Watch HDFC Bank’s Ravi Santhanam's hot take on AI

For the longest, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been used by marketers who have access to first-party data. It has been used to identify the needs of the customers with depth, explains Ravi Santhanam, chief marketing officer, HDFC Bank, in a conversation with Storyboard18 on the sidelines of Goafest 2023. However, that's changing.

Santhanam has an 18-member data science team. They help his marketing team decode data highlights and possible trends coming out of it. He explains, “When you have so much data, how do you get the data to work for you? How do you use the data to understand the consumers more, and that has been there for a period of time? Off late, the Generative AI that we all talk about, has caught the attention of a lot of people. There are still a lot of nuances that they need to understand.”

Santhanam and his team have started trialling and testing out how new AI tools and applications can help the banking sector. Santhanam opines that it can do a phenomenal job on communication. “When it comes to 101 personalised communication, I think, once the master creative is ready, the ability of us to personalise the communication to a wide set of people, creating narratives on a personalised basis, I think, that is where it will help,” he says.

Once it is being tested out, Santhanam is confident that it will coexist with human inputs. One challenge that he wants all the marketers to be cognizant of is everybody is going to use the same set of tools and ask the same questions. How is the communication going to be different from one brand versus another in the same category? How to build the brand ethos into that communication? How it is going to differentiate the two brands? These are some questions that marketers have to figure out going forward, he concludes.