Generative AI has taken over the world of marketing with businesses experimenting and trying to figure out how it would help them run their business smoothly. At Pitch CMO Summit 2024, experts from the BFSI industry came together to discuss Gen AI revolutionizing the space.

The discussion revolved around how businesses were using Gen AI and bringing relevance using responsible AI.

The Pitch CMO 2024 session was moderated by Udit Agarwal, VP & Global Head of Marketing Exotel. The panellists were Kavita Jagtiani, CMO at L&T Finance; Geetanjali Chugh Kothari, CMO, Future Generali India Life Insurance; Erum Kidwai, SVP & Head of Marketing, Ageas Federal Life Insurance; Hector Anklesaria, Deputy Vice President - Marketing, Tata Capital and Abhishek Gupta, CMO, Edelweiss Tokio Life Insurance.

Starting the conversation, Agarwal asked about GenAI’s relevance to customers and its use for multiple channels while not spamming. Jagtiani responded and said, “As L&T Finance has a wide spectrum of products, it's a wide audience that we cater to. Our mission is to leverage AI not just to maximize reach but also to create customer delight. We look at the what, who, and how, of the campaign. To understand our customers well, we assimilate the data on our consumers across touchpoints and create an understanding of individual preferences.”

“Understanding the causality of consumer behaviour and then targeting accordingly is what helps in creating consumer delight,” she added.

Building on the same point, Anklesaria said, “I think relevance is underrated, I mean even today Google is going to crawl your content on relevancy and you need to have enough keywords. Gen AI does provide solutions, but not in all aspects because it is prompt-driven. However, it does provide us with another world we weren’t aware of maybe a year ago.”

Further in the conversation, Kothari spoke about the nature of the business and how Gen AI is revolutionizing the space. She said, “There are two areas I would like to touch upon. First, of course, the category is complex. The fact that we haven’t been able to scale our online marketing efforts is because the customer still needs a human interface to understand our offerings. Gen AI helps in this part. It tries to simplify the needs of the customer. The second is - we are a category that is plagued with a lot of misinformation. With Gen AI there is seamlessness of offerings and communications that we have. It is going to play a much larger role in bringing ethics into the category. It will help us in prospecting customer level as well as build trust in the category.”

When asked about the integration of Gen AI, Kidwai, said, “Let us first understand what is AI going to do for consumers, what does the customer expect? They expect us to be on time and be personalized. So how is AI to help me - it is giving you unlimited scope to reach our consumers. We use AI to segregate our customers and their behaviours. It helps us to do targeted communications and draft the messages with our creative and media partners.”

Moving on to the challenges in accepting AI, Gupta spoke about the perception of BSFI where there has been a lot of mis-selling and how AI is helping them to educate customers and the intermediaries. He said, “It is difficult to even understand what does AI do. Customer-centricity is the keyword here. In our category, customer means end-consumer because 92% of sales happen when there is an intermediary. We take more initiative for Gen AI towards the distributor side rather than the consumer side. It is a more captive audience for me. I can explain to them what I am trying to do and get them to experiment.”