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July 23, 2019

Read time: 4min

Proactive insights at Prudential Financial

Market Logic Team

Market Logic joined more than 400 insights leaders and Fortune 500 executives at The Insights Leadership & Talent Summit in Chicago. Over two intense, thought-provoking days, we shared stories and exchanged ideas with some of the world’s foremost experts on using insights to power business decisions. And we brought our own case study to the table, too, with Jackie Chan, Vice President, Head of Decision Insights Group at Prudential Financial.

Which part of the insights process takes up the most time? Here’s a clue: it’s not the research. We found that it takes insights managers an average of eight times longer to embed an insight into their businesses than it does to execute a new project.

That’s a delay that can strip research of its relevance, and may mean missing the best moment to implement an insight. And it’s why at Prudential Financial, time is more than money – it’s the key to driving customer obsession.

In front of leading lights in the insights sector, Jackie Chan explained how Prudential Financial closes the gap between insight and implementation with AiME, its AI-powered insights assistant created in partnership with Market Logic.

AiME went live April 2019 and “…is already used by more than 300 active users to access $30 million of knowledge assets with one-click search, so stakeholder questions are answered faster.”

By Jackie’s calculations, AiME’s intuitive interface has already saved the company upwards of 1,000 hours, by giving marketers the tools to find insights themselves. But AiME is much more than a search engine. It also promotes insights, so that they embed quickly, to keep Prudential close to its customers.

Don’t just pull, push!

“One of the great things about AiME is that it’s not all pull,” explained Jackie. “There is a really strong push element to the platform.” Thanks to shared Knowledge Zones on AiME, Jackie’s Decision Insights Group promotes and shares creative content on specific themes or for specific audiences. “It gives us a storytelling forum to push content out to specific groups of users. In essence, it’s an activation tool for insights.”

In more subtle ways, too, AiME helps put insights promotion on to a more proactive footing. “AiME doesn’t just present results like an internet search engine,” Jackie explained. “Instead of reading through each hit to find what’s relevant, it gives me a Word document with key findings from different source documents that answer my question. That alone is a huge time saver.”

How champions help insights stick

Uptake was vital to the success of the new platform, and for AiME to become a single source of truth, stakeholders would have to move away from their existing systems. So after putting the first business case together at the end of 2017, Jackie began a campaign to help the solution bed into the enterprise.

In Q2 of 2018, her team launched the beta to 50 “champions” selected from all over Prudential Financial, whether they were involved in collecting, creating, analysing, or acting on data. Each was chosen by their respective leadership, both for their role and for their ability to influence people around them.

“With our community of champions we created a forum for sharing use cases, successes and lessons learned,” explained Jackie. Her team drove engagement in that community with contests and games before asking each champion to suggest five new users from their business functions in Q3. “The invitation-only approach made it feel exclusive, and exclusivity often drives interest.” From 50 champions, AiME expanded to 250 users in a matter of months.

That organic uptake gave AiME an ideal foundation for the moment it opened up to the entire enterprise in April 2019. On top of the existing user base, the Decision Insights Group generated excitement with video campaigns, events, intranet promotion and digital signage in company buildings. And to maintain momentum, they formed a steering committee of advocates chosen from the original champions.

Speed is of the essence in creating actionable insights, but AiME is about more than quick wins. For the platform to become a single source of truth for Prudential Financial, an organisation with more than 50,000 employees, it needs active users and a consistent stream of fresh content, uploaded by users across the board. As Jackie said in Chicago, “more than a technology implementation, this is a change management initiative.”