Faraday is a unified data and AI company that predicts customer behavior. Vonoi Magazine

By: Bennie Randall Jr

Faraday is a unified data and AI company that predicts customer behavior. They use data on all US adult consumers, obtained from major data brokers, to help brands build predictive models and personalize their content. The company was created 10 years ago by founders who initially focused on the clean energy space but expanded to serve various industries. In the next five years, Faraday aims to be a leader in responsible and transparent AI, ensuring that their models are equitable and free from biases. Their AI is trained on opt-in permission data from US consumers and is customized for each brand they work with. To learn more, visit Faraday.ai.

VM: Hello Mr. Dave so tell us about your company?

Dave Small: Yeah, so Faraday is a unified data and AI company that's purpose-built to predict customer behavior. So we predict things like product recommendations, next best purchase, high lifetime value customers, who's likely to subscribe to your service or your product, who's likely to churn and stop buying. The way that we do that is we come preloaded with data on all US adult consumers, about 270 million people, 1500 attributes that we get working with all the major data brokers. So it's all opt-in, permissioned, responsibly sourced data, and we make that really easy for a brand to combine their customer purchase data and order data with that graph, they get their own version of our data plus their data that they can use then to build predictive models so they can figure out all these next... "What are my customers going to do next? How should I personalize my content? How should I segment not just on what they did in the past, but what they're likely to do in the future?"

VM: Now why was this company created? Who started it and why is it so necessary right now? You've been around for 10 years, correct?

Dave Small:
Yes, We have been around for 10 years. So our founders, Seamus and Andy, and Robbie Adler, this is their second company actually, and they got started in the clean energy space. So 10 years ago we had all these solar companies popping up, all these clean tech companies and they were trying to figure out who they should be targeting. And so they started going out and building the database of households and customers who would look good for these companies. Then we found out that banks wanted the same kind of technology and same kind of data and retailers and insurers and all these different kinds of brands.

So we basically built this very comprehensive graph of consumer data and property data and started to layering on machine learning and AI techniques on top of that to deliver these predictive models. So it started as this kind of white glove approach, and then we turned it into a fully API-based software platform that marketers and product folks can use and engineers can build against.

VM: Since we're in this AI phase, and we're clearly in the beginning of it, where do you see your company in the next five years from now?

Dave Small: Yeah, it's a great question. We have really established a strong track record in the responsible and transparent AI space. So our system is not a black box. You can see exactly what our system is doing. 

Within our system, you can make sure that models are not skewing along protected classes, race, gender, sexual identity, things of that nature. So you can actually make sure that the models that you're building, maybe your customer file has historical biases in it, and you can actually mitigate and make those models more equitable with our platform.

And so that's an area that we're doing a lot of leadership in to make sure that AI is not going to repeat the wrongs of the past especially in protective industries like insurance, banking, and real estate where we work. We really want to make sure that we can not only do good by the clients that we work with, but their end customers.

So I think in the next five years we're increasingly seeing a lot of talk around responsible AI, but talk is one thing and really building that into product is another thing. And so we'll be a leader in that space.

VM: The million-dollar question many of our readers often ask, Who is teaching your AI?

Dave Small:
Our models are trained off of this consumer file that we have. So it's all this opt-in permission data on US consumers that we're getting from the major data brokers, and that every model is built specifically for the brand we work with. So it's their customer file. So the models learned from what our customers do. Boll & Branch, for example, this direct to consumer home goods brand, our models are trained just for them on their data plus all our data. 

It's not a broad system. Everyone gets a model that's unique to what they're trying to do and what their customers look like, and so it's not going rogue or anything. It's very much confined to the business outcomes that our brands are looking for.

VM: Where can our readers locate you online?

​Dave Small: Faraday.ai

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