results.” And second, the decisions based on this (already old) data are, at best, educated guesses. 

Erik Huberman, an entrepreneur who founded and runs a unique marketing agency that makes top-notch digital services available to smaller companies, knew that the solution to these issues was artificial intelligence (AI). When I interviewed Erik for our How I Did It video series, he outlined several steps toward leveraging AI that not only made his own company more efficient, but also created a product he could sell to a market far larger than his agency could ever reach otherwise. Here are some tips—watch the full video to get the details:

1. Save all your data. Your data— all of it—is unique to your business and reflects its collected wisdom and experience in raw form. Get permission to collect and save data from your customers, partners and suppliers as well. Even before Erik knew exactly how to extract value from it, Hawke Media collected anonymized data about its clients’ performance.

2. Analyze how you use data to make decisions. Hawke Media built expertise around optimizing marketing campaigns by analyzing client performance against multiple benchmarks and key performance indicators (KPIs). Understanding how humans use this data will inform how AI will use it down the line.

3. Make your data real time. Erik’s first goal was to build the capacity to stream real-time data from multiple digital channels concurrently so users could get a broad view of performance.

4. Train AI on your collected data. Modern technology has put machine learning (ML) and AI tools within reach, so this is not as far-fetched as you might think. Erik acquired a company with this capability.

5. Plug in real-time data. Training AI on your own, proprietary data sets (including customers, vendors, etc.) creates a model or algorithm that can correlate inputs (or “signals”) with outcomes (that is, decision-making) in ways that are imperceptible to humans. By applying this algorithm to current data, you can create forecasts. The greater the volume and variety of data you use, the more accurate the forecasts. Erik’s data comes from client campaigns as well as industry benchmarks.

6. Inform decision-making with forecasts. Now, the magic. Imagine you’re able to peer around the corner and get a peek at the future based on what’s happening right now. You can anticipate both risks and opportunities, and adjust your actions to take the best path forward.

7. Sell it as SaaS. Following these steps, Erik essentially transformed part of his company’s experience and knowledge into software. He could (and does) use it to make his agency far more efficient. But he also chose to make the technology available to other companies—even competing agencies. Why? Because software-as-a-service (SaaS) lets him increase his profit margin with every subscription to a global market his agency could only have dreamed of before.

Want to know how Erik leveraged data to position his company for hockey-stick growth?  Watch my free video interview and hear him tell his story by signing up for How I Did It, a new free program from Birthing of Giants that provides step-by-step explainer videos from fast-growth entrepreneurs like Erik.