Keen On

As a longtime Harvard Business School professor and the former chief marketing officer at Aetna, David C. Edelman is all too familiar with both the dangers and opportunities of personalized technology. In Personalization, his new book, co-authored with Boston Consulting Group managing director Mark Abraham, Edelman focuses on customer strategy in our age of AI. While Edelman acknowledges that there have been dangers with Web 2.0 style products that enables personalization, he is nonetheless cautiously optimist that AI will enable companies to provide hyper-personalized services and products that will ultimately benefit consumers. Rather than the age of surveillance capitalism, then, Edelman believes that AI represents the age of the empowered and happy consumer. Fighting talk from one of the world’s leading marketing mavens.David C. Edelman has a long history of Personalization work stretching back more than three decades. In 1989, he wrote the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) classic article, “Segment-of-One Ma