The Chair, which will be inaugurated in the academic year 2021-2022, will be held by Gaia Rubera, a scholar who worked at Michigan State University and the University of Southern California before returning to Italy to join Bocconi, where she is Head of the Marketing Department and teaches courses in Innovation and Marketing Analytics, Deep Learning for Computer Vision e Social Media Marketing.

The Chair calls for an intense program of research and initiatives which will involve students in educational challenges that will put them in direct contact with the company. 

The Amplifon Chair in Customer Science’s research program aims to deepen the understanding of the customer through the use of artificial intelligence techniques. “The developments in computer science”, explains Gaia Rubera, “allow us to use many different channels, like a post on Twitter, an image on Instagram or the call to a call center, to transform the conversations customers have with the company into data.  The artificial intelligence technologies make sense of this data, reading the signals that help to understand how the consumer will respond to the company’s actions and identifying the most effective strategies to create a higher value not only for the brand, but also for the customer”. 

If, at the beginning of the last decade, the most developed tools for this purpose involved textual analysis, used to interpret social media posts, and, in the fast few years, computer vision, used to analyze images, the new frontier that Rubera intends to explore involves audio analytics. They make it possible, for example, to identify and match non-verbal behavioral cues of a call center operator, like the speed of presentation, the tone or the use of sighs and pauses, with the customer’s reply. 

“We are grateful to Amplifon”, states Gianmario Verona, Rector of Bocconi, “for making it possible for us to intensify our activities in advanced fields like computer science and artificial intelligence, which Bocconi has invested in considerably over the past few years, first by bringing talented, young academics like Gaia Rubera on board, then by developing new and advanced study programs like the three-year undergraduate degree in Economics, Management and Computer Science and Mathematical and Computing Sciences for Artificial Intelligence or the Master of Science in Data Science and Business Analytics”. 

“We are very proud to be starting this journey with Bocconi University”, Enrico Vita, Amplifon’s CEO commented. “The deep understanding of our customers, of their needs and their buying experiences is crucial to our future development strategies.  Toward this end, in Amplifon we believe that leveraging on the talents of the future is key and we are very enthusiastic about joining forces with this global Italian excellence with a long-term partnership, which testifies to the Group’s commitment to and focus on the education of younger generations”, Enrico Vita concluded.