Intelligent engagement: Dubai’s digital frontiers

So now on to our second panel discussion of the day, focusing on artificial intelligence, which is at the forefront of everyone's future planning conversations. And the expansion of this technology represents a really important investment of both government and brand level. But the exciting possibilities of AI technology can still be hard to prioritize. So to join me in exploring what brand and marketing leaders can do today to reap the benefits of AI tomorrow, allow me to work with three fantastic speakers Michelle Walsh, Senior Director of Marketing and Communications for the shopping malls at Majid Al Futtaim, Anna Germanos, the Group director of CPG retail, e-commerce and luxury for Middle East, Africa and Turkey at Meta and Ahmad Abu Rabi, Director of Decision Analytics at Miral. Welcome, everyone. Thank you so much for joining us today and taking time out of your busy schedules to be here. Before we begin, I'd just love if each of you give us a really quick introduction to your roles within your business. So it's just that our audience can get to know you a little bit better. Michelle, why don't we start with you? Hi, everyone. It's great to be here. My name is Michelle. I work for Majid Al Futtaim team, shopping mall division. I oversee marketing and communications. My head of comms told me to wear amazing shoes today, so I think Elisa, from Level Shoes would probably appreciate that comments. The problem was, I fell in. Thankfully, you just started because the traffic was heavy. But I prefer to fall out of these institutions instead of falling into the normally. But it's great to be here. Hi everyone. My name is Ahmad. I am leading the data analytics team in Miral group. With the 17 years of, data science, we try to convince marketing that we can help them always. And, we share our experience with you. Just make it easy then. Hi, everyone. Very happy to be here. So I'm Anna, I work for Meta, the mother company of, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger. I lead a number of verticals. So, basically working with the large advertiser and the consumer goods, retail, e-commerce and luxury to make the most out of their dollars spends on our platform. So making sure the return on ad spend is high and the ads are effective and efficient. Thanks so much, Anna. Well, on that note, why don't we start with you? Because I know that globally, Meta has been focused on several initiatives in this space, including things like, AI studio, Meta AI with Llama 3. Can you give us a really quick overview of Meta's key developments in AI and what it means for users in the Middle East? Sure, so, yeah, I mean, in all conferences, AI is the topic, of the now and, and, Meta has been heavily, heavily invested in AI and it's not new actually, it's been for the past ten years that we've been investing heavily in AI. The latest development on AI is something super exciting is our Meta AI assistant that is now available in all our apps. I actually have it on WhatsApp. I can show it to some of you, but this is not yet rolled out in the UAE. I have the privilege to be an internal employee and they test with us first. So I'm happy to show it to some of you. But it's one of the most powerful assistant. It's rolled out today in 14 countries. And it's being powered by Llama 3, which is our, newest open source, large language model. That fuels all the AI development and that is open source or available to anyone to build on it. Actually, ChatGPT has been built on Lla ma 2, which is the older version of Llama 3. So that's really the most recent announcement. But how do we practically use AI in our business in our day to day activities? It's mainly across many areas. One is, to fuel our discovery engine. Today, more than 20% of the content that you see on our apps, whether Instagram or Facebook, is suggested by AI, which makes it very personalized and very relevant. Second, it's helping a lot removing harmful content on our platform. More than 86 or 87% of hate speech is removed by automated systems, which helps a lot to read the content on the platform. Third, and this is very important for marketers, is fueling our, marketing solutions. Today we have a full new suite of, who called Advantage plus, solution that it's powered by AI, where we see 20% more conversion, at 30% less cost, so much more efficient, an effective ad solution. And as an anecdote, last year was it was sitting, you know, doing the annual review with one of the advertisers. And I'm like, you know, we should have seen more growth on the platform. And he was like, no, we managed to reach. Our target was, lower budgets because your solutions are becoming more efficient. And, of course, I said, you know, your targets were very conservative. You can push your targets for next year and then spend more on our platform. But we really see, it's, how AI is powering the solutions. It's also powering automating messages messaging with the AI bots on the messaging platforms. And finally, and I think this is very important, it's democratizing creativity today as marketers, especially in fashion and luxury. You have a catalog of product. But how do you make personalized ad. And going back to personalization is really sometimes changing the background, changing an image, a picture, etc.. And this is today available in our, generative AI studio, where any brand manager or anyone working on a campaign can change the creative and enhance it to make it more relevant and more personalized. So these are the areas where AI is, you really see from an end user. Some examples and use cases of AI in our day to day. I think that really links back to what Elisa was saying during the first panel about using AI to automate more mundane tasks and releasing people to actually maximize the power of their own creativity as well. Totally. But we just heard from Anna about, you know, what's happening at a very digital, a highly digital environment within the, matters ecosystem. Michelle I'd love to talk to you a little bit more about what that means in a more omnichannel environment. So thinking about a further about that investment. I know that over the last couple of years, Majid Malls has been investing significantly in upgrading the omnichannel experiences of its visitors. Can you tell us about some of these key developments and how that digital transformation is manifesting at an omnichannel retail environment? So, look, not much keeps me up at night, but there was one stat I saw or heard at a conference recently, and it kind of sticks in my mind as a way to, you know, approach transformation. 49% of people research online by offline, 51% of people research offline and buy online, right? So if you're thinking that way, that means you have to be all things to all people. And then it depends what their purposes, what's the occasion, who they're with. So it really throws the gauntlet down to all of us in retail and shopping malls is to how can we create amazing, omnipresent, customer experiences? So four years ago, we really embarked on figuring out, like, what's the purpose of a mall within a digital, shopping experience, right? You know, malls are a platform more than we are actual retail ourselves. So we bring people and brands together. So we're trying to work out. And it's a journey, right? What? You know, what we discover one year from research and insights, you know, is is highly is evolving at a rapid pace. So during obviously I hate to bring up that dirty C where it was Covid obviously, you know four years ago we were all kind of figuring out what changes we should expect moving forward. And we did have to obviously do a lot of, you know, quick adjustments to obviously digital experiences to allow for obviously a very challenging situation. But it began really a journey. I suppose it kind of got us on a journey quickly. Then probably as bricks and mortar, we probably would not have done. So I think it was good in that respect. It is hard to be a traditional bricks and mortar business trying to digitize. We were just saying that, you know, I have probably a lot more legacy systems to play with than you have. But what we have managed to do, and this is based on, obviously speaking to customers that are consumers that are coming to our mall. We landed on a, you know, a couple of key digital features that we feel will, enhance the pre discovery experience. So we have a, you know, in mall of the Emirates, we've created an e-commerce platform on one of the Emirates. So you can do a lot of discovery in advance and even purchase if you can't get there. We also have another a feature called Digital Concierge, where everything for the mall then is pretty much available to buy online. So you can get in touch with our WhatsApp channel, on one of the Emirates and tell us anything you want, and we'll deliver it within four hours. So we're starting to see a lot of take up in that area. And then we have other things like what can we do digitally to improve the physical experience. So we're we're adding, you know, more car parking, features to the app so you can reserve your car park in advance, which we know is a pain point or all over the world, not just our malls. And then obviously we have hands free shopping. If you're in the mall and you know your bags are too heavy, which I hope they are, you can get in touch with one of our runners who will come and either bring it to your car or again, delivered to your home within four hours. So I think we're in the direction in a few different areas, whether that be on a commerce side, on a chat side, and then improving the in mall experiences as well. Yeah, it's incredible to hear about how much is happening before they even visit the site, because that journey, that experience doesn't start when they enter the stores, enter a mall. It starts quite a long time before that, and I think that's really something for us to think about. When we think about the role of digital in that customer journey as well. And I know about Miral travel, you've also been implementing several AI powered developments that elevate the customer experience. Some things that come to mind. AI powered chat bots. You have a contact center that delivers highly personalized customer service. But interestingly, you've also been deploying these new developments in formats like email or SMS and live chat on your site. Can you tell us a little bit about how this works, and what's the effect of using them across all of these direct to consumer communication channels? Yes. Actually, we started the first phase, by, chatbot generative AI to help people when they contact our contact center to help them to answer to their questions first and then we shifted almost 10% of our customers who called call centers to this, generative AI. And we did see even better satisfaction. And we are serving our guests, we call it guest actually, we don't call them the customers. We served our guests much better. So now we are in the way where we have a lot of use cases, which we'll talk about, we have a transformation program called "Neue" where we have a lot of data science use cases, and we want to feed this generative AI to give the best experience to the customer. So when you interact with us, we will know, who are you? Are you a valuable customer? Are you a new customer? Do you have a family? And then we will give you the right advice, the right recommendation, so that you enjoy your experience in in the whole island? In. Yes. Island. So at the start, we really see, a good, benefit of it from, how we serve the customer and also for our team who is overloaded. And of course, this would reflect on the customer experience when you call and you wait long time and you just follow simple question. Now we are reducing this time and improving the customer experience. Like a lot of companies, we are investing a lot in AI. And, it is for us. It's only the start. It's a journey. There's a lot of, other touchpoints which we are, we will tackle, to improve the customer experience. So more to come then. I think about the development of social media. We've seen this space evolve from being a source of connection and inspiration to being an opportunity to convert sales. Do you find that fashion and luxury consumers are particularly active when it comes to social commerce, and why do you think that is particularly in this region? So today, luxury and fashion brands have the opportunity to measure, thanks to data and to having the right tech infrastructure to be able to measure sales and social platform to drive sales. So we see it. We see it every day with our partners. The recipe to actually driving scenes is having the right product. Serve it to the right consumer with the right message. It's saying it like this is very simple, right? To have the right product rely on the algorithm of the social platforms. Thanks to AI, and thanks to the power of the signals that are collected from all the consumers and the activity that they have on our platform, we have the discovery engine, which is of immense importance to category like fashion of luxury. Nobody will go and search for this black dress, but when you are on Instagram and I work for Instagram, so I'll highlight these platforms when you're on Instagram and you see this beautiful black dress, someone wearing it, and suddenly you click on it with two clicks and you go and buy it because you liked it. You didn't even needed this black dress. But then this product came and found me. And then I went and I actually bought it. So this is what we call discovery commerce. Thanks to this algorithm, they're surfacing products from your catalog to the relevant consumers. The second element of my equation is the targeting. Today you need to make sure that the targeting accuracy is very high. And thanks to again the algorithm, Meta has one of the highest match rates when it comes to actually really targeting people you want to target in your campaign. So having this right accuracy, it means that you're targeting the right consumers. The third element is the message. What are you saying to them? And then Fahed mentioned something about localization. In fashion, it's easy to do it when you have, you know, especially some of the brands are local. They know the consumers, they have very local examples. The more luxurious we go, the more difficult localization is. A lot of the branding and the messages come from the central members that where they don't really know the local consumers, the Middle Eastern consumers. But this is changing. We see more and more localization coming. Ramadan last Ramadan was a brilliant example of brands like Bulgari, Tiffany and a lot of luxurious brands today that are creating bespoke content with people, celebrities from the region to be relevant to the to the consumers. So when you have these three ingredients together on social media, then sales will happen and conversions will happen. So most of the advertising activity that we see are really targeting, especially in retail and in fashion and luxury, are targeted for performance. So to drive sales and more and more companies are being very, a lot there's a lot of scrutiny around the return on advertising spend. And thanks to the data, we're able to prove the impact of marketing, not only on online sales that is very easy to measure because you have the data and you have, if you're going directly to consumer, be able to measure the sales. But we're also in the world of luxury, where in-store is still very, very important. We're able, thanks to some sort of integration of online to offline integration, also measure the impact of your online activation on the sales that happen in stores. So having the right equation and the right, infrastructure to be able to measure this, is really helping brands to track the conversions and the sales that are happening. Here we've heard so much about personalization today, but I love that idea of a brand or a product discovering the consumer rather than the other way around, and really landing that message that it was made for them. And I think one of the key things I take from what you said, Anna, is how impactful social commerce is on incrementality, which is obviously a really important metric for success for all marketers. And you get that level of data in those kinds of environments in a way that maybe you don't get from from other channels. Maybe one thing to add on targeting. And this is back to the AI almost, always brands have and or brand marketeers have some, you know, preconceived ideas about their own target audience. Like, we want to target this audience because this is the core audience, which is, which is very true. But then with the new AI powered solution, we recommend to use audience liquidity, keep the audience open, because you might be very attractive to some consumers where you never knew that these were part of your audience. So as long as the conversion happened, let the algorithm optimize for you and you'll see that there are new pockets of consumers. This goes back to your incrementality point that you never tapped into because you were so constrained into your targeting. Let the system optimize. Let it find the audience that will, that's your brand will appeal to, and the conversion will happen. Were sold, Anna, I promise. As I said, the power of AI to, I guess, do a little bit of myth busting about who your core customer is as well. Michelle, I read that math is also working on enhancing its data strategy and its use of best of breed technologies as well. What does this mean in real terms? And also, how can brands benefit from better understanding of the customer data that you possess? Yeah. So, working on, It's probably the correct, two words in your question there. And, hopefully I'm consistent with what Fahed also mentioned on his side because we work in the same group. This is probably one of the hardest things that we work on. You know, we, as I said earlier, you know, we're a traditional company. We have a lot of legacy systems. We are a huge ec osystem at Majid Al Futtaim. And on the face of it, we do have a lot of information, what we're trying to and it's still a work in progress is how easy is that data to interpret? How easy is it to access? How usable is it for our teams, and then how is it actually driving value back to our business? So I would say we're at different stages in each of that. And, you know, new tools come on all the time. And then you have to, you know, consider, should we be changing to this? And it's a very agile thing with very complex systems. Right. So I think we've been fortunate in that we launched a loyalty program about four years ago, which is our share loyalty program. I'm sure some people will have heard of it. That's been able to give us a cross-POV of what's happening with our consumers. And I think that's where it gets really interesting. So it's not just me understanding one component of someone's experience. It's looking across a breadth of, occasions and times and behaviors and spend and stuff like that. So what we're now starting to do is speak to. So for me, it's about how do I. Give retailers value. Okay. So this is where we're sitting down and we're discussing, you know, segmentation on a very deep level right now. We we can sometimes cut out Meta in this scenario because I can do segmentation and then obviously send someone a targeted offer. And we can close the loop straight away. We will never get rid of Meta I promise. Don't worry. But I think we're starting to see a new dawn for us, which is I can close the loop, I have the information I can segment, I can send a communication to a retailer that I'm working with. We know when someone comes, we know what they're spending and we close the loop. So for me, I think that's an amazing opportunity that I think we're really going to take to the next level. So if any retailers are here, you know, please obviously reach out. We're already in touch with all of the brands that exist in, you know, in our in our malls to come up with these kind of I wouldn't even say use cases anymore. This is now a products that we're offering to our retailers and we can see value straight away from it. And you know what I'm sensing from what you just said and some of the conversations that have taken place earlier is there is such a culture of collaboration and a willingness to share learnings about what you're discovering about your customers, perhaps in a way that you don't see in some more mature markets where people are very like, defensive and protective of their customer data. And here people want to share. They want to have workable strategies that impact everyone and ultimately customers for the benefit of their experience as well. I'm just I have to mention a little bit about the development of the loyalty program at Majid malls. I know that's something that's also been evolving, within Miral. And when it comes to an industry like travel and tourism, obviously the experience is all that more important. You mentioned some of the developments that you've introduced at Yas Island, earlier, but I think you have a new program called Gas Connect. I believe that helps connect, visitors to different services and solutions such as Wi-Fi and nothing that preferences. What's the value of the data that you can get from these touchpoints and the new loyalty program? And how does that help to drive future loyalty as well? Yes. So, we talk about a lot of experiences in the Yas Island. We talk about the theme parks. We talk about, Ferrari World, about if you had arena where we do events, but the event is one customer. Right? So we need to know everything about these customers to be able to build the right experience with them. So that's why we have, which is my connect system, where we gather all the information as much as we can in my connect to know the customer, we can know, for example, in which hotel you came, did you come with a family? What you visited all this which was complying with the data privacy? Of course. So this will allow us to better hyper personalize the recommendation for the customer. And something really, really important is that I think we all agree on that is if we, hyper personalization is, is not an option to really, generate growth from data. However, if you don't do it correctly, we can create friction with the customer. So more information we have about the customers better we can sell them better we give them the, I mean, the best experience in the whole island and even in Abu Dhabi, as a destination. I just say on that subject of hyper personalization when it comes to recommendations, I read that you also implemented a new program called "Neue," that helps with automating those recommendations and creating a more, tailored experience. Can you tell us what the impact has been on customer satisfaction with automating this highly tailored experience for guest? Yes. Before even talking about the customer satisfaction, about knowledge, the transformation program which we, initated to become the first data driven company and the first company in terms of customer satisfaction. So what is most no risk? A set of data science and machine learning, use cases. We build, all the technology along this, when I joined Miral, about nine months ago, I looked at all these, and I realized there's one challenge, which is, not all these use cases, machine learning, very advanced, are used. And so this, for me was really a big issue and big challenge. So why they are not used. And we said let's automate this. Actually if you go to marketing team we tell them I'm building for you a machine learning tool. There was no way for them to say, what is that? No, but if we tell them that, we would help you to, however personalize you don't need to do anything. Actually, we will automate it. So the automation came on top of that. So automation meaning that we run a very complex algorithm to know what to recommend the best experience for each customer. And then we need to automate it to go out to the customer at the right time. So all this automation plus machine learning, it will drive us naturally to the recommendation engine and the AI. Yeah. So definitely this will also increase the customer satisfaction in everything we do. We measure the impact on the NPS. It is very important for us and we do see an impact. Sometime when we change the price, for example, we see a set of, customers who know the prices, then they are unhappy, etc.. But we do consider this, and the idea is to say this with the customer in the center of the business, what we are doing is good for the customer. Let's do it. If it is not, let's not because we know that long term the impact we can have a negative impact. So, new program is a great program, which we are we are just at the beginning of our journey, one year only, and the vision is five year program, which we, we released to the AI, which was also our data science and machine learning. You're wrong. We only run away from finance, not the data team. Well, I say one thing. You said that I think it's a really important reminder is, you know, we've heard about the use of AI, when it comes to personalized recommendations and optimizing services as well. But actually the timing of when content and messaging gets deployed is also really important because you can have the right product mix, you can have the right messages, but if it hits the customer at the wrong time, when that, then they're distracted and not in a mindset to engage with that content, then it won't have the desired effect. Yes. If I may, just one thing. One of challenges also was which channel we should contact the customer and how we have a data. We have a data platform, and we have a centralized data where we have all these, the communication for each customer. And we said, okay, if we don't want someone to send an SMS and a CRM, send an EDM. And there is a contradiction on this. So ere Emarsys came in the picture and everything now goes to the customer go through Emarsys which is connected directly with our customer database. This is a very important point to mention because when, we again, we don't want to create a friction with the customer. We want to use a centralized flow, to contact our customers. Thank you so much, Ahmad. I have a couple of questions for all of you. Now, just on some more general trends that we're seeing emerging in the market. So the first one is just about how luxury consumers in the Middle East are engaging with innovative technology like virtual reality or live streaming or even the acceptance of crypto, which I think is accelerating faster in this region than it is in other parts of the world. And I'll come to you first. Are there any unique behaviors or attitudes that you see in response to some of these trends here? I believe what we have seen, from, luxury and fashion, we've seen the, WhatsApp really gaining a lot of attraction. We seen it with the great example of Mall of Emirates with the WhatsApp concierge. Going back to personalization, this is the most personalized experience that you can have. It's one on one. It's by directional, it's private. So in that sense, we've seen especially in the Middle East, I don't know if it's something specific, but in our region, we love to chat. If we compare the Middle East to any other part of the world, we have one of the highest adaption of WhatsApp and chatting per capita in the world, with higher than the US. So from that perspective, I think there's a huge opportunity. Some brands are really starting to leverage, especially brands and marketers from our region that are being top the charts. And MAL, which creates, Mall of the Emirates is one example. And we have other examples, especially in the luxury segment, some luxury marketplaces, whether it's, you know, Chalhoub Group or, Al Tayer Group that are now leveraging WhatsApp, a lot of it is organic. It's paid messaging. So it doesn't feel like it's ad it's, intrusive. And they are creating more and more awareness that these channels exist today. When you see some ads like chat now, etc., to direct the traffic so that you can have this personalized experience. And from there, once on WhatsApp, you can automate a lot of it, when you have the scale, to make it more efficient and to be able to cater for the messages that comes through the channel. Thanks Anna. Michele, I imagine that technologies that have more of an experiential element, like VR or live streaming, are also really important to, business that blends that physical and digital experience. What kind of role do they play in the strategies at Majid malls? So we're seeing some interesting stuff particularly in China. In this area, it hasn't quite come here yet in as big a way. I still think, you know, going to shopping malls and just generally shopping is a national pastime here, right? Thankfully. And I know people say, you know, death of malls. We've been hearing about that for the last couple of weeks or years. I don't agree with that. I think bad malls and bad retail will go away, but great malls and great experiences will continue to prosper. What we're noticing is, and particularly within luxury, is there's a huge investment in emphasis going into what's happening in the boutiques. Okay. And people are appreciating that. I'm not saying we're at a ceiling as on the online, but we're definitely seeing that, you know, people are wanting to go back to that in mall experience and the in retailer experience. And then it's a case of, well, what does digital mean within the store experience as well? We're working with, you know, our retailers to figure that out together. We've tried a few things. We tried, you know, a solution called Hero Shopping, where you can directly speak to a sales associate. It was a couple of years ago. The take up wasn't there, but it was something that we wanted to try. I think that's the thing. We're not afraid to try things. And if it doesn't work, then, you know, we learned, you know, in obviously in great ways from that. I think we just need to be open minded moving forward. Try stuff. You know, Digital Concierge is working really well for us. It will never replace, but it's complementary. So it's finding the complementary technology solutions. That's where we're at right now. Thank you. Anything to add on it? Thank you. The only thing I would say is, transformation is a journey. There is no there is no, this is not easy. There's a lot of change and management on it and has to have a change of the culture of each company with its.