Whither ".ai"?

I’m often asked why our website and email domains are “nventiv.ai” and not “nventiv.com”. Is our business somehow associated with Anguilla, since “.ai” is the country code for that island in the Caribbean? Or are we building AI tools? What do we offer clients in the way of AI? The answer is not that simple - and in thinking through the question, it lends itself to a philosophical statement about setting expectations around AI in marketing analytics. Here’s a version of the response I typically give:

Recent advances in technology, including cloud computing & AI/ML, allow us to leverage the tools and techniques available today to greatly improve the outcomes we can deliver for our clients, compared to even just a few years ago. Applications of AI are often behind-the-scenes efforts that automate rote tasks and improve processes related to ingestion, exploration and analysis of data, that fuel creation of knowledge bases that capture and formalize institutional wisdom for common decision-making, and that apply advanced analytic techniques, including neural networks and deep learning. In terms of analytics specifically, that often means leveraging various libraries and frameworks within development environments that provide tools and algorithms for building intelligent systems to support our desired outcomes. In our case, that is most likely to mean machine learning and natural language processing.

Typically these aspects of our work do not deliver something “visible” for clients (hence the reason many businesses describe their offerings only as “AI-driven”!) For example, clients are rarely involved as we utilize AI tools to accelerate onboarding of client data, perform data hygiene, fill data gaps, classify data and create composite variables. Nor as we feed that output into analytic processes like predictive modeling and machine learning. But they do see the impact as we can deliver outputs at speed and scale that then influence their marketing activities and implement ongoing improvements over time.

Because that is our typical approach, we decided to use “.ai” to signal to the marketplace that our offerings are indeed “AI-driven”. We think that also includes leveraging cloud computing to tap into best-in-class approaches to ensure the security of our clients' data, freeing us to focus on the analytic and strategic services that are our sweet spot.