Idea in Brief

The Opportunity

AI has the power to gather, analyze, and use enormous volumes of individual customer data to tailor the customer journey at every touch point.

The Challenge

Many companies avoid AI projects entirely because they believe that extracting value from AI solutions requires developing complicated technology first.

The Solution

Companies can use open-source AI tools and data from third-party providers while continually experimenting, learning, importing fresh data, and refining customer journeys.

Mercury Financial, founded in 2014, is a small fintech with a big mission: helping customers restore their credit profiles. Jim Peterson, Mercury’s CEO and a finance veteran, knew from the outset that AI was crucial for creating the personalized customer journeys that would be at the heart of Mercury’s offering. So in 2021 the company began searching for an AI-driven engine that could give every customer the right nudge at the right time through the right channel and in the right sequence. The nudge might be a push to split up payments among multiple credit cards, or a gentle warning that the customer was nearing a credit limit. Some might respond to a text message, others to an email. Some might respond best two weeks before an action date, others two days before. Any one of those elements—or, more precisely, the particular combination of them—could spell the difference between a fully engaged customer and a deeply annoyed one.
A version of this article appeared in the July–August 2023 issue of Harvard Business Review.
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