GR business launching tool that’s ‘the next big thing’ in AI
GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. (WOOD) — A Grand Rapids company is launching a new tool that uses artificial intelligence to help businesses with their marketing.
LaFleur Marketing — a digital marketing agency headquartered in Grand Rapids — has launched LaFleur Core Insights, a dashboard that uses ThoughtSpot Embedded to pull data from multiple sources, like Google Analytics, into one spot. Clients can then use the dashboard to visualize data and ask the AI questions.
CEO Chip LaFleur said often, businesses will say, "I know half my marketing works, I just don't know which half."
The new dashboard will help answer that. He explained clients can use the tool to ask questions like, 'Why did more clients sign up this month compared to last month?'
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"If someone says, 'Hey, what part of my marketing budget is working, and what part of my marketing budget isn't working?' That takes sometimes four to five days to get all the right information into place and cleaned … and given to you in a way that makes sense," Bob Flavin, the LaFleur Marketing digital strategy team lead, told News 8. "This system allows you to do that in minutes and seconds and find these trends and correlations that you wouldn't be able to find in other ways."
The program can also show clients the steps it took to give an answer, and analysts running an audit can access the code it use to double check if the responses it's giving is right.
"You can't trust something that you can't audit. And this is auditable," LaFleur said.
So far, the LaFleur Marketing team has done beta rollouts for a few clients. They've also used it in their own work and have used data from all of their clients to find marketing trends across industries.
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LaFleur, who recently gave a presentation to local business leaders on how companies can use AI at the Grand Rapids Chamber CEO Summit , said this type of tool is the future of AI.
"Everyone's gotten very excited about generative AI, which is very exciting technology and it's changing the way people operate and way people do things. But as the buzz has died down a little bit, people have started to see the limitations as well," he said.
He said generative AI has been overhyped on what it can do, and the majority of business executives are not using it.
"I think the next big thing to come out of AI is this, basically," he said. "Not just this product, but this as a concept — taking your data and building it into a warehouse that you can inquiry and then use AI to find patterns to identify trends and to make predictions about future behavior and in future inputs."
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He expects businesses will soon start organizing key information, like standard operating procedures, into one spot, so that an AI can access it and answer questions like, 'How is our 401K administered?'
But LaFleur cautioned about trusting tools just because they use AI.
"Just because it says it's powered by AI does not mean it's something good or useful. It doesn't automatically mean it has value," he said. "Put it through its paces and test it. Find the tools that work, but don't just trust that it's AI-powered and that makes it better."
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