Durham College’s (DC) Hub for Applied Research in Artificial Intelligence for Business Solutions (the AI Hub) is pleased to announce it has partnered with marketing services & analytics company MobileXCo on a project focused on using AI and machine learning (ML) to help automate Tether^™, its web-based experience marketing platform.

In a time when consumers are driven by experiences, brands are looking to engage them in interactive and memorable ways. However, it can be difficult to measure which parts of a company’s marketing initiatives are delivering true value. Enter MobileXCo and Tether™, which helps companies close the gap between their promotion-type marketing activities and understanding how they contribute to sales by linking campaign participation and activity to transactions at retail.

By taking a transaction-centric approach to consumer participation in contests and gift-with-purchase reward programs, MobileXCo directly links specific consumer activity to a purchase. In the process they collect valuable data related to the participants and their transactions and analyze it to surface valuable insights.

In partnership with DC, the objective is to automate as much of the receipt data extraction, organization and analysis as possible. The end result will be a more streamlined and less labour intensive solution that inherently delivers incremental value based on data.

Over the course of four phases, DC faculty and student-research assistants from the college’s Computer Programmer Analyst and Data Analytics for Business Decision Making programs are working directly with MobileXCo, providing them with an opportunity to not only learn about advanced AI technologies but also hands-on industry experience developing a real, functional solution for a client.

Work with MobileXCo is scheduled to be completed early in January 2019. The project is one of several research initiatives being undertaken by the AI Hub, which will be further enhancing its capacity following the approval of $2 million in funding from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), through the council’s College and Community Innovation Program.