Matthew Bernardini is the CEO and Co-Founding father of Zenapse, the place he leads the corporate’s imaginative and prescient and oversees the event of its proprietary AI basis mannequin into category-leading merchandise. With a background as a product marketer, knowledge strategist, and technologist, he brings a mix of entrepreneurial expertise—having achieved 4 profitable exits—and company experience from organizations akin to JPMorgan Chase, Omnicom, and Capgemini.
All through his profession, Bernardini has maintained a powerful curiosity in synthetic intelligence, psychology, shopper conduct, recreation idea, and statistics, which proceed to tell his management at Zenapse.
Zenapse is an AI-driven platform that reinforces buyer acquisition, engagement, and retention by way of emotionally clever experiences. Powered by the world’s first Massive Emotion Mannequin (LEM), Zenapse makes use of psychographic insights and goal-based optimization to assist manufacturers join extra deeply with audiences. Quick to deploy and straightforward to make use of, it delivers measurable leads to hours—not weeks—whereas decreasing prices and growing ROI.
Zenapse is constructed across the intersection of emotional intelligence and AI. What was the ‘aha’ second that led to the creation of the Massive Emotion Mannequin (LEM)?
Zenapse has a veteran founding group with backgrounds within the product improvement, promoting, advertising, and buyer expertise areas, with greater than 100 years of mixed expertise at firms like Capgemini, Omnicom, and JP Morgan Chase. Over our careers, we’ve seen a brand new paradigm shift emerge for entrepreneurs, the place AI has modified how we take into consideration and have interaction with shoppers.
In at the moment’s fast-paced digital panorama, clients count on personalised and resonant experiences throughout all touchpoints, however conventional advertising options lack the pace and insights wanted for real-time decision-making and wrestle to satisfy these expectations. Concurrently, from product selections to promoting campaigns, leaders wrestle with the excessive price of hiring a number of group members to finish this work.
To deal with this want, we’ve constructed the world’s first Massive Emotion Mannequin (LEM), which helps entrepreneurs enhance income and gross sales by bringing emotional intelligence into their shoppers’ expertise. By orienting their communication in direction of what’s of worth and curiosity to shoppers, reasonably than a single “brand-first” message, manufacturers can create extra significant interactions that result in increased engagement, gross sales, retention, and buyer acquisition.
How do you outline a Massive Emotion Mannequin (LEM), and the way does it differ technically and functionally from a conventional Massive Language Mannequin (LLM)?
Our Massive Emotion Mannequin (LEM) is a predictive AI engine powered by a dataset constructed on information of greater than 200 million shoppers with 6 billion datapoints. Via AI-driven psychographic insights (i.e., beliefs, sentiments, and feelings), firms can perceive what motivates their clients to transform – whether or not that’s the options or advantages of a product, particular promotions and incentives, imagery or calls to motion, then permitting them to prioritize the model expertise content material to a shopper’s choice.
In distinction to our LEM, which focuses on emotion and conduct, massive language fashions (LLMs) give attention to textual content and capabilities associated to pure language processing (NLP) with out deeper insights into what totally different segments of audiences consider and worth.
We’ve labored carefully with Google, by way of their Google Startup and Google Cloud Market applications, in addition to Comcast Raise Labs, to make sure that our resolution is enterprise-ready and meets the wants of the world’s most demanding entrepreneurs.
Why do you consider emotional intelligence is the “lacking hyperlink” in most advertising AI platforms at the moment?
The straightforward reply is that entrepreneurs haven’t been in a position to actually perceive their clients as a result of present legacy expertise focuses on demographics and conduct. We seamlessly combine with instruments from firms akin to Adobe, Salesforce, and Google to ship extraordinary outcomes.
95% of shopper selections are unconscious and pushed by emotion. But, for many years, manufacturers have used demographic (e.g., zip code, race, earnings) and behavioral knowledge to tell advertising campaigns. Whereas the sort of knowledge has its makes use of, most buy selections are pushed by feelings, which these knowledge factors fail to seize. Consequently, entrepreneurs wrestle with restricted accuracy and effectiveness, usually resorting to generalized options.
Now, by way of our LEM, manufacturers can faucet into psychographic insights to construct this full image and enhance gross sales and income. The proof of idea for emotional intelligence’s function in advertising lies within the numbers: we’re serving to household-name manufacturers enhance conversion charges by 40-400% and engagement upwards of 80%.
What are the commonest misconceptions you see round AI’s function in understanding human emotion?
One of many largest misconceptions is that AI is right here to switch entrepreneurs. At Zenapse, we’re taking a distinct method – we’re serving to entrepreneurs develop advertising and promoting with emotional intelligence and AI that helps them diversify their views by way of the flexibility to attach and perceive their clients on a deeper, extra emotional stage.
Conventional campaigns have usually relied on lumping shoppers into broad classes outlined by demographics, like age, earnings, and zip code, which ignores the nuances of what people actually care about. With our LEM, entrepreneurs can align campaigns round what issues most to every particular person.
As an alternative of guessing what may resonate, our platform helps entrepreneurs confidently create experiences that really resonate as a result of it’s constructed on a basis of emotional intelligence. That’s not changing the human contact – it’s making it stronger.
In your view, what separates hype from true innovation within the AI + EQ area proper now?
We’re getting into a brand new period of selling that’s outlined by emotionally clever experiences, not surface-level personalization.
Client conduct has modified dramatically. The vast majority of shoppers now choose personalised experiences – they count on manufacturers to know what they care about. This presents a possibility for manufacturers to leverage AI in a means that creates deeper connections with their shoppers.
The distinction between hype and true innovation is the standard of information. Our LEM is constructed on information of 300 million shoppers and 6 billion real-time knowledge factors, which supplies manufacturers a complete understanding of who their shoppers are – one thing they couldn’t have finished prior to now.
What varieties of psychographic alerts and real-time knowledge energy the LEM, and the way are these modeled into the Information Lake?
The psychographics behind our LEM are based mostly on 4 pillars:
- Beliefs – we group beliefs into particular person classes, together with how they worth issues like cash, information, household, and belonging, amongst others
- Feelings – take into consideration the way you react after seeing an advert or promotion. Does it deliver you pleasure or make you anxious?
- Actions – from gardening to gaming, we account for all various kinds of real-world and digital actions
- Behaviors – the occasions and actions a shopper performs in an organization’s experiences, akin to finishing a type, watching a video, or making a purchase order.
Customers make shopping for selections with their hearts as a lot as with their minds, so we all know that addressing the emotional part is the important thing to unlocking actual worth throughout your complete buyer lifecycle.
LEM is described as leveraging 6+ billion knowledge factors throughout 300M+ shoppers. What safeguards and moral issues are in place to make sure privateness and transparency?
Privateness is the middle of our product improvement. Our complete expertise ecosystem is SOC2 compliant, and our dataset doesn’t seize or retain any shopper personally identifiable info (PII). Our knowledge is aggregated and anonymized. We additionally keep clear inside insurance policies and governance practices to make sure moral use of AI in each step of improvement.
Are you able to stroll us by way of the function of ZenCore, ZenInsight, and ZenVision in powering emotionally clever buyer experiences?
ZenCore is our proprietary shopper psychographic mannequin and the engine that powers our LEM. ZenInsight is the information basis of emotionally clever experiences. ZenVision, in actual time, interprets these insights into predictions on which messaging or content material will resonate with a given psychographic phase and offers actionable suggestions for entrepreneurs. Collectively, these instruments type a full-stack resolution for advertising with emotional intelligence.
How does Zenapse adapt emotional predictions throughout verticals like retail, telecom, and healthcare? Are there any stunning trade use instances?
We’re already working with firms like Comcast, Sam’s Membership, Aeropostale, Bread Monetary, Bayada Training and Motion Karate to enhance conversion charges of digital model experiences by 40-400%. Whereas the emotional drivers range by vertical, the framework stays constant: we decipher what issues to a given shopper and assist manufacturers align their experiences accordingly.
What’s your long-term imaginative and prescient for LEM—do you see it evolving past advertising into different domains like healthcare or schooling?
Proper now, we’re targeted on utilizing AI to assist entrepreneurs and advertisers higher relate to their clients, and as our knowledge continues to get higher over time, so too will our LEM. Now we have not too long ago prolonged the platform past web sites to help CTV by way of our partnership with LG Advert Options and their innovation lab. Our aim is to increase our platform key shopper touchpoints by 2028 – video video games, cars and related houses to call a couple of.
How do you see emotionally clever AI reshaping the following decade of digital experiences?
The flexibility to ship real-time, hyper-personalized experiences throughout all digital platforms is already extra highly effective than ever, creating new alternatives for partnerships. AI and emotional intelligence will proceed to be adopted, and as these applied sciences and insights grow to be more and more subtle, they would be the driving drive behind advertising efforts throughout all digital media.
Our group is working exhausting to remain forward of this curve. We not too long ago introduced our partnership with LG Advert Options’ Innovation Labs to assist CTV advertisers ship emotionally clever experiences throughout LG’s ecosystem of 200 million sensible TVs, and we’re working to deliver our insights to different screens, like net, cellular, AVs, music, films, related vehicles, and extra
We see the way forward for digital experiences being formed by AI and emotional intelligence. Companies that fail to adapt to this shift danger being left behind by opponents who’re faster to reply to the modifications in shopper preferences and behaviors.
Thanks for the good interview, readers who want to study extra ought to go to Zenapse.
