• by Jess Nelson , October 3, 2016

Demandbase, a B2B marketing company, announced the launch of a new artificial intelligence insights platform Monday.

The new AI-powered business graph--DemandGraph--powering the company’s account-based marketing platform captures and monitors business behavior and relationships across industries by reading billions of Web sites on the Internet. Those documents include SEC filings, annual reports, social media, press releases and Demandbase’s identification technology that associates IP addresses with businesses. 

The technology identifies companies and individuals that are in-market for particular solutions or services. Demandbase’s DemandGraph technology identifies customers who are most likely to buy, similar to how LinkedIn recommends business connections.  

The technology comes, in part, from the acquisition of Spiderbook in April 2016. Spiderbook specialized in identifying the correct company representatives to reach out in any given account, and the company’s technology has now been integrated into Demanbase’s offering.

Peter Isaacson, CMO of Demandbase, said Demandbase already provided a data-driven insights platform for engaging and measuring accounts, but Spiderbook’s technology provided a necessary boost in targeting. The technology identifies accounts that are most likely to close, says Isaacson, and then delivers insights on the back end to help sales teams close the deal.

By automatically reading information freely available on the Internet, digesting it and then bringing it into the DemandGraph, Demandbase helps marketers and sales representatives create more personalized content for the companies and brands that are most likely to be interested. Isaacson says that DemandGraph ingests over 300 terabytes of data each month.

“The scoring is driven by sophisticated machine-learning algorithms,” says Alan Fletcher, co-founder of Spiderbook and CPO at Demandbase. “We’ve built these algorithm, but then we’ve also added human validation.” 

As real-world examples, Isaacson and Fletcher discussed how companies could leverage Demandbase’s business graph to boost their media relations or recruiting efforts by correctly identify and matching an individual who would be most interested in what the company is offering.  

“You can have the smartest AI algorithms in the world, but if you give it no data you’ll get garbage,” agrees Fletcher.