“It’s The Why,” said Element Data CTO Charles Davis in a recent talk with TheCube, explaining how businesses and marketers can benefit from understanding The Why behind consumer decisions. “If you can understand how people inform their decisions…then you can figure out how people or an organization got to where they are. It’s The Why.”
“The web and technology has been focused on The Who, What When and Where, but we still have a very difficult time answering The Why. And the reason why we have trouble with The Why is we really didn’t have an ontology or a taxonomy for human decision making — and that has huge implications for the AI and the ML [Machine Learning] space.”
Part of understanding why people make the decisions they do is understanding how human bias affects those decisions, said Davis.
“Cognitive bias is the neurological shortcut that we take to arrive at decisions or conclusions.” Noting Element Data’s work toward classifying human decision-making biases, Davis added, “If you can start to recognize them in data, then you can start to figure out ways to change perception or at least to surface that these biases are present.”
Watch Charles Davis on TheCube discuss how his research and Element Data’s Decision Cloud technology is helping businesses and marketers understand natural biases and The Why behind human decision-making to improve marketing personalization and business efficiency.