Artificial Intelligence for Customer Engagement: Building a Permission-based Ecommerce Ecosystem at CXsphere

CXsphere, a startup in the permission-based ecommerce ecosystem space, had gained initial success with the launch of its first Artificial Intelligence (AI) driven customer engagement product. It had several clients and was generating recurring revenues. AI-driven data analytics was a new industry and CXsphere had a unique business model. It leveraged AI on the demand side, providing customer insights tomajor consumer product firms. It leveraged big data systems on the supply side, offering permission-based opportunities to individual consumers to monetize their social media, e-commerce and other digital footprints. CXsphere had raised a bridge round of funding and hoped to be cash positive and to have raised Series A funding in the coming years. To successfully raise funding at the desired price, several challenges are ahead: (1) rapidly growing its business, (2) setting CXsphere on the path to becoming a global brand, (3) maintaining a strategy of frugal innovation, (4) staying ahead of competitors by (a) getting consent from consumers to use their data and at scale, (b) providing better AI-based customer engagement / personalization services in a cheaper, faster way, and (c) growing its ecosystem and connecting more individual consumers to more brands and firms.