NRF coverage in New York showcased the future of retail as a technology and AI show with IoT devices, wearables, and edge computing. Marina Petrova from GMS discusses generative AI business and the company's focus on AI after acquiring Intentful, an AI business, last year. The speed and accuracy of AI at NRF are impressive, making AI a game-changer in marketing, data, and creativity. Marina emphasizes the importance of education on practical AI implementation and the shift towards widespread adoption. Companies need to embrace AI to stay competitive as the gap between technology evolution and adoption widens. GMS specializes in AI-powered customer engagement solutions and welcomes collaborations to drive innovation in the AI space.
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Marina Petrova, GMS
NRF coverage in New York showcased the future of retail as a technology and AI show with IoT devices, wearables, and edge computing. Marina Petrova from GMS discusses generative AI business and the company's focus on AI after acquiring Intentful, an AI business, last year. The speed and accuracy of AI at NRF are impressive, making AI a game-changer in marketing, data, and creativity. Marina emphasizes the importance of education on practical AI implementation and the shift towards widespread adoption. Companies need to embrace AI to stay competitive as the gap between technology evolution and adoption widens. GMS specializes in AI-powered customer engagement solutions and welcomes collaborations to drive innovation in the AI space.
NRF coverage in New York showcased the future of retail as a technology and AI show with IoT devices, wearables, and edge computing. Marina Petrova from GMS discusses generative AI business and the company's focus on AI after acquiring Intentful, an AI business, last year. The speed and accuracy of AI at NRF are impressive, making AI a game-changer in marketing, data, and creativity. Marina emphasizes the importance of education on practical AI implementation and the shift towards widespread adoption. Companies need to embrace AI to stay competitive as the ga...Read more
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What method did the speaker use to gather key information from the NRF conference and trade show?add
What are the different roles and players involved in the AI industry, and how is the market infrastructure evolving to accommodate the increasing integration of AI in companies worldwide?add
>> Hello, welcome back to theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, your host with Dave Vellante here for three days for Mediaweek. This is NRF coverage. It's basically retail week in New York. Everybody's here. They're talking about the future of retail. Basically it's a technology show, it's become an AI show. Always had IoT devices, always had wearables, always had edge computing. Now computing and data and AI is all here. We've got a great lineup of guests all week bringing it down. Closing this out is Marina Petrova, head of generative AI business at GMS. You're closing this out. You missed the bell. You probably saw it from the balcony.
Marina Petrova
>> I was here. I was here.>> Well, thanks for coming on. Appreciate you.
Marina Petrova
>> Thank you. Thanks for inviting me.>> You're closing out our fabulous three days with coverage. Let's get into what you do, head of generative AI business at GMS. First of all, tell us what you guys do and then your role there.
Marina Petrova
>> Sure. GMS has been in the telecommunications and messaging space for almost 20 years now, and as every company is now evolving and changing, they started looking or we started looking into AI as well. And GMS acquired my company that I started four years ago in 2021 called Intentful, which was AI business, and that was basically bringing AI into market.>> And what year is that? Last year?
Marina Petrova
>> It was last year.>> Last year, okay. Congratulations.
Marina Petrova
>> Thank you. Thank you.>> All right. How's it feel to be part of the big machine?
Marina Petrova
>> It's interesting experience for sure, and I love bringing the innovation and bringing the change and being the voice of change and I absolutely love it.>> Well, first of all, we love the disruption that Gen.AI is doing in a good way. Retail here. Healthcare is a lot of devices. Telecom, similar enablement coming in that market. What's the perspective here at retail week with NRF, is it connectivity? What's the Gen.AI equation?
Marina Petrova
>> As I was walking here, I was thinking about everything that I saw at NRF and also at the experience that I had, not just on the trade show floor, but when you walk into the conference, there is just so much. There's just so much information that is so easy to get overwhelmed. But we now live in the age of AI. What I did, I took the print brochures that they had at NRF and then I also took the NRF website and then I used my AI assistant and said, "Can you sum up the key players here? What they do? What is their AI initiatives and what are the trends and what should I be paying attention to?" And of course it did, and I think this is so different from everything that we had before.>> Sounds like you can be a reporter for SiliconANGLE on theCube instantly.
Marina Petrova
>> I'd love to actually. I love that.>> But did they have us? We weren't on the list, but no, but this is a really great example. How fast was that?
Marina Petrova
>> It was seconds. It was probably up to a minute because there was just the volume was so huge that it had to do it and the task that I gave it was so significant. And the key thing that both I saw with my own eyes and what AI suggested is one of the core topics was the omnichannel experience and how retail is becoming that you can see what's happening with the customer engagement throughout different channels. And that is of course taking everything to a completely different course.>> Marina, that would've taken a sit down, a cup of coffee, slogging through, and they're all pages you got to turn, you miss everything, you get tired. I mean, that is a great use case of the speed and the accuracy.
Marina Petrova
>> And what it did, it didn't only look at what I asked AI to do, not just look at the company profiles, but also if they are in the news and what they're talking about and what their core messages is and how there is an overlap whether we just launched the new, a slightly different topic, we just launched a new product, which is what I call to be the beginning of two-way marketing when people can start having a conversation with an ad. And that also translates into retail as well. So when I was talking to AI, I was curious to see if there is an overlap with what's at NRF and what we are doing. And it's just fascinating.>> Yeah, we're living in what I love about this market, you and I must cut from the same cloth because I personally have that same emotional reaction because once you get that immediate value so fast, you get into these essentially prompt-like experiences where it's not probably, but your mind is going that next step. And then as you get deeper, you're iterating through the thought process. Your train of thought or train of prompt now translates to tokens. So you see things like memory, train of thought, these are tech terms that are buzzwords, if Jonathan from data to say it's too many buzzwords, but this is kind of where the creativity and the value's going. Take us through your view of that because it seems like we're so early.
Marina Petrova
>> We are incredibly early. And when I had my first interaction with AI and my background is marketing and advertising and media. And when I saw the first time it was like as if electricity was going through me and it was GPT-III, it was way before ChatGPT and everything. And my immediate thought was this is going to change everything in creativity, in data, in marketing and in management because you can inform AI what it needs to do and how you can connect with, I like calling it now, you can connect with every customer one-on-one and at scale at the same time just because of what AI can do.>> It's going to really change the game. And there's all the normal stuff we're hearing hyper personalization, omni channels, but as this connective tissue gets together, the ability to actually do all this and actually have the mechanisms are now going to be either at our fingertips. So I have to ask you, what are some of the things that you guys are doing to kind of move us down the road to some sort of, I guess I feel like I'm in kindergarten, but we are going to grow up fast. Where are we in that phase of growth?
Marina Petrova
>> So there are a couple of things that we are doing apart from the product and commercial side of things. From that day one, when we decided to start an AI company, it was clear from day one that we also want to be as sort of a part of our mission to educate people because we are all creatures of habit and it is very difficult to go through change. And so what we also do is we do practical AI implementation sessions sort of to go through AI one-on-one, how you can do this. And what I have been seeing year-over-year and for years in the world of AI is a lot. It's a long time. And I have seen people going eyes like this, what is this? We have no idea what this is, and that was before ChatGPT. And then gradually that perception has been changing from just having early adopters to hype to now having everyone realizing that it is time to understand that it is here to stay, and okay, so how do we actually handle that?>> I just had Jonathan Franklin on, who was an AI scientist at Databricks who was at Mosaic ML before super in the weeds, nerdy in a good way. He said, "Just write it down what you want to do and just got to know what you're measuring. Don't get too over complicated on it. Start simple." And he goes, "Write it down." And I said, "Is pseudocode the new code?" He goes, "No, that is the code." So in natural language you can actually understand just the logic, but the key point was if you don't know what you're measuring, then don't even do it. But if you know you want to measure something and you know what the question is or string or words, I would like to go into my newsfeed and find out all the cool things were mentioned and cut a video out of it and post it to YouTube.
Marina Petrova
>> That's a very similar thing that I was given to our team even before ChatGPT advance so significantly. I was telling them that you always need to start with understanding what it is that you want to achieve, what it is that you wanted to do, and then as if you're talking to a human being. I think that my communication habits have changed as well because I have always been direct, but it's like given->> You're a prompt machine....
Marina Petrova
>> and people on the same time are much better if they could.>> I should get some tips from you. I know you kind of feel like I'm prompting, pretend that you're a doctor.
Marina Petrova
>> Right, exactly.>> Wait a minute, why don't just say that? And by the way, law fields, all tax, all this heavy lifting is happening.
Marina Petrova
>> Yes.>> Now, I mean, you're going to see a shift to creativity, what's your perspective on the human impact?
Marina Petrova
>> I think that human impact will continue. I think the key power is in human and artificial intelligence combined. I think we humans still, we do have our creativity. Of course AI can prompt our creativity, but I think it is the human that directs AI in terms of what AI can do and it can augment so many of our talents actually. And I think that the creative industry is going to benefit tremendously from this.>> So first of all, is it gms.net, that's the website?
Marina Petrova
>> Yep.>> You can check it out. I want to just ask you, because I love the web page, splash page. It says, "AI communication solutions for customer." Let's talk reach your goals in the normal website thing, but talk about the AI because I like this positioning, AI communication solutions, what does that mean? Does that mean you're building AI like packets or moving like communications or is it AI communications as in communicating data to people? What's the main premise of that?
Marina Petrova
>> It's interestingly a little bit of both because GMS started historically in the telecommunications, in the messaging space. So there is one component where communications is actually the delivery, and AI is coming into that area as well. AI is everywhere. And the other one is communications as a marketing, communications as customer communications as customer connections where the brands and companies get connected through communication and through AI powered communication with the companies and customers.>> And tell me about your job. What's a day in the life for you? Tell me about your team, what are your goals?
Marina Petrova
>> First of all, I think that in the last four years I probably have the most interest and most amazing job in the world because there is something new every day. Once you accept that fact that it's always change and you are comfortable with constant change, that's fun. If you don't like change, that's difficult. So my day in life is->> You got to know who you are, be ready for it....
Marina Petrova
>> my day in life is customers speaking to customers and traveling around the world. We have customers all over the world from Asia to the U.S of course. And this is involving educating them on what their possibilities are, obviously suggesting our products and looking for. And it is changing because the way it started initially when AI was just new to everyone, most of the conversations were around discovery. What it is, what can you do, what can we do in our business? And I learned so much over the last year by talking to hundreds of businesses around the world and just amazing. Another thing that I think what is happening right now is every company in the world because of AI is becoming a startup because everyone needs to change.>> They have to see new opportunities and go after them, but not the same way they did other things.
Marina Petrova
>> Exactly. And the whole world now is at a phase except for the startups that actually started in this is at the phase where how do we change, what do we do? And there is this widening gap, which is concerning to me.>> Which gap?
Marina Petrova
>> Widening gap between technology, how quickly technology evolves and how quickly the companies are ready to start that adoption.>> Yeah, I mean the question is AI ready for the company? Is the company ready for AI? And AI it's getting ready fast, it's getting better every day.
Marina Petrova
>> And if they->> If the gap is big, they're going to be put out of business. I mean, at the end of day, if I'm an entrepreneur, I mean first of all, to your point about them being entrepreneurial, if they don't do it, they're going to be cannibalized by an entrepreneur who's going to say, "Thank you, I'll take your lunch and dinner."...
Marina Petrova
>> That's exactly what I think is we are going to see a lot of those examples, a lot of them. Because in the old, let's say traditional culture, there is the CEO who delegates everything to their team. You cannot delegate learning. Everyone has to know what it is. Everyone needs to spend their 10 hours or more playing with it, touching it, understanding what it is to be able to bring that change. You cannot delegate AI learning to anyone.>> I mean, people throw AI at things like, but in the enterprise in particular with a big action as we cover a lot of the enterprise, of course, there's a lot of domain expertise involved in the enterprise. Just inherently a lot of knobs and buttons. You got to push all these databases and credentials and consumer, even the consumer has, you can't just throw AI at the consumer either because the best AI has domain-specific data that's been either trained, reinforced, so there's always domain-specific data. It's just harder in the enterprise. So you have to kind of know that in order to make AI or not. What's your take on that?
Marina Petrova
>> That's actually every single slide two on every presentation that I make, or maybe slide three after the initial introduction says you can teach AI anything. And that's what I'm trying to explain to everyone that we talk with is that it is not your personal experience that you had with a free version of whatever platform. You can have your own version of whatever you want to call it, engine model, anything, and then it would have the knowledge of what you want it to be and then it becomes a super capable employee. It becomes your assistant, it becomes whatever you want.>> Yeah, Marina, what's interesting is that I've been really kind of, I ask this question a lot to all the experts when I meet the Databricks nerd and all the other guys coming in, how do you tell the players from the pretenders?
Marina Petrova
>> Oh my God.>> Everyone says they're an AI guru or they're like a expert. But at Amazon re.Invent, this came up, the guys from Poolside answered the best so far. There's true producers of AI. These are like hardcore eating glass, machine learning, algorithms, like the high-end computer science making, $2 million a year, whatever they're doing in Google. And then you've got consumers of AI. So you either producing, now I added a third thing saying, what if you're a data provider? Because remember, synthetic data is filling the void. So I added a third, they agreed to that. So we agreed to produce AI, consume AI, and then they have their own data here or data providers in here, synthetic or real aggregation. Great. If you're going to be a consumer of AI and you engage with someone who has AI, but you have to have domain-specific expertise. So it's domain plus AI-
Marina Petrova
>> And value.... >> and workflows.
Marina Petrova
>> Right.>> So the thread is end to end workflows well understood. You don't have to be completely figured out, but I know I have an outcome. I want to make this work better. I want something to do this. Then you have the domain expertise to know what it is. It's like playing chess. If you don't know what checkmate looks like-
Marina Petrova
>> Oh yes, absolutely.... >> don't play chess.
Marina Petrova
>> 100%.>> Would you agree?
Marina Petrova
>> So I do agree 100%. And I think the infrastructure of the market is finally becoming clear and it is changing and it is only starting. So there is infrastructure, then there are companies like Microsoft and Google and OpenAI that are providers of LLM, and then there are value builders that goes on top of that, and the data goes also in that as well. I think what we're going to see now is every single company on earth, I think it is happening everywhere. Everyone is in integrating AI one way or another. But we will stop seeing that AI is added everywhere because it'll be like a computer.>> Yeah, fluctuation.
Marina Petrova
>> It's about the value.>> Like you're talking about electricity. It's like you felt electric. I think AI is electricity.
Marina Petrova
>> Yes, I agree with you 100%.>> It's in everything.
Marina Petrova
>> Yes.>> How we use electricity, we can either shock ourselves to death-
Marina Petrova
>> Yes, exactly.... >> or power it.
Marina Petrova
>> That's what we also started doing. We started with initially with explaining what AI is because it's where the market was and how we were creating the AI specific instances for our clients. Right now, we are moving a little bit more into the product side of things because this is easier to understand and this two-way marketing that I was talking about, it's advertising. Everyone knows what advertising is, and now because it has that technology evolved into it, you can take it to a completely different level.>> That's awesome. Well, I really appreciate you coming in here. I have to ask you, where are you based out of?
Marina Petrova
>> So my accent is Ukrainian. We have the office in Midtown here.>> Are you here in New York?
Marina Petrova
>> Yes, I'm here in New York.>> Great. We're in our new studio here, you can come back. We'll do a deep dive.
Marina Petrova
>> I'd love to do it.>> I would like to do a deep dive one at least for an hour because we have to wrap up the show here. But I do want to ask you one final question. As you look at AI and you look at your plans, what is GMS doing? Give a plug for the company and what your group is doing, share with the audience some of the things that you guys are doing and how they can work with you.
Marina Petrova
>> Please reach out. We're happy to talk. So we work as AI communications providers in multiple areas. So it is customer engagement, customer solutions, customer-related solutions that are AI-powered that help connect companies and their customers.>> Thank you so much for coming on.
Marina Petrova
>> Thank you.>> We're here on our new set, market's closed, everyone runs out the door. The market is closed big day today at the NYSC. The market's up. I'm John Furrier ending our three days of wall-to-wall coverage for Mediaweek. This is our NRF coverage. It's been retail tech, AI week, all week. Here with Dave Vellante and myself all week. Thanks for watching.
