Wrench. AI wants to stalk your customers: And tell you everything you need to know about them.

• Author: Lastoe, Stacey

DAN BAIRD, CEO AND FOUNDER OF WRENCH.AI, wants to empower the marketing industry. Wrench.AI is a platform that provides personalization through data insights, with a goal of enabling marketing professionals and salespeople to save time and energy, and avoid what Baird refers to as "drudgery."

The Salt Lake City-based company is just a little over three years old, and in many ways is still in its nascency with about 12 full-time employees. In 2019, the private company raised over $100,000 in seed funding from Ideaship and Baird is undeniably excited about where the company is headed next.

"The need [for personalization] is growing," Baird says. "We've seen more organizations acknowledge that they must get a greater degree of personalization in their marketing and sales outreach, but they also feel the burden of balancing that with a commitment to privacy, which customers demand, and rightfully so."

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"The premise is: If we actually give the marketer, the salesperson, the who, what, where, when, and why framework," Baird says, the marketer can focus on making their experience a novel one--not just flood inboxes and reach for "low-hanging fruit."

"The kind of joke around the office is that marketing and salespeople suck at data, and data people suck at people." Baird explains that this translates to marketing professionals creating pitches they're comfortable with but don't necessarily give the person on the other end what they want to hear.

To effectively market to people and sell products, experiences, and anything else a consumer might want, you need the proper insights, Baird says, explaining the core of the company's mission. Of course, humans can analyze data and present insights, but not at a rate comparable to artificial intelligence.

Because I'm neither in sales nor marketing and often have a love-hate relationship with technology, I asked Baird to explain Wrench.AI to me in easy-to-understand terms. In response, Baird prompted me to name something I like or a product I think is really great. It took me a minute before blurting out, "Skiing. I like to ski."

Never mind that it's July and we are many months away from ski season: Baird was eager to accommodate based on my random utterance. "Perfect. Imagine you're a retailer who wants to engage with people who like to ski. You upload your ski products, and Wrench combines your company data with publicly available data to rate your customers' interest from 1-100."

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