Adthena launches Ask Arlo to give marketers real-time insights

Adthena, the leading provider of search intelligence for enterprise brands, has launched a Conversational AI capability for their users.

Their CTO explains more in their press release:

"Our real-time, conversational chatbot, Ask Arlo, is built using our own in-house technology that harnesses the latest generative AI to help customers see through vast search data trends and identify immediate actions to gain ROI in Google Ads." says Paul Felby, Chief Technical Officer at Adthena. "This innovative tool represents a huge opportunity to unlock value for our customers at scale, enabling users at all levels to make data-driven decisions with unprecedented efficiency." 

Interesting that they've built this in house, isn't it?

If you've got the right team, expertise and conviction it's actually pretty straight forward to make your own "Ask Arlo", so kudos to the engineering team at Adthena.

The idea here is that instead of having to do your own analysis, you can ask the chatbot to do this. It's a great example – ideally – of using AI to augment your existing teams. I can imagine that the chatbot could do a lot of the basic work, but crucially could suggest thoughts, ideas and approaches that you yourself haven't considered.

Even the best of us can struggle to analyse and find insights in a huge amount of analytics data, so I trust this will be a useful addition for Adthena's users.

If you'd like to see how it's working, here's the Ask Arlo video:

Editor's Note: Here at Conversational AI News I am especially interested in the vendors and service providers offering Conversational AI technologies to the wider market. I thought this was an excellent example of an 'end customer' – that is, Adthena – deploying CAI for their customers. But it's also indicative of the maturity of the CAI marketplace.

Why did Adthena build this themselves? I speculate that they've done this for a reasons:

1. They couldn't find any decent, useful Conversational AI vendors that offered the flexibility and capability that the engineering team wanted.
2. They decided to do it themselves so they could have full control over the precise way in which they integrate and manage the Conversational AI technology.
3. They wanted full ownership of the intellectual property (but they're using a third-party LLM such as Llama from Meta).
4. It was reasonably easy to do.

Is this the equivalent of building your own word processor software back in 1981, instead of buying WordPerfect?

I think it's an eminently viable route for many companies at the moment. But ideally, you'd just buy this off the shelf like you do for many other technologies critical to your business (cloud infrastructure, email newsletter software, Microsoft 365)

I would suggest that this news is a failure point for many of the Conversational AI vendors in the industry: Why did Adthena build this themselves when they could have used your offerings?

Anyway: Good work team Adthena!