Zenie AI's Approach to Context-Driven Marketing Automation

Bharathi Kannan, Co-founder and Head of Engineering at Zenie AI, shares insights into how Zenie distinguishes itself in the rapidly evolving landscape of artificial intelligence. Kannan discusses Zenie's core integration within the ZEPIC platform, highlighting its continuous learning capabilities and the role of large language models in enhancing marketing strategies.

The conversation also touches on Zenie’s focus on user experience, security measures, and the innovative Team Inbox feature, which aims to streamline communication across various customer touchpoints. Kannan's perspectives offer a deeper understanding of how Zenie AI is shaping the future of marketing automation and customer engagement.

How Zenie AI Powers End-to-End Marketing Automation

How does Zenie differentiate itself from other AI engines, especially the AI Copilots and Agents that are becoming popular in the industry?

Unlike Copilots and Agents, which need to be summoned for a named, siloed set of tasks, Zenie AI is always ON, learning across all the data in ZEPIC, to assist users across their needs. From organizing customer data to creating workflows and launching campaigns,  Zenie is omnipresent, learning and helping in every product function for marketers.

ZEPIC hit the AI jackpot by being born in the golden age of GenAI. Our AI engine, Zenie, is not a layer on top of an existing tech stack, rather it is integral to our core architecture and thus there’s more context made available for the models to learn from.

Copilots and Agents are ‘bolted on’ to existing code wherever possible. Moreover, our extensive martech expertise has been leveraged to fine-tune the models, enabling Zenie to deliver highly accurate and relevant results tailored for marketers.

Could you explain how Zenie assists in various modules across the platform, from user onboarding to campaign execution?

Zenie acts as a comprehensive guide throughout the ZEPIC experience. It welcomes new users, helps with their setup and configuration process, and quickly enables them to create hyper-personalized campaigns—the primary goal for marketers using ZEPIC.

From the get-go, Zenie assists in importing, organizing, and storing customer data. It goes a step further by automatically creating and suggesting customer segments, and even crafting entire customer journey workflows and cross-channel campaigns—all from simple user prompts.

Before Zenie, the user had our easy drag and drop interface to create campaigns, but we’ve now exponentially made it easier. Now, users can bring their campaigns to life through text or voice prompts, making campaign creation as easy as having a conversation.

Today's consumer is 24x7 online, over multiple devices, and very unpredictable. Zenie AI helps businesses analyze the vast swathes of customer data to make meaningful connections with their customers. Honestly, we are only limited by our imagination in how Zenie can help users across the platform. This is because Zenie is part of the core platform learning from all data housed in ZEPIC, including user behavior data.

How does Zenie’s use of large language models (LLMs) enhance the accuracy and personalization of campaigns?

Zenie leverages a diverse array of LLMs, each fine-tuned for specific marketing use cases. This approach, rooted in our team's 15+ years of martech expertise, significantly enhances the relevance and accuracy of our AI-driven solutions.

Our LLMs are trained on custom datasets tailored to consumer marketing, which deepens their understanding of marketing language, customer behavior, and industry-specific nuances. This allows Zenie to produce more relevant and accurate outputs across various tasks.

We employ different LLM models optimized for specific use cases—such as customer segmentation, campaign personalization, and content generation. In this way, Zenie ensures precision and effectiveness in campaign execution, as each model is fine-tuned to excel in its particular domain.

Finally, Zenie’s models are continuously updated based on feedback and performance metrics, allowing them to evolve and improve over time. This adaptive capability enhances both the accuracy of ongoing campaigns and their ability to resonate with diverse audiences—meaning your campaigns keep getting smarter, more accurate, and more personalized over time.

What security measures or guardrails are in place to ensure Zenie provides accurate and consistent results?

We use a number of proprietary security frameworks and guardrails to uphold the integrity of the platform and to ensure consistent, accurate results.

Our privacy-first approach acts like an invisibility cloak, masking any personally identifiable sensitive information. We’ve included mechanisms to prevent prompt injection attacks and profanity and sensitive topic filters establish a professional and respectful setting across interactions with Zenie. 

Our accuracy guardrails keep Zenie's responses tethered to verifiable data and avoid generating outputs that deviate from established facts or fall outside the domain expertise it is trained on.

How does the ‘Bring Your Own Models’ feature work within Zenie, and how can businesses leverage it to meet their specific needs?

Upon request, we support customers in integrating Zenie with their own LLM providers. This enables businesses to optimize costs based on their existing arrangements and usage patterns. It also gives businesses greater visibility into how their data is processed and managed—ensuring they remain in control of their proprietary information.

Why should businesses trust software vendors with their proprietary data? Bring Your Own Models answers that question for them as they explore Zenie.

How does Zenie help streamline operations for customer service agents and marketing teams alike?

Consumers don't really care which department(customer service or operations or sales or marketing) they're talking to—their primary concern is getting sought value from the interaction. With Zenie learning from ALL customer data housed in ZEPIC, it appreciates and works for the entire customer journey with the brand.

A key capability is Zenie's customer summary feature. It provides every customer-facing team member with a concise yet comprehensive overview of the customer, giving them the best context in milliseconds at the crucial time of service. Thus, Zenie enables marketing and customer service at the speed of AI, breaking down traditional departmental silos and ensuring consistent, informed interactions across all touchpoints.

What was the inspiration behind launching Team Inbox, and how does it improve communication for businesses managing customer inquiries?

Team Inbox was born directly from customer feedback. As ZEPIC empowered marketers to create effective marketing campaigns that generated customer responses, businesses wanted to have the visibility and the ability to service these customer inquiries. 

ZEPIC is an Omnifunctional engagement platform—we want the end consumers to be able to get what they need regardless of the channel they use, be it email, SMS, WhatsApp, or social media. Our latest launch enables WhatsApp messages to be managed out of Team Inbox, with plans to soon enable businesses to manage multi-threaded customer conversations across channels. No more juggling between apps or losing track of messages!

How does Team Inbox integrate multiple communication channels, and what benefits does it offer to teams working with WhatsApp?

Currently, Team Inbox consolidates all WhatsApp-based customer engagements. Our roadmap includes imminent integration of Instagram DMs, SMS, and other IP-based messaging services, with email integration to follow.

WhatsApp has now become a versatile tool across business functions—Marketers use WhatsApp for their campaigns, Operations teams for their transactional notifications like Order deliveries, and Customer Service teams use WhatsApp to resolve issues or answer inquiries.  Its rapid global adoption across diverse teams stems from its personal, timely, and effective nature when used right.

ZEPIC enhances WhatsApp’s utility by providing these different teams with the best possible Customer 360. This includes contextual insights and first-party data across business applications, along with consumer behavior data from digital footprints. This empowers customer-facing teams to serve their customers, truly understanding and appreciating their entire brand experience.

How can businesses use Team Inbox to manage both promotional messages and transactional notifications more efficiently?

As mentioned above, the biggest help to businesses through ZEPIC is in its offering of a comprehensive view of each customer. It provides rich context—such as past conversations, purchase history, and recent activities—enabling more personalized and impactful responses to queries, whether they’re product or shipment-related.

By bringing all communication—transactional, promotional, and service-related—into one accessible space for customer-facing teams, we ensure no context gets lost in the shuffle. And with ZEPIC’s team Inbox, customers don't have to repeat themselves or wait while information is passed between team members. It's all there, ready for anyone who needs it, making interactions smoother and more efficient.

Are there plans to integrate additional messaging platforms or channels into Team Inbox in the future? Yes, we are just starting with the WhatsApp channel. We will expand our support to other channels like Email, SMS, and messaging platforms like Instagram DMs, Facebook Messenger, and so on.

With the recent product enhancements, how do you envision ZEPIC transforming the future of marketing automation?

We believe ZEPIC’s latest release is transformational to not just marketing automation but also how every enterprise software is expected to work. Zenie's comprehensive assistance—right from initial configuration and setup, through executing tasks, to analyzing and suggesting improvements—it establishes a new benchmark for business software functionality.

The future that we envision for marketing automation—and enterprise software at large— is that of deep personalization, tailored not only to each individual user of the software but also to every end consumer served by their business.

Could you share any feedback from early adopters of Zenie or Team Inbox that showcases the impact of these tools?

We’ve got very encouraging feedback from our customers as well as some of the world’s largest consumer brands who are piloting with us. Much of what we've discussed in this interview is directly informed by their experiences. We are experiencing a transformational moment in enterprise software, akin to one of the industrial revolutions. Before there were two-wheelers and four-wheelers, it took ages to get to one’s destination. Similarly, our early adopters now find it inconceivable to work without Zenie AI's assistance. It's gratifying to see customers accomplishing tasks in a fraction of the time they previously required.