Rhizabot gives salespeople immediate access to deep data

Advertising research company Rhiza today announced the release of Rhizabot, a bot that lets salespeople access the data they need to close a deal.

Rhizabot puts a conversational interface on top of the Rhiza platform, which combines datasets from inside a business with consumer behavior data from Nielsen, point-of-sale data from IHS Polk, and voter registration data from L2. You can talk to Rhizabot through Amazon’s Alexa, an Android smartphone, or the Google Chrome web browser.

“What we’ve done is we’ve come up with a set of algorithms that extract the story out of the visualization,” said Rhiza president and CEO Josh Knauer.

Rhizabot is able to answer questions about the spending habits of cat owners or iPhone owners or tennis fans, and disparate questions like:

– Who are my biggest competitors?

– How often do frequent flyers use credit cards and what kind of card do they use?

– How many Democrats are millennials? How many Democrats live in Pennsylvania?

– Tell me about Democrats and gun control. Tell me about Democrats and gun control in San Diego County.

After Rhizabot finds the information, it can automatically generate reports and PowerPoint presentations that drill deeper into details.

The Rhizabot project was a year in the making, the company said.

“The emergence of virtual assistants — and specifically, the APIs that a lot of big companies like Amazon and Microsoft and Apple have been opening up into the virtual assistant platform — made us start realizing that we could actually bypass the entire web interface and just focus on [making it] possible for our customers to have a conversation with the Rhiza platform. And with all the data and expertise and analytics that we have behind it … we provide them with a seamless experience that is more natural for them,” Knauer said.

When it comes to car dealerships, where roughly 40 percent of Rhiza’s media customers’ revenue comes from, a salesperson can simply input the name of their employer and the name of the car dealership where they want to sell ads. After that, reports can quickly be generated.

Rhiza CTO Mike Higgins explained that for a salesperson, coming into a meeting with a full set of data at their disposal means they can talk convincingly about the ad buy and have a much better chance of closing the deal.