Empowering Retail Marketers to Target Their Customers with the Right Message, At the Right Time, In the Right Channel: Grey Jean Technologies

Consumer behavior is a vast field to be studied and it is not at all possible to completely understand as it is related to the human mind. Consumers make buying decisions every day and with multiple real factors behind their purchasing decisions. Every buying decision has various characteristics -cultural, social, personal or psychological - and every factor includes dimensions that can be used in marketing.

In an era where technology is invading every single industry, it is now possible to predict consumer behavior. Based on past buying decisions and by using machine learning and artificial intelligence, we can “guesstimate” how a person might behave in certain purchasing situations.

With this mission and to effectively utilize the huge amounts of data created and left behind from every consumer’s digital trail and to help marketers use that data subtly, Grey Jean Technologies was founded in 2015.

Get Genie. Predict Consumer. Purchase Behavior.

Headquartered in New York, Grey Jean Technologies improves customer acquisition and sales across all retail channels.

The core to Grey Jean Technologies is the company’s product Genie, an AI-powered machine learning recommendation engine. Genie predicts a consumer’s buying behavior based on their previous actions. It looks at the components and attributes that connect a consumer with a product – like the time of day, location, demographics, and the attributes of a product.

Genie helps retailers treat each consumer as an individual by using datasets that a typical retailer or marketer holds including purchase history, transaction history, and loyalty data. The machine learning platform looks at all the datasets to correlate and understand why consumers buy a specific product. Genie not only analyzes data but it also corrects itself, which means if Genie recommends a product to a person and if the person does not buy or perform that action, Genie goes back and recalculates and comes up with a different product.

Grey Jean believes that AI technologies should be used to enhance our day-to-day lives. With security of data and privacy concerns in mind, Genie works in a way that is non-intrusive, effective and efficient.

Genie doesn’t use personal information and doesn’t share or sell data.

Being a self-learning, self-adjusting platform for brands and marketers, Genie programmatically delivers offers, deals, and messages consistently across multiple digital channels.

Overcoming Challenges

Just like every other start-up, Grey Jean had to overcome multiple hurdles.

Grey Jean’s first hurdle was to test the accuracy of its predictive capability. This depended heavily on the number of real life data sources and the quality of the data sources. Many of the data sets were inconsistent and lived in silos. Much of the data was never meant to be used in the way we wanted to use it. Our work to harmonize and programmatically ingest these disparate data sets enabled us to prove a 60-70 percent accuracy rate.

With the ability to execute data precisely, Grey Jean Technologies turn ideas into real things that are tangible and deployable. And that is what sets the company apart in the industry today.

“You always start with a blank sheet and with an idea. To become important in this Machine Learning space, our ability to turn ideas into real things have played a critical role over the years.”

The Future Vision

It is interesting to see the increasing adoption of both AI and blockchain technologies. Grey Jean is actively working with partners to build Genie within a blockchain. This will marry the best of blockchain technology – security, consistency and immutablity of data, with the best of machine learning technology from Genie – predictive fraud detection, risk determination and personalized communications.

Meet the Kingpin

Cosmas Wong, CEO of Grey Jean Technologies: Cosmas is an ex-corporate lawyer who found his new calling in data-driven companies providing data-driven solutions. As a founder of Enso Financial, a leader in the analysis of trading strategy and financial data for the world’s largest hedge funds, Cosmas is no stranger to big data.

At Grey Jean, Cosmas applies his experience of shepherding the most sensitive data to the marketing and retail space. An avid traveler and loyalty program enthusiast, he applies his personal passions to the consumer sector.

“Our ultimate goal has always been about reducing the footprint of marketing communications in order to make it more targeted and relevant for consumers.”