Mike Cunningham (TechConnect)
Queensland-based data management specialist TechConnect has partnered with Moreton Bay Regional Council (MBRC) to create an Amazon Web Services (AWS)-based artificial intelligence bot 'Ask Morty' aimed at small-to-medium-sized businesses (SMBs).
The tool is designed to provide SMBs with easy access to anonymised census data, and insights that can be used to support their marketing campaigns and turn them into business growth.
“Based on research into the needs of local SMBs (which constitute more than 90 per cent of all businesses in the MBRC area, one of Australia’s largest council regions), the Ask Morty bot was designed to help local SMBs save time and effort in their marketing campaigns," TechConnect CEO Mike Cunningham said.
"It does this by making available, in a simple process, relevant anonymised 2021 Australian Bureau of Statistics census data of the Council’s almost 500,000 citizens (across three simple variables around potential customer demography).”
On average, this process can take less than two minutes. Based on a small number of inputs from the SMB user, Ask Morty provides the user with highly accurate, key demographic metrics for targeted marketing campaigns, across a range of devices.
SMBs in the region can then use the information provided by Ask Morty” for a range of activities, from marketing to expansion, product diversification, and increasingly, for recruitment campaigns at a time of local, and national, staff shortages.
Previously, census data was available for such tasks, but it was often located in more than 20 pages or unrelated information, rendering it unwieldy and time-consuming for application in marketing programs for SMBs.
“We started talking to companies like TechConnect and told them our biggest challenge was to make the data meaningful, consistent, accessible, and actionable for SMBs, who are the lifeblood of our economy,” MBRC head of economic intelligence Kerrianne Haggie said.
“It has long been a goal of local governments to leverage open data, such as anonymised census data, to help their SMBs increase profit and growth, but councils have been limited by the complexity and accessibility of the data.
“This has often led to resistance from SMBs, particularly those who are uncomfortable with analysing data to uncover insights to help them grow their businesses.”
The responses Ask Morty provides are drawn from a range of interrelated, relevant variables across the MBRC - including population age ranges, gender, work or study situation, home ownership and others.
TechConnect designed the bot to take into account the diverse nature of demographics across the region, which vary considerably from suburbs such as Scarborough in the South of the region to Caboolture.
Taking this complexity into account, Ask Morty provides single-suburb answers and clusters of suburbs that are connected in one or more ways.
Ask Morty was designed, created, tested and launched in less than nine months, with three full-time experts at TechConnect collaborating closely with the team at MBRC.
The highly secure bot is hosted on AWS, using a range of services including AWS Lambda, Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon CloudFront, Amazon API Gateway, Amazon Lex, Amazon Polly, Amazon CloudWatch, Amazon DynamoDB and Amazon ElastiCache.
Launched only a few months ago, the uptake of Ask Morty has exceeded expectations, with more than 3540 interactions from SMBs accessing the interactive tool.
“TechConnect has a proud, 11-year history of helping our customers around the world make sense of data and use it in a highly secure manner, to become more competitive, and to support growth,” Cunningham added.
“With Ask Morty, we have taken the collaboration with the MBRC to the next level, by establishing a public-private partner relationship with them.”
