Managing Director and Partner at BCG, Rob Derow on the Future of Technology, Complicated Commerce and more!
Managing Director and Partner at BCG, Rob Derow sat with Ground’s Kat Garcia to share his thoughts on AI-driven personalisation in digital spaces, the role of technology in reshaping the creator economy, and complicated commerce. Rob offers key insights on how industries are adopting AI to optimise and innovate in ways previously unimaginable. Rob is also a global leader for CX for growth at BCG X, and dives deep into the trends shaping the future of marketing, including insights from his time at the Cannes Lions festival, and what keeps him grounded as a leader.
Meet Rob
G: You were most recently at Cannes Lions with BCG X, can you share what were the greatest takeaways from your time there?
R: It was a fantastic show. I mean, it's hard to beat the south of France. A couple things that stood out to me was one, particularly from a technology perspective, lots of talk about personalisation, lots of talks about optimisation, Gen AI, it was really very much a tech forward show. Perhaps I was expecting a little bit more on the creative side, but very kind of ad tech, martech, media heavy, and seeing folks really leveraging the tooling to drive to better outcomes. A couple other things were the Creator economy, I think that's not a surprise to anybody, but really seeing, you know, the power of influence, the power of ambassadors content creators, and unique ways you can sponsor an interplay with with those content creators from an advertiser perspective. I think Gen AI, you know, last year, or over the last couple of years has had a lot of hype. I think people are trying to find real, practical use cases to unlock efficiency, to reduce costs, to increase creative variance. I think there's a little bit of a wait and see, and an excitement around this application layer that soon should be coming, but definitely a presence there. But my biggest observation is really probably around the technology, aspects of personalization, and then, you know, this creator economy really coming into full speed.
Prefer to watch? Play the full sit down interview with Rob Derow and Kat Garcia
G: It’s interesting that you're talking about different trends, developments, technologies. In your opinion, what are you seeing in terms of specific verticals? How are they going to be disrupted?
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R: Yeah, one of the things I've been looking at, and kind of trying to coin is Complicated Commerce, or Complex Commerce. I think in commerce you had really simple retail experiences coming online, very easy for the consumer to understand and transact. And I think what you're seeing now, and particularly with Gen AI and some of the conversational commerce elements is some of these more challenging commercial situation starting to become digitised. So think of large purchase like automotive or B2B. Think of things that historically had required a sales rep, and now you can really have that engagement, whether it's full on Gen AI, chat concierge, that's a large language model, or a decision tree or something that just escalates you to human intervention, I think you're going to start to see the digitisation of some of these more complicated commerce processes. We're seeing a lot in finance and insurance, from an industry perspective, whereas historically, you know, it'd be much harder to onboard someone for a life insurance policy, or to become to get a wealth advisor things like this. And so I would keep an eye on, you know, complicated commerce, complex commerce, B2B, and this kind of second coming of E commerce.
G: G: How do you keep yourself grounded ?
R: Yeah so I have three boys, so they, they keep me busy. So we got a lot of baseball, a lot of sports, personally, surfing, yoga. So it's, you know, it's, it's carving out personal time and family time, and making sure that that's calibrated with the with the work life balance. And, you know, being fortunate enough here in Southern California, we have access to a lot of a lot of great opportunities and a lot of great activities.
About Grounded Insights
All year long, we'll be featuring ground breaking innovators and their perspectives on the future of consumer growth. A space where leaders can inspire positivity, vision for the future of their industry, and what keeps them grounded.
Grounded Insights - the blog and video interview series - was born out of the need for more leadership and education on HOW to grow consumer-facing businesses in today's ever-evolving world. From rising CACs, privacy concerns, challenges in the venture capital markets, new technologies like ‘AI’, and the pressures of scaling profitably…The team behind Ground wanted to gather greater insights from the people behind some of the most successful companies in consumer.
