XPLAIN: Revolutionizing the Way Marketers Integrate Brands in People’s Lives with the Help of Strategic AI

XPLAIN is fully committed to helping global brands thrive in the fast-changing world by providing Tailor-Made Strategic AI Solutions and Consumer & Industry Intelligence Consulting Services for a wide range of clients across the globe. Some of the company's customers include PepsiCo, Danone, AMEX, MetLife, Yum, and more. For its extraordinary work, XPLAIN is acknowledged with the Gold Award for Global Innovative Digital Business.

XPLAIN was founded in 2008 as a digital marketing service provider. Like any other company that has innovation in its DNA, XPLAIN has grown by discerning the evolution of things and wanting to offer even more value to its customers along the way.

About seven years ago and after two years of continuous R&D in specialized XLabs laboratories, Artificial Intelligence (AI) in conjunction with Big Data was not just 'added' to what XPLAIN offers, but became the company's foundation. XPLAIN integrated the solution in all its services, enabling the company to expand its customer base worldwide.

XPLAIN now provides AI services and tools to global brands, helping them not only to survive in an international environment but also to achieve important business results.

The Strong Founding Stone of XPLAIN

Stefanos Karagos is the Founder of XPLAIN. He is an Information Scientist who loves disruptive strategic thinking. Stefanos has been a pioneer and a thought leader in the technology and marketing sectors for over 27 years. As the base member of XPLAIN, he has elevated the company's current position of offering Digital Innovation Services to brands active in 71 countries. Stefanos has significant experience in fields like FMCG, Retail, Technology, Finance/Insurance, Destinations/Tourism, and Automotive. He has been recognized by the industry and his colleagues on multiple occasions and was voted by his peers in the US as one of the Top Innovators in 2016.

Unraveling a Wide Array of Services Using AI Analytics & Big Data

Having its own R&D capabilities, XPLAIN offers a wide spectrum of services to its clients with AI Analytics and Big Data at the core. Some of the company's services include,

• Creating a Behavioural and Business Insights (BBI) Platform specifically designed for SMEs, thus democratizing AI and big data insights for all. This is the result of XPLAIN's vision to offer tangible value for moving forward and evolving to be the 'Backbone' of most economies, which are affected by the Pandemic.
• A Forecasting Platform to predict orders for over 780,000 stores is being leveraged by more than 1,100 SKUs on a day-to-day basis and for the next 10 days ahead, whilst also offering insights for further portfolio optimization to the company's clients, saving them millions in logistics and adding incremental sales in the process.
• Tailor-Made Complicated War-Room Dashboard systems to connect all possible Data-Sources and to influence factors in XPLAIN's clients' business and markets. It is a need that has risen significantly during the pandemic in order to rectify the disruption in the business decision-making processes globally.

In essence, XPLAIN is solving consumer and business-related challenges by building AI platforms and offering the consumer competitive intelligence and advisory services. The company is also resolving its clients' challenges in modern strategic decision-making.

Integrating Technology to Enhance Decision-Making

At XPLAIN, innovation is 'loaded' and potentially detrimental to results since it does not define an 'absolute' measure or benchmark. For the company's innovation, oversimplifying a bit is anything new in relation to a system that is being introduced and makes it better and more efficient. So, on the one hand, it is not technological progress in itself for its own sake, but rather understanding and giving insight in what is the most effective choice or choices one can make.

XPLAIN brings in the major categories of technology at such a stage that when used in the right manner and applied as it should, the company makes certain that its customers' decision-making process leads to a truly innovative choice, and is informed in the most relevant, unbiased, and insightful manner. The quintessence of how XPLAIN does it can be described by a few words: more connectivity, more data, faster and more intelligent analytics, and more insightful and actionable results.

Connecting all the Technological Dots to Fine-Tune Solutions

The company is trying to always be one step ahead or further to enhance and fine-tune solutions that are true to the principles. This is why XPLAIN is working tirelessly on making certain that its output covers true needs that modern brands and marketers have, especially in such radically changing environments and contexts, like the one we're living through at the moment with a pandemic affecting behaviours and business models.

That is why XPLAIN invests heavily in cutting-edge fields such as Computer Vision, Unstructured/Agnostic Aspect Analytics, and Natural Language Processing and Analytics. Indicatively, when it comes to NLP, the company is implementing proprietary top-of-class analyses that go beyond the usual sentiment, such as Contextual Narratives, Emotional Analyses, Motivational Segmentation, etc. The solutions have been developed in close collaboration with experts from around the world and top academic institutions in the field.

Envisaging the Challenge of Recruiting the Right Talent

One of the primary challenges XPLAIN faced was that all innovation-focused and breakthrough technology companies it serves were hampered in finding and recruiting experts in the multi-disciplinary fields the company needs.

For example, XPLAIN collectively combines three major fields of expertise such as AI, Consumer Behavior, and Business Strategy. Unfortunately, companies face the daily battle of finding excellent professionals like AI Scientists, Exploratory Data Analysts, Full-Stack Developers, Behaviorists, Business consultants, and Marcomms Advisers, and more.

On the other hand, XPLAIN also faced some setbacks with the effect of the pandemic. It was not on the operational continuity or efficiency, but mostly on making certain that the company keeps its people's morale and optimism levels as high as possible. The same goes for XPLAIN's clients. The company supported them equally in fighting in decisions with actionable insight.

Remarkable Awards and Recognitions

For many years in a row, XPLAIN was awarded Gold awards for Global Innovation Digital Solutions. Indicatively, for five consecutive years running, the company received the top accolade from the Internationalists (American National Advertisers) as the Most Innovative Marketing Solutions and Technology Firm.

XPLAIN has successfully leveraged Artificial Intelligence technology & proprietary algorithms to analyze millions of unbiased consumer conversations and reactions to the Content & Campaign initiatives of Brands. The company has delivered a fully tailored AI-Powered Marketing System to address each brand's needs that effectively support their content creation strategy. XPLAIN shows outstanding results by rendering enhanced targeting, augmented consumer understanding, and content optimization. The company also facilitates an extra layer of AI Pre–Testing across all content created to further maximize results in a digital, mobile-first world.

A Sneak-Peak into the Future of Humanizing Marketing Technology

In the near future, XPLAIN is expecting to see great leaps in further humanizing marketing technology. This will come not only from making AI more intelligent through enhanced Neural Networks and their application but by a better understanding of what the true needs of the company's target audiences are.

It may seem a paradox, but the most valuable and human-like capability that separates great brands from Loved Iconic Brands, which is empathy, will be further boosted and supported by the power of Artificial Intelligence (and not replaced).

XPLAIN promises to be at the forefront of the next great era in Marketing Technology.

"XPLAIN has always and will always be in service of adding real value by focusing innovation towards a true understanding of people's needs and the behavior and choices they make. It is the only way to create, sustain and flourish meaningful relationships between brands and consumers in any category".

– Stefanos Karagos, Founder of XPLAIN