SAP Startup Spotlight: Dotaki

Kevin Becker is co-founder and CMO of Dotaki. After a degree from a top-tier business school, Kevin has worked in market finance before turning to marketing consulting. He is passionate about new technologies and the way they can enhance business performance. That’s why he founded Dotaki with Benoit Allibe, a researcher in psychology and machine learning. Together, they are dedicated to providing the e-commerce industry with a disruptive way of serving their online customers.

What is the value customers get from Dotaki?

Our customers are large (>20M€ online turnover) B2C online merchants. Thanks to Dotaki, they can bring empathy to their online experience. Dotaki’s artificial intelligence (AI) is able to recognize two types of people among the visitors of a website: Rationals and Emotionals. Dotaki then adapts the website’s interface to these personality types. For instance, Emotionals get a lot of reassuring messages, whereas Rationals get more direct calls to action (as they value efficiency over reassurance).

This generates an increment of 5 to 10 percent additional online revenue. Dotaki’s customers typically get a x100 ROI between the additional incremental revenue and Dotaki’s cost.

Why is it important for online merchants?

There are several reasons. The main one is the high cost of online traffic acquisition. Once people are on your website, you better convert them into customers, or it will hurt your profitability. That’s exactly what Dotaki is doing!

How is it possible to recognize Emotionals from Rationals on the web?

Dotaki’s algorithm is very advanced and comes from years of research and development. It is the result of a close collaboration between several researchers (PhD in economics, Doctor of Medicine, etc.). It uses 3,500 first-party variables gathered via a Javascript tag when a visitor accesses the website. These variables are mainly linked to the way the visitor interacts with their device: mouse movements, speed, acceleration (also works with the finger on a touchpad/mobile device), the scrolling pattern, speed, depth, etc. We have been working for years with researchers in psychology to train a deep learning model to link these variables to ten personality types (Audacious, Hedonists, Emotives, Altruists, Homebodies, Straightforwards, Conventionals, Analyticals, Trend Setters and Attentives). The accuracy is equivalent to asking someone to classify their closest work colleagues in these ten categories.

How is Dotaki connected to SAP?

Dotaki deploys its tag using the customer’s tag manager. Then, Dotaki uses ClickStream to push each visitor’s segment into CDS. The segments (Altruists, Analyticals, etc.) are available in CDS dashboards and used as targeting variables for SmartEdit custom components. It is a seamless experience for Commerce Cloud users.

What does it mean for you to have been selected for the SAP.io foundry program in Munich?

Our selection by the foundry team has been a huge event for us. We are really proud to have SAP supporting our vision of the future of e-commerce.

What’s the future of Dotaki?

The business is good, despite the COVID-19 crisis, which proves that Dotaki addresses an actual need of online merchants. Dotaki will thus continue to accelerate its product development, mainly with the goal of being able to serve more customers, with even stronger results.

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