Activity Stream
Artificial Intelligence for Smarter Business
Stefán Baxter, Founder & CTO Einar Saevarsson Co-founder & CEO1.Can you explain what you do?
Activity Stream is Applied AI for business engagement, both internally and externally. Specifically, we help everyday colleagues not only access the data they want; we suggest data that is relevant and take a step further to predict what’s coming in their workstream. In industry terms, this is augmented analytics.
Gartner defines augmented analytics thusly: augmented data preparation, augmented data discovery, augmented data science and machine learning. Without going into exhaustive detail, we use artificial intelligence, including machine learning, to empower citizen data scientists to automatically find, visualize and contextualize data relevant to their job. We take this a step further, with data suggestion, error prevention, and proactive data predictions. Activity Stream achieves this in a system-agnostic way, without a traditional data warehouse.
2.How do users benefit from Activity Stream?
From the point of view of the business, we can provide almost instant value, as our lean approach and adaptive data model is not time intensive. To give an example, one customer said candidly to us after implementation, “You have been able to do for us in four weeks what we’ve been unable to achieve internally for four years.” That was a real quote.
What does this hyper-relevance look like to an everyday colleague? We empower employees to search and filter anything. Visualize, zoom-in and zoom-out on either time or topics, or both. Subscribe to notifications about today’s priorities, collaborate with co-workers. And, most importantly, receive answers to questions you didn’t even know to ask and suggestions on how you can do your job better.
3.What makes you different?
Activity Stream’s approach is different in several ways: user experience design, how we work with our customers, our delivery model, and our go-to-market strategy.
Activity Stream’s approach is different in several ways: user experience design, how we work with our customers, our delivery model, and our go-to-market strategy
Other companies in the space are helping their clients to SEE their data and MONITOR internal or external business interactions. We take it a step farther by partnering with our customers to translate data and ACT, we leverage data to SUGGEST next steps, and we provide context to data and eventually PREDICT actions to empower a proactive employee.
Our peripheral competitors start with the point of view of optimizing the data scientist experience OR improving the systems that interface with the customer. The reason we don’t have a direct competitor in this space is we went big. We approached this from the point of view of the everyday colleague, in that we wanted the cacophony of systems to be invisible to the end user, yet deliver the data in a way that is sticky, addictive. Also, we aimed to improve BOTH internal systems optimization and customer engagement systems, at the same time. It was a bold move at the time. It still is.
4.So how does it work?
In our genesis, we worked backward from the vantage point of the person, as the fundamental desire every company has to create the ultimate proactive employee. So we asked ourselves, “What do we all need to be successful in our jobs? And how do we want to receive those data sets and insights?” All of our delivery decisions started with this premise first, the proactive employee, instead of the data scientist. So we designed the interface to be intuitive, customizable, and hyper-relevant to any end user.
From a technical perspective, creating the ultimate empowered employee scenario forced us to solve this from many angles. It required us to have a holistic approach: provide infrastructure, analytical capabilities, and delivery. We simultaneously built infrastructure to collect and combine data; adaptive modeling for complex data combinations in real-time; analytical capabilities leveraging an arsenal of AI; and real-time delivery that is sticky, almost gamified.
5.Is AI applicable in every industry?
We say yes, but we chose a go-to-market strategy based on our strengths. Our entry market was one that we knew well, one where we had a good network. This allowed us to engage from the get-go with our customers as partners, which is fundamental to our entire customer success strategy. We are now replicating our success in other markets like energy, building management, and retail to name a few.
AI is the 4th industrial revolution, already spawning new AI-first businesses, ready to disrupt most existing value chains and models. We simply believe it will not be friendly to the late-arrivers, and our strategy is to partner with you to get an edge on *your* market. So your success is our success.
6.What is your product vision?
To leverage the ethical application of AI for galactic progress. We say that with humor, the “galactic progress” part, but truly we seek to become an indispensable partner in AI. In the near term, we are creating an augmented analytics platform, with the end user experiences as gamified work intuition. If we hit our mark, this will empower people-- the exact opposite of the fear that automation will destroy jobs, it will save money on operations, improve customer relationships, and help employees excel.
Activity Stream News
Activity Stream and Project Admission Announce Strategic Partnership
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"As we continue our journey to elevate every event, our focus on offering the very best data-centric products for live events is enhanced by strategic partnerships. Project Admission's transactional capabilities and innovative approach will empower our clients to better leverage their data in perfect harmony with our objectives." says Activity Stream CEO Einar Saevarsson.
Adds Project Admission CEO Stephen Glicken, "From the moment we met Einar and the team behind Activity Stream, we knew there were tangible synergies between our companies. We are very bullish on the opportunities ahead for clients in being able to seamlessly leverage Activity Stream's marketing and segmentation tools that have been tactically developed to drive conversion in the live entertainment space."
Activity Stream is a pioneer in data-driven solutions that increase profitability across every stage of the event lifecycle, servicing over 600 clients globally across more than 25 ticketing platforms. Activity Stream launched its Total Marketing Platform late 2021, an unparalleled industry-first marketing suite designed specifically for live entertainment. This groundbreaking platform empowers organizations to monitor sales and marketing effectiveness in real-time, gain deep insights into customer behavior, effectively segment audiences, and execute high-performance marketing campaigns with unmatched targeting precision and results.
Project Admission, launched in 2018 and working with more than 50 professional sports teams across all the major North American sports leagues in addition to other key stakeholders in live entertainment, provides clients with unique monetizing features and opportunities around the life of the ticket, while also adding value and simplifying the commercialization of live events. From its customizable digital storefronts to its unrivaled bulk distribution tool to its season ticket management offerings, Project Admission addresses a breadth of ticketing needs from teams, venues and promoters' across live entertainment.
"Ever since ticketing came online, there have been conversations about the opportunities to leverage data to better serve customers with customized, targeted ticketing offers," says Glicken. "We have finally arrived at the time where those conversations are a reality and it's at the nexus between Activity Stream and Project Admission."
Both companies have shared a period of sustained growth.
To date, Activity Stream is integrated with Ticketmaster, AXS, SeatGeek, Eventim, Tessitura, AudienceView, ShoWare and a host of others. In 2022, Activity Stream announced the acquisition of Yesplan, a venue management platform, and crowdEngage, a mobile and in-venue customer experience platform.
Project Admission is integrated with SeatGeek and Tickets.com with a handful of notable integrations coming near term. The company also acquired Split Season Tickets in 2022 which is currently completing its integration with Ticketmaster as a Nexus Partner.
Concludes Saevarsson, "We look forward to the year ahead with Project Admission as our partnership promises transformative experiences for our clients and their audiences, actioning data into material conversion."