Pixis.ai is a tech startup that provides codeless AI infrastructure for marketing and business growth. Along with securing Series C funding of $100Mil, Pixis has developed an end-to-end codeless AI infrastructure that equips teams with cutting-edge data science to automate and improve core processes. In this Interview with TechBullion, Neel Pandya, CEO JPAC & EMEA at Pixis, shares more insights into this tech innovation.
Please tell us more about yourself?
Hello, I am Neel Pandya, and I am the CEO JPAC & EMEA at Pixis. Pixis builds exciting codeless AI products for marketers and it is my goal to put India on the global map for AI and innovation in marketing and business growth. I aspire to equip brands with robust AI capabilities to help them effortlessly scale their marketing growth. Having had extensive experience working in the FMCG, Telecom, Marketing, and Advertising industries with global brands such as L’oreal, Vodafone, and Unilever, I’m able to accurately identify the pressing brand pain points that can be alleviated with AI.
What is Pixis and what inspired the commencement of this business?
Founded by Shubham A. Mishra (Global CEO), Hari Valiyath (CBO) and Vrushali Prasade (CTO), Pixis is a SoftBank and General Atlantic-backed codeless AI infrastructure company. The Pixis suite of AI products have been built by anticipating the roadblocks that demand generation faces as the marketing landscape becomes more nuanced and complex. For a long time marketers have relied on the expertise of technical consultants for AI in marketing, but Pixis changes this by empowering marketers to directly integrate and use AI with ease.
You ask about the making of Pixis? It’s an interesting story. The Pixis founders started the company right out of college. Being gamers, and having built successful AI products for the gaming industry while being in college, they gravitated towards Creative and Generative AI quite early on. The disparity between marketing efforts and the results of the efforts is what pushed them to dig deeper into the problem, and that led to the conception of the Pixis suite of AI systems; Targeting AI, Creative AI and Performance AI, each solving a specific problem, and together solving the larger problem.
Bringing technology and creativity together has always been at the core of our efforts at Pixis. Providing state-of-the-art, innovative codeless AI products to businesses is an especially rewarding experience for me, as I come from a marketing background and am acutely aware of the roadblocks marketers face. It’s all the more exciting when customers use our products and call us to tell us that they’re surprised at how quickly the product brings results for them.
What does a codeless AI infrastructure for marketing entail, could you give us a walkthrough of the unique solutions and services you provide at Pixis?
Let me answer this technically first. Pixis’ codeless AI infrastructure consists of over 120 (and growing) proprietary, pre-trained AI models across three primary AI engines; Targeting AI, Creative AI and Performance AI. What this translates to, for our customers, is that it enables ease-of-use, performance accuracy and advanced creative capabilities to ensure their campaigns are set up for maximum success. Simply put, we strive to provide accessible AI technology to help brands elevate their marketing efforts and augment decision-making in a world where consumer behavior only grows more complex and unpredictable.
In essence, our AI infrastructure learns from a customer’s data sources (historical performance, social engagement data, first-party data, etc) and helps them scale their efficiency while reducing inefficiencies, autonomously. Brands can garner diverse and accurate, AI-led insights into their target markets, to generate and manage creative, cross-platform data-backed campaigns that optimize in real-time. The codeless nature of our products helps marketers directly leverage and use our AI without the need for data scientists or even coding for that matter.
Precisely, introducing Pixis’ codeless AI to their tech stack has enabled these brands to leverage completely data-backed AI-recommended strategies, for optimizing growth beyond what was thought possible – and all of this without writing a single line of code.
How much has AI influenced coding and marketing innovations?
Over years, Artificial Intelligence has developed manifolds across sectors and industries. AI infrastructures provide non-programmers or non-AI experts a robust platform armed with all necessary tools and functionalities to independently create stellar campaigns and strategies to match the company’s long term mission and vision.
Deploying technology requires great investments, resource building and robust budgets are some of the myths that AI has been stomping over since its advent. The need to put in hours of hard work to develop custom codes for campaign development, its well-being and constant optimization reduces greatly because of AI. AI possesses immense potential to help marketers function independently without relying on the bandwidth of a specialist be it in the field of coding, graphics or writing.
Having said that, AI can co-pilot marketers in their mission to accomplish and align their marketing goals. AI has the capability to do what humans have already done – the stark difference is the pace at which AI can calibrate and exercise. Work ideally worth 3-4 man hours can be done in just a few mins with AI thus leaving ample room for the marketer to think through revolutionary campaigns and ROI strategies.
Tell us more about the codeless market in particular, how big is this industry and what is the level of demand for AI powered infrastructures especially for marketing?
Low/no code AI models are quite prevalent today especially with OpenAI’s GPT-3 and ChatGPT iterations, or even. generative AI as a whole. However, the market is still evolving. As per reports the worldwide low-code market is estimated to increase by 19.6% from that in 2022.
Like I mentioned before, AI efficiently backs humans in their efforts to scale and improve efficiency. Lots of data needs to be fed to the AI so that it can function independently. This data is achieved through multiple sources one main source being human experience and knowledge. AI cannot replace a coder’s work because a coding specialist along with data analysts are required to feed AI with what action it needs to perform in vivid situations through the end users’ lifecycle. Humans need to constantly update and upgrade details AI needs to know.
Pixis aims to establish a powerful AI blueprint to make marketing effortlessly intelligent, agile and scalable. How does this help businesses and how does it work?
While the end of cookies is a major win for online privacy, their demise represents a major setback in the world of digital marketing. Brands depended heavily on data relayed through cookies in order to plan their next strategy, and now with their imminent demise, the landscape has been transformed. Brands can no longer target potential customers to a highly specific degree using third party data on their browsing habits. Pixis addresses this problem by allowing marketers to target customers intelligently while respecting their privacy in a cookieless world.
The AI infrastructure is trained with billions of cross-industry data points relevant to brands in every industry. This hyper-accurate targeting allows brands to generate higher quality leads at a lower cost; for example, one of our celebrated customers, Skoda saw their cost per lead improve by 10% whereas DHL witnessed a 35% spike in their CTR after deploying Pixis’ AI infrastructure.
Pixis’ AI models house self-evolving neural networks which use reinforcement models to incorporate creative feedback from live campaigns. The model uses machine learning to analyze and optimize every conceivable data point instantly and feed insights back into the live campaign. This enables marketers to run accurate, data-driven campaigns at vast scale.. The AI structure is future-proof, as it can inherit new models and customize them without any rework, making Pixis an ideal choice for brands looking to scale rapidly without disrupting performance metrics.
The Pixis infrastructure comprises a Performance engine that maximizes ROI by predicting and prescribing the right plan of action to optimize bid and budget allocation. Using this sophisticated performance AI, Pixis typically delivers a minimum 20% performance improvement on digital spend, with one customer recently achieving an 87% increase in Return On Advertising Spend after deploying Pixis. This continuous real-time optimization allows brands to stabilize costs even as the scale of campaigns multiplies. Electric vehicle charger company BOLT recently leveraged this feature, seeing its audience reach increase by 68% and sales of its electric charging points grow by 600% in two months.
Pixis currently comprises over 2 dozen proprietary AI models deployed across multiple ecosystem and partner platforms, tell us more about these?
A slight correction there; it’s over 120 pre-trained AI models now. Yes, we’re steadily inching closer to our goal of reckoning 200 pre-trained and self-evolving AI models to our suite. These models work together to deliver intelligent solutions to solve real world marketing and demand-generation challenges with utmost ease. These challenges range from pico targeting, retargeting, sharp marketing sans cookies, Generative AI models for copy and creative content generation to campaign real-time performance optimizations, bid-budget redistribution and automation, and more. Pixis’ AI establishes a powerful blueprint to make marketing effortlessly intelligent, hassle-free and scalable at the same time driving incremental revenue for brands.
Since 2018, Pixis started this journey of helping businesses with customized AI solutions. Any use cases you would like to share with us, what are the success stories so far?
Actually there are many! Recently, one of India’s leading electronic charging vehicle companies, BOLT, achieved a 6X boost in their demand generation and CTR crossed the industry benchmark of 0.3% to BOLT’s 80% CTR after deploying Pixis’ codeless AI infrastructure for their marketing. CARSOME, Malaysia’s leading tech unicorn witnessed a 40% reduction in Cost Per Lead (CPL). These coupled with the achievements of DHL and Skoda, as mentioned above. Additionally, highly regarded global brands namely HDFC, Joe & The Juice, Sanofi, to name a few more have witnessed great success in their campaign outcomes upon leveraging Pixis.
Besides this, what really makes the impact more worthwhile is the way our customers appreciate our efforts to build an AI that takes mere seconds to deploy without writing a single line of code. They find the UI and UX extremely friendly and easy-to-use which makes the product’s adoption easy. A lot of our customers are regularly part of our beta programs where they use various new and upcoming features. This collaborative experience adds positive layers to our working relationship.
Where do we see the future of Codeless AI Infrastructures and what do we expect from the influence of AI and machine learning in marketing?
Codeless AI infrastructures are already on their way to democratize the access and usage of AI to not just big brands but also medium and small businesses. Going forward, they’ll enable the concerned teams to build processes more efficiently with evolving ML and AI models, the era of artificial intelligence across industries, globally is just going to bolster YoY.
AI’s efficiency to make sense of large chunks of data points and to help marketers make wise decisions to maximize ROI leads to better AI adoption patterns amidst marketers across ages and levels. This simplicity and high-accuracy working models that are self-evolving in nature also proliferates smooth functioning of teams across the board.
2022 marks the year that AI suddenly leapt into the fore and made its way into the language of the masses. Be it through ChatGPT or DALL-E, people of all ages are curious and want to know more. It therefore makes it easier and more exciting for us in the AI industry to build more and provide more exciting products for an audience that wants more.
Do you have available client partnership opportunities at Pixis. For instance, what sectors would benefit the most from your solutions?
Today, AI is prevalent across almost all industries spanning from healthcare, finance, media and advertising, to space, data analytics, research and development, defense and mining. Its agile nature seals the confidence of practitioners and experts for better, accurate and meaningful insights and outcome. Since the inception of Pixis in 2018 we’ve come across innumerable use cases, AI deployment and implementation strategies and intents, but one significant trend that we’ve observed over years is the level and keenness to adopt AI has spiraling upwards, unstoppably. We’ve seen e-commerce brands rock through the usual market clutter by creating data-driven, creative campaigns. We’ve also witnessed financial technologies and BFSI sectors soar high on their ROAS numbers. It’s also heart warming to watch our first ever customers walk the journey of success and innovation with us even today. Such rock solid support from our customers, believers and investors only makes us thrive harder to build technological innovation of great value, scale and intelligence.
With the world transitioning towards digital and data being the new gold, coupled with other macro factors such as ‘cookieless web’, comes the need to monitor campaign performance across a multitude of digital platforms, the time is right for marketers to inject the magic of AI into their organizations’ DNA.
For more information, visit the website – https://pixis.ai/