Assaf Baciu, Co-Founder & President of Persado

Can you share the story behind the founding of Persado and how your previous experiences influenced its creation?
My co-founder, Alex Vratskides, and I founded Persado 12 years ago. We were at Upstream, and became fascinated with how text message response rates changed with even minor tweaks in the language. Given that the number of characters is limited for SMS, we started thinking about text messages as a mathematical problem that has some finite number of alternative messages, and with the right algorithm we could find the optimal ones. We evaluated some approaches and saw that there is a way…and the rest is history.

Persado’s Motivation AI Platform is highlighted for its ability to personalize marketing content. Can you explain how the platform uses generative AI to understand and leverage customer motivation?
GenAI, on its own, via a foundation model, cannot motivate systematically. It’s a component with a stack of data, machine learning, and a response feedback loop.
Persado has been generating and optimizing language using various approaches for over 10 years. We’ve accumulated a unique dataset from one million A/B tests from messages, across industries, designed to connect with consumers and motivate action at any stage. We leverage this data to finetune a foundation model with Supervised Fine Tuning (SFT) and Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF). We've also adapted a second transformer model to be able to predict message performance based on language parameters. On top of that, our machine learning (ML) algorithms understand—in real time—which language elements resonate with a given individual, then adjust the copy within the communication to that person or segment.

How does Persado’s Motivation AI Platform differentiate itself from other generative AI tools in terms of driving business results?
Persado is unique on many fronts.
• Purpose-Built – Persado has the only models specifically trained and curated with 10 billion tokens of marketing enterprise communication, coupled with behavioral data.

• Emotionally Intelligent – Our AI is designed to understand and generate language that elicits specific emotional responses from target audiences. This capability is grounded in advanced ML models trained on extensive linguistic and psychological data.

• Precision – Our platform leverages the most powerful model architectures and is trained with statistically valid customer behavior data. We have executed the equivalent of more than 1M A/B tests, which enables us to generate the specific words, phrases, emotions, and stories that drive incremental impact 96% of time.

What are some of the key capabilities that Persado’s AI platform offers to ensure a seamless integration with existing marketing technologies?
Our platform securely integrates with a brand’s existing tech stack to simplify marketing content generation so brands can easily generate the highest-performing digital marketing messaging they need to boost results. We combine custom, non-PII user attributes, and Persado’s award-winning language generation models to more effectively communicate with every customer across channels, at any stage of their journey.
Motivation AI is compatible with over 40 martech solutions to ensure each brand can use their existing martech stack to generate the most relevant, personalized outputs for their customers.