Aston Martin Aramco Formula One Team announced Xerox as an Official Global Partner in late 2024, and the multi-year partnership commenced earlier this year. The Silverstone venue that hosted the event is the home of the team.
The day kicked off with an opening from Darren Cassidy, president of Western Europe at Xerox, who was keen to stress Xerox’s wide portfolio to the gathered guests.
“We are a print company but we are so much more than that, and part of our mission today is to have those conversations with everybody,” he said.
Later in the morning, Janine Yates, head of demand generation at Xerox, and Ian Welch, data director at the manufacturer, discussed data as an asset, while real-life data case studies came from Go Inspire, which was acquired by Xerox in 2022, and BT/EE, sharing details of a project with Go Inspire that won a DMA Gold award last year.
Dimitri Kyprianou, group managing director at Go Inspire, said: “We harness data to deliver award-winning campaigns. […] We are all consumers and it’s our job to put individuality back into the data.”
The BT/EE session saw Alanna Pepper, account director at Go Inspire, talk to BT/EE’s Mark Carvell, CRM alliance lead, and Debbie Hadley, marketing campaign manager, about the award-winning DMA campaign.
Carvell commented: “The strongest data signals you get are the ones that customers have given you themselves and given you permission to use.”
On AI, he added that the business had been using AI “for a long time in various guises”, to drive the offers sent to customers, or to determine the point in their contract that they are contacted. The company is now starting on its journey of looking at how AI might be used to help produce content that is sent out to customers.
Dan Boyles, AI solutions consultant at Lenovo, also discussed AI, which he said was creating value in the areas of efficiency, CX (customer experience), forecasting, and new streams.
“AI doesn’t save me time, it enables me to put time into new areas that are more important,” he said.
Other talks during the morning session focused on IT, digital transformation, and workflow innovation.
An extensive afternoon session included a ‘Solutions Village’, with more than 20 booths from Xerox and its companies, as well as various partners.
Meanwhile, guests were able to test their skills in race car simulators, a Batak reaction game, and a pit lane challenge, while tours of the Aston Martin Racing Technology Campus were also provided.
Speaking to Printweek at the event, Xerox’s Cassidy said: “This is one of the first times that we’ve really showcased our breadth of services to one audience. And those services are: print, IT services, digitalisation services, and then our market and communication services.
“We haven’t put them all together [previously], because the people that are typically interested in, or that are procuring, those services are different.
“But what we found recently is that the theme of data is starting to underpin all of them, and we wanted to try to say, ‘is there a thread with data that resonates that these are just different use cases, but that they’re underpinned by the requirement to go and manage the data, release the data, and do that securely and accurately so that we can use the tools we’ve got.”
On AI, Cassidy said Xerox – through Go Inspire – has developed an AI-driven app called Go Discover, which is part of a platform called Go 360.
“Go Discover allows you to ask open ended questions, as a marketer, against the data that you point it to. We took a year to train the AI engine with the data scientists that we have at Go Inspire.
“It’s taken 9,000 lines of coding into the application so we can get really good answers. That’s now live and we are making it available now. Feedback from early customers is awesome and we’re excited about that.”
