PEAKLIFE

With the CEO & Founder, Ranjan Kumar, Peaklife explores more about Entropik Tech

While watching an advertisement you might not be paying attention to how your emotions are reacting to it, but machines are. In this era of unceasing technology, Artificial Intelligence has started to dominate every aspect of our life, even those part we are oblivious of. AI’s potential has been realised and used by firms to analyse how their advertisements are impacting customers. Entropik Tech is one such company of India’s only Emotion AI company which has developed proprietary Emotion Recognition Technologies (Brainwave Mapping, Facial Coding, Voice & Text based sentiment analysis, Eye tracking) inhouse to decode consumer responses to content, products or service.

Entropik Tech started by quietly bringing ‘Emotional Marketing’ to the forefront in India by enabling agencies and brands to quantify and analyze ‘Emotional Effectiveness’ of promotional content. Being a SAAS offering that is completely online, it is affordable and able to meet tight timeline demands of the Media industry. The company has been working with multiple industries across India, US, Europe and South East Asia to solve real business problems by decoding subconscious consumer behaviour.

From understanding more about Entropik & AI to the journey of Ranjan Kumar – Founder & CEO of Entropik Tech, this interview takes you through all.

Q- As we see AI developing tremendously with time, how have you used it in your business?

An AI revolution is underway and going by its mainstream permeation, it is bound to influence every sector in a radical way. Entropik Tech’s work lies in a niche vertical of AI = Emotion AI or Affective computing (As its popularly known as)

Millions are spent every year by brands to understand customer preferences. Traditional practices like interviews & surveys, provide insight on conscious buying choices, but prove ineffective in decoding implicit preferences, which are proven to be responsible for 95% of purchase decision making .

Establishing ‘Emotional Connect’ is a powerful marketing technique, after all people buy emotions not things. 82% of consumers with high emotional engagement with a brand always buy from it. Likewise, 70% of emotionally engaged consumers spend up to 2 times or more on brands for which they have loyalty

Our Emotion AI Platform is India’s only SAAS platforms that helps brands track subconscious consumer behaviour using multi modal emotion recognition technologies like Brainwave Mapping, Facial Coding and Eye Tracking and converting them into actionable metrics.

We help brands identify the smallest building block of user input that constructs an emotionally satisfying brand experience.

Q-What inspired you to work with Emotion Recognition technologies and come up with Emotion AI?

While I was running my previous AdTech start-up, Red castle, I realized that brands spend so much time & money creating advertisements & chasing viewers via paid promotions that they miss out on, incorporating consumer feedback, and making sure their content resonates with users at an ‘emotional level’, thereby loosing on ‘virality’ & ‘gaining organic traction’.

Pre-testing is rarely part of the process and if opted for is done via traditional techniques like surveys focusing only on conscious part of the brain. Consumer behaviour research powered by Emotion Recognition technology is required to decode a consumer’s subconscious. This led to the idea of creating Emotion AI. I wanted to create a solution that is an easy fit for any production cycle, a platform that offers valuable subconscious insights and prediction data to brands.

Avenues for applications of Emotion AI are plentiful including recruitment, medical diagnosis and assistance, loan evaluation, customer service, automobile passenger safety, optimization of ROI for marketers & many more.

Entropik Tech is dedicated to building Emotion AI.

Q-How exactly does Facial Coding & Emotion Detection help brands in achieving their targets?

Facial coding and other Emotion Recognition Technologies along with our proprietary AI models, helps brands measure cognitive & behavioural parameters such as Attention, Appreciation, Attentiveness, along with cognitive parameters like Happiness, Boredom, Familiarity and many more.

We enable brands to conduct consumer behaviour research & measure consumer’s response towards Media content, Ad commercials, Product design, Website and App experience to offer Emotion Analytics and data assisted marketing recommendations.

The losses borne by companies on failed product launches and poorly constructed marketing campaigns varies significantly depending upon the Industry & consumer centricity. Optimising for Emotional efficacy has given Marketers and Product teams with disproportionate returns as high as 4x ROI lift on Research spends.

Q-How has your journey been from IIT to being a founder of Entropik Technologies?

The journey has been a mix bag of success and failures. IIT introduced me to soft computing, neural networks and deep learning. Since college, a penchant for fundamentals and has been the driving force behind all my endeavours.

During my previous start-ups I have seen the advent and growth of consumer internet. Digitization and tonnes of content at a click, brought about a lack of synergic communication between Users & Businesses. At Entropik, we are building the future by building our tech at the perfect confluence of three areas, viz. Affective Computing, Consumer Behavioural Science and Data Science.

Founded in 2016, over first 2 years of our Business we dedicatedly built core proprietary technologies around Brainwave Mapping etc. Further, we identified strategic industry leaders who can leverage the disruptive value out of our Tech in their respective domains. 

Subsequently, over last 1.5 year of being into the business we currently work with 55+ Enterprise customers, with an Annual Run Rate of USD 2 Mil. To draw a comparison, in 2017 Q1, we were having 5 Customers. This 10x growth between 2017 to now across Geo (North America, Europe & SE Asia) is fuelled by a strong foundation of building core value proposition for specific Industry verticals.

Q-AI started as minimizing human efforts & perform tasks which are not humanly possible, do you think we are going away or coming closer to our initial purpose?

AI is designed to take over & solve day to day trivial stuff that would let people focus on larger and evolved problem statements. But with technology becoming more ‘Artificially Intelligent’ the world is becoming ‘Emotionally Disconnected’.

Man-Machine interaction has grown to unfathomable speeds, while it becomes faster, it’s not evolving to remain symbiotic with human emotional needs. The quality of interaction will further keep on deteriorating unless we add ‘Emotional Intelligence’ to the mix.

I am a firm believer that, humans and AI can only co-exist if we are able to make AI emotionally perceptive. EmotionAI with ability to recognize human emotions has better capacity to interact with people and meet their needs.

Artificial Intelligence must grow in synergy with Emotion Tech for a perfect balance and long-term sustenance. That’s why Emotion tech is the single largest vision of ours at Entropik Tech.

Q-How exactly does Facial Coding & Emotion Detection help brands in achieving their targets?

Facial coding and other Emotion Recognition Technologies along with our proprietary AI models, helps brands measure cognitive & behavioural parameters such as Attention, Appreciation, Attentiveness, along with cognitive parameters like Happiness, Boredom, Familiarity and many more.

We enable brands to conduct consumer behaviour research & measure consumer’s response towards Media content, Ad commercials, Product design, Website and App experience to offer Emotion Analytics and data assisted marketing recommendations.

The losses borne by companies on failed product launches and poorly constructed marketing campaigns varies significantly depending upon the Industry & consumer centricity. Optimising for Emotional efficacy has given Marketers and Product teams with disproportionate returns as high as 4x ROI lift on Research spends.