Video: How machine learning and AI helps one digital agency create unique customer experiences
For several years in the 2010s, I was an adviser to Infor's CRM organization -- a sterling bunch of CRM leaders who loved the space and, at the same time, had some top-flight CRM-related applications (chief among them, Epiphany, one of the greatest customer-facing products of all time).
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I'd venture to say that Epiphany was the founding father of all RTIM and related technologies and remained the ne plus ultra of the interaction universe for a long time. More on that later. But even more foresighted and, to a large extent, more interesting, in 2012, Infor did something that I found (and still find) one of the single most innovative and incredibly valuable things I've ever seen in the tech industry: It created a for-internal-use-only design organization called Hook&Loop[2]. What made this a fascinating and immensely valuable idea (and a true differentiator) was that the hires weren't coders or architects but creatives -- 100 of them -- including the chief designer of Michael Kors and the person responsible for the special effects in the early Transformer movies -- you know, when the special effects (and the movies) were really good.
Hook&Loop, headed by one of my favorite Infor management team members, Chief Digital Officer Marc Scibelli[3], was and remains a breakthrough for a software company, especially one that is focused on enterprise software. What makes it unique is that it is responsible for design. But not just design of user interfaces and a user experience that is unparalleled in the enterprise software world, but also for building design,