“We’re really big into AI around here and Tanjo implements it in a way like no other vendor. Another entry from Gartner’s Cool Vendors for AI in Marketing, Tanjo uses AI to help marketers get better ideas about the demographics they’re working to reach. AI used to bring to mind images of human-like intelligence and Tanjo’s Animated Persons (TAP) aren’t too far off from that.”

For Parker (CIO of NCCC), the brain technology presented an opportunity to harness the synergy of seamless access to data and information from a system that serves all 100 North Carolina counties.

“We have 59 — counting the system office — buckets of intellectual property, data, information, and history spread throughout the entire state. One of the challenges we face is how do we capture that information? How do we bring that information together so that we can leverage it to enhance each other? All of us are smarter than any one of us,” said Parker.

(Tanjo CEO Richard Boyd) decided that AI could help develop a far more comprehensive, flexible model that would find unexpected insights faster and cheaper. That was the start of Tanjo Animated Personas (TAP), the company's simulated models of real human beings that can be queried to see how they'll respond to words, phrases and product concepts. … "It's essentially the new scientific method," Boyd says. "… machine learning can ingest such large amounts of data ... bring all the sources together and let the system find every hypothesis that might be true.”