In order to cater for the interdisciplinary focus on this semester’s “AI Elective” by Prof. Dr. Nadine Lindstädt-Dreusicke and Prof. Dr. Dirk Wentzel we were happy to welcome Hubert Jakob, co-founder of Statista and COO at ECDB for a highly insightful guest lecture. The 23 students in our class, coming from various study programs including Media Management and Psychology of Advertising, Marketing, Market Research & Consumer Psychology, Marketing Communication and Advertising, International Business as well as ISP students from our different partner universities abroad learned how Statista and the ECDB, a company specialized on eCommerce data analytics, make use of AI.

Hubert thereby focused on the one hand on the effects that AI can have on search behavior, traffic and leads, thereby affecting the overall funnel. On the other hand, the students learned how Statista and ECDB use AI in the production process as well as for product presentations. In both cases Hubert thereby indicated which steps have already been taken and what is more to come. It was impressive to learn what type of AI tools have been developed at Statista and ECDB to increase productivity – covering the different areas of brand building, customer acquisition, nurturing, pricing and customer self-service. Concretely, AI can thereby assist, among others, with personalization, translations, customized landing pages, segmentation, A/B testing, automation and customer service – saving valuable time and costs. In addition to this, Hubert also highlighted the dominant role of large investors in the overall field of AI, mainly due to making use of their huge amounts of user data available. So again, it gets clear that it is all about data. For Statista and ECDB, Hubert pointed out that their goal is to have a “secure LLM with all of our data, a rich set of functionalities available to all customers.”  In that regard it was interesting to learn about the Beta Version of the AI Assistant at Statista. Currently not yet available (anymore) to the university clients (due to a massive rush of users from that field at the very start of the beta version) we are curious to see when this attractive tool will be available to students and researchers again.

At the end our students received a valuable advice: „AI is not a threat and you don’t need to be hectic with it, you can take your time and get to the right answers“, Hubert concluded showing how essential humans (still) are for AI to exist and mature. 

Thank you so much, Hubert, for making time in your schedule to teach us about all these valuable insights.