CIPIO.ai believes the future of commerce lies in the power of a brand’s community. With a mission to help companies connect with their communities of customers, fans, followers, and beyond to drive authentic user-generated content (UGC), CIPIO.ai chose to work with Microsoft and use Azure OpenAI Services to tap into the power of generative AI. CIPIO.ai’s UGC Solution empowers brands to discover content and content creators, authentically engage with their communities, activate and collaborate with the community, execute new content, pay content creators, and analyze the impact of its brand community at scale. Customer feedback shows CIPIO.ai driven UGC outperforms other branded content, supporting authentic content for brands to use in their paid advertising campaigns, social media marketing, and at every stage of a buyer’s journey.
“With Azure OpenAI, we can now leverage its best-in-class language learning models to process video content elements with better performance and lower costs. Without access to Azure OpenAI and the Microsoft support team, we would have been less likely to offer this application to our customers in such an efficient and effective manner.”
Sundeep Sanghavi, Chairman and CEO, CIPIO.ai
CIPIO.ai is on a mission to humanize brand marketing using OpenAI. With expertise in data science, AI, and user generated content the company’s co-founders saw that discovering, engaging, activating, collaborating, and campaigning with and for this community was a massive challenge for most companies. Conducting analytics and facilitating payments added more layers of complexity. CIPIO.as knew that doing this work manually was humanly impossible and investing in paid ads without authenticity is a waste of most brands’ marketing budgets.
In response, the company launched its UGC offering in 2022. Designed to support brands through AI-driven marketing automation and software, the solution could scale through an organization’s community, find genuine advocates, and promote more relatable brand content. “We could have gone to OpenAI directly, but when we gained access to Microsoft Azure OpenAI, we knew it was the right choice. With Azure OpenAI Service, we get a lot of additional resources and support from Microsoft—there’s just nothing comparable,” says Jin Yu, Chief Technology Officer at CIPIO.ai. “Now Azure OpenAI is embedded at the core of our CCM (community commerce marketing) platform.”
Discovering creators with natural language processing and image to image search
Using Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service, CIPIO.ai developed several UGC solutions, currently in beta, to help companies drive authentic user generated content. This includes a generative AI application that produces social media content options derived from simple user input that can scale social media captions and textual content creation.
CIPIO.ai semantic search functionality based on natural language processing allows users to discover real, relevant, and reachable content creators, giving Brands more insight into what their customers are interested in—and who is creating new and compelling content.
Growson Edwards, Co-Founder & COO at CIPIO.ai. says that brands now have the most precise way to search for on-brand content in seconds, with over 12 million creators and 300 million videos and images refreshing in real-time. “We currently offer the industry’s only natural language processing and image to image search,” says Edwards. “AI capabilities powered by Azure AI help brands drill down into specifics to find content and content creators that align with their values.”
Improving paid and organic content performance with UGC at scale
CIPIO.ai provides brands with a steady stream of UGC at scale, cost efficiencies, and speed for paid, earned, shared, and owned channels. “All of this is tracked and managed via the platform—you can even facilitate payment to individuals for their original content. Everything is centralized and automated and easy to scale,” says Edwards.
Yu says Azure OpenAI Service gives CIPIO.ai the tools that offer customers a competitive edge in creating, organizing, and analyzing massive amounts of video content. “We’re processing hundreds of millions of textual content, images, and video across multiple social media platforms,” says Yu. CIPIO.as applications depend on Azure OpenAI Service and APIs from Azure AI services. “They ingest petabytes of both first- and third-party social and consumer data reducing the amount of internal and external resources brands need to acquire, authenticate, and activate a community of brand enthusiasts and influencers,” Yu adds.
“With Azure OpenAI, we can now leverage its best-in-class language learning models to process content elements with better performance and lower cost,” says Sanghavi. “Without access to Azure OpenAI and the Microsoft support team, we would have been less likely to offer this application to our customers in such an efficient and effective manner.
Increasing customer satisfaction, expanding innovation
Besides the ease of connecting with genuine creators, and managing and sharing content, one of the most significant benefits to CIPIO.ai customers is not having to worry about creating it. "You’ve got creative people on your team, and they feel the need to create everything themselves. It’s just impossible,” says Troy McFarland, Director of Marketing at FITNESS SF. The San Francisco-based company uses CIPIO.ai primarily to engage its members to create workout videos and inspirational content during gym visits. “There are so many brilliant minds out there that are doing it already, and CIPIO helps us tap into that. We have so many videos in the pipeline that we no longer have to worry about content.”
McFarland adds, "Tapping into the power of our brand community almost immediately resulted in a six-to-eight-fold increase in customers tagging and mentioning us online. The amount of authentic content we have been able to pull and share without costly rights fees has been incredible.”
Outperforming other branded content, increasing automation
Though CIPIO.ai was founded less than two years ago, it has amassed a global team of social media marketers for its customers, including nearly 200 million social profiles and related consumer data. Since the beta launch of its Generative AI applications a few months ago, CIPIO.ai has gained 93 new customers, fueling growth with brands like Botanic Choice, Orange Theory, Kekoa Foods, Squire, and Crunch Fitness. “Customers are telling us that their community user generated content is outperforming their other branded content,” says Edwards.
With this and other customer feedback, the company plans to expand its Generative AI application to include audience targeting parameters, additional guidelines for different social platform content, and AI recommendations for video content to accompany the text. “Our goal is to help our customers continue to scale social media content production while further humanizing both the process and the content itself,” says Edwards. The company also plans to increase automation in workflows across the platform, further enhance image semantic search, and bring even more precision to its community generative AI.
“We wouldn’t be able to do this so quickly, so effectively without Microsoft and Azure AI,” adds Sanghavi. “Using the algorithms, using the powerful technology to bring all this massive amount of data, processing it real time and then bringing it up to the customer in a way that helps them build real connections and community—it’s fantastic, and we’re excited about what’s to come.”
“We’re processing hundreds of millions of textual, image, and video content across multiple social media platforms. Our applications heavily depend on Azure OpenAI Service and APIs from Azure AI services.”
Jin Yu, Chief Technology Officer, CIPIO.ai
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