Botco.ai's Co-Founder & Executive Chairman, Anu Shukla says, 'Instant' is the new mantra

The millennial and other customer segments have no patience for long hold times, pointing and clicking through endless web pages and trying to read long manuals or 100s of FAQs.

MEDIA 7: Could you please take us through your 20 years of high-tech industry experience?
ANU SHUKLA: I began my career as a marketing manager in a passive electronic components firm in Silicon Valley. After that, I worked in several software companies as the VP of marketing and Products and all of them went public or were acquired. I felt like I was ready to take the leap to my own venture and I started a company called Rubric which was an early pioneer in marketing automation software and was acquired within 18 months for about $400 million! Some of the features that are now standard fare in a marketer’s toolbox were invented by us like lead nurturing, close loop marketing, and email drip campaigns. After that, I started several companies in AdTech, MarTech, and payments/loyalty. My 3 exits include Rubric, MyBuys, and Tapjoy, for over a billion dollars in enterprise value. I am currently an Angel investor, a venture partner with elevate.vc – supporting underrepresented black, LatinX, and female founders and also co-founded and the executive Chair of Botco.ai. This is our new entrée into marketing automation applying AI and conversational marketing techniques to enhance outcomes for our enterprise health and wellness customers. Other details about my journey can be found here : https://www.linkedin.com/in/anushukla/


M7: Botco.ai has partnered with STChealth. What does this partnership offer new to the table for your clients and customers?
AS: STC Health is a customer of ours – they provide mass immunization records and have partnerships with all the states. They use our AI chat platform to answer thousands of queries and requests for immunization records from consumers, schools etc. Our platform enables them to provide a valuable service for the general health and safety of the country.

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Ecommerce has become even bigger, remote work is a necessity, and virtual collaboration is needed.

M7: What is new in Botco.ai’s conversational chat platform Version 2.0?
AS: Botco.ai 2.0 is rich in features and functionality that are needed for marketing applications in health and wellness verticals. They can be divided into 3 pillars of personalization, AI/NLP and actionable insights, and analytics dashboard. Unlike the do it yourself chatbots, Botco.ai has functionality geared for marketing applications – such as referral code tracking that can initiate a chat knowing which ad campaign or banner you are coming from, our new AI algorithms can analyze a vast amount of texts and create the questions and answers base from it in hours not weeks, as well as new sentiment analysis that can make the bot aware of negative or other sentiments in the responses. And last but not the least, our dashboard can analyze the conversations occurring and present insights such as what product or feature is being requested, what times of day, and what this means in context. Finally, we are always bringing out new integrations with EHR, CRM systems, and other useful and strategic products such as VerifyTx that allow for verification of insurance benefits from a chat interface on a website.


M7: What do you see as the most noticeable change right now happening in the workforce, encouraged by the rise of digital technologies?
AS: The rise of digital technologies combined with the effects of the pandemic have accelerated the adoption of virtual and digital technologies in industries that have been slow adopters like healthcare. Ecommerce has become even bigger, remote work is a necessity, and virtual collaboration is needed. Botco.ai strives to provide a platform to enable the leap to a digital, virtual world – I guess we could call ourselves a good citizen of the evolving health and wellness metaverse!

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The rise of digital technologies combined with the effects of the pandemic have accelerated the adoption of virtual and digital technologies in industries that have been slow adopters like healthcare.

M7: What do you believe are the top three product marketing challenges in the post COVID-19 era?
AS: We live in an on-demand world where “instant” is the new mantra. The millennial and other customer segments have no patience for long hold times, pointing and clicking through endless web pages and trying to read long manuals or 100s of FAQs. The top challenge for marketers is to engage with customers in a meaningful, frictionless way and get them the precise information they are looking for before they jump to another site in about 57 seconds ( studies show). AI/chat is one of the best ways to do that through intelligently layered conversational interfaces over static web pages. The second challenge is to make sense of vast amounts of data that the systems are churning out in an actionable way, and finally to do this in a world where remote and virtual is the new normal and budgets have probably been flat.


M7: What is your advice to young women entrepreneurs of today?
AS: I would encourage young women to really know and be passionate about the ventures they pursue, to prepare and do the research, to network and build a stable of mentors and funders, and to take the leap without fear of failure because you will learn and build on the failures.