Slalom: Building hyper-personalized connection with generative AI

Over the past few years, much of the conversation around AI and generative AI has focused on productivity – which is understandable, considering the potential of these tools to accelerate workflows and automate defined tasks. However, that’s far from the full story. In episode 2 of The Art of the Possible podcast, Jennie Wong, Ph.D., Global Industry Director for Education at Slalom, and Patrick Frontiera, Higher Education Strategy Leader of IT and Campus Operations at AWS, explore an exciting, less-discussed use case: hyper-personalization. Together, AWS and Slalom are using AI to drive hyper-personalization projects that have fundamentally transformed operations for a diverse group of customers. UCLA Anderson School of Management, for example, has seen a staggering 130% increase in donations from alumni who received hyper-personalized, generative AI-driven emails compared to more traditional control emails. “The UCLA Anderson Advancement Team was already doing a certain level of personalization,” Wong said. “They were already using certain best practices. But [using generative AI], we essentially doubled down on behavioral science research in persuasion over the last few decades around how to make the most effective assets most likely to convert.” According to Frontiera, the success of this program came down to two factors:Project alignment Slalom’s ability to speak not just in terms of the technology, but also the desired business outcomes. “These are really two sides of the same coin,” Frontiera said, “and [generative AI] was critical in delivering something that the Advancement Office could benefit from and that would fit into their daily workflows.”