Brands are always looking for ways to scale and innovate. Cheddar News catches up with John Dubois, EY Consumer Data & Analytics Leader, at EY's Emerging Tech pop-up event at SXSW to find out how brands can stay ahead of emerging tech.

Brands are always looking for ways to scale and innovate. Cheddar News catches up with John Dubois, EY Consumer Data &amp; Analytics Leader, at EY's Emerging Tech pop-up event at SXSW to find out how brands can stay ahead of emerging tech.

How Businesses Can Stay Ahead of Emerging Tech

Alright. This segment is brought to you by ey empowering today's leaders to realize tomorrow's opportunities. Brands are always looking for new ways to scale and innovate but it's not always easy to cut through the noise. So how can companies leverage new technologies and break through the status quo. Cheddar news, Michelle Castillo caught up with John Dubois, E wise, consumer data and analytics leader over us emerging tech pop up event at South by Southwest to find out, take a look, emerging technologies is transforming customer by our behavior. So how do you stay ahead of this trend? I think I think the trend is really based on a couple of key premises. Um One is that customers make decisions and part of our journey is to understand how they make those decisions. So um if we think about how you became aware of something and how you consider different options to fill a need, it all comes down to understanding what it is that consumers really want and what they need and then where they are and kind of deciding what it is they're going to be buying. What we're seeing is technology enables a lot of that. So um like, you know, the session we're having here where we're talking to influencers, how is it that an influencer informs potential customers of a need state? And then how is it that we can take that message and push that into, say a digital world so that we can continue to confirm that need and help them make the decision? Is it based on the price? Is it based on value, aesthetic? And so really the technology becomes an enablement to understanding the customer journey and then applying our knowledge of that journey to take friction out of that, that system to make that make their decision a little easier and more natural. So, generative AI which includes things like chat GPT is being talked about all throughout the South by southwest. So how are you advising customers to stay ahead of this trend? This trend has been a long time coming. We saw former president saying things are appearing to say things they hadn't said or actors faces being put on different characters. That's all generative. And so the way we look at all of these trends in sort of an S curve, which is you, you see a new tech, a bit of tech, it starts to get traction, but we really don't understand the use cases yet. And what we're seeing now a generative is some of the new prompt based systems. They're actually making this democratized and consumer facing consumer facing, which is capturing imagination like it's no longer people coding and trying to train models. It's, it's all about an interaction. I'm asking you something and I'm getting what seems to be a really authentic response back. And one thing that we're still, I'd say in the escort, we're still kind of understanding exactly where this is going to go. And so we've put together a number of use cases that we see, where can you generate things to make things along the journey? For example, more personal, more personalized, more authentic. And so the idea of generating content, it brings us back to the old days of merchandizing or marketing or even market places where I used to know the vendor and they used to be able to tell me, hey, based on what I know about you, this is the product you'd like at scale. That's really tough to do. But with the, with the generative ai I think we're getting closer to a point where maybe we can start to add authenticity to a relationship, to create connection with customers and to and to provide that kind of value at scale. So I think that's so where are you advising customers focused among? So where are you advising that customers focus amid all the noise? Yeah, noise. So I have a startup background prior to joining. Ey. So noise is a little interesting word for me because I view every idea that we're seeing even here at South by Southwest. It's founded in somebody's identifiable need, whether that need is large or small is yet to be determined. But I think of noise as something that can be built upon later. And so what I like to do is think about these solutions as building blocks and, and so noise while we may not have the right use case for a given solution or technology that technology down the road, maybe underpinning something extremely valuable. So I I generally advise customers to look at things um understanding how it will impact you now. But keeping in mind what the premise of that was and how that might apply to you in the future. All right, John Dubois Consumer Data and Analytics leader at EY. This segment brought to you by Ey helping you realize your transformation through the power of people, technology and innovation visit ey dot com to learn more.