Brandon Purcell
Principal Analyst

Author Insights
Blog
Explaining Explainable AI
In 2020, one message in the AI market came through loud and clear: AI’s got some explaining to do! Explainable AI (XAI) has long been a fringe discipline in the broader world of AI and machine learning. It exists because many machine-learning models are either opaque or so convoluted that they defy human understanding. But […]
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What We Talk About When We Talk About Insights
What exactly is an "insight"? Analyst Brandon Purcell previews Forrester's new Periodic Table of Insights which will be unveiled at the upcoming Data Strategy & Insights live virtual event.
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Who Is Responsible For Responsible AI?
What are the most common issues resulting from AI? Analyst Brandon Purcell reviews the most recent legal issues stemming from AI and provide guidance on how to address them.
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Values, Ethics, And Algorithms, Oh My!
At CX North America, you'll learn how to interpret and implement ethical AI principles across your organization to protect your customers, business, and brand.
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Five AI Principles To Put In Practice
From tech vendors to governments to industry consortia to the Vatican, it seems that every day a new entity is announcing its set of AI principles — broad guidelines for how AI systems should be responsibly developed, trained, tested, and deployed. On the surface, this is great news, as it demonstrates an awareness of the fact […]
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It’s The Most Wonderful Time Of The Year For Segmentation
Well, sort of. It actually depends on what type of segmentation you’re interested in, which of course depends on what you plan to do with your segmentation. (Segmentation is not an end in itself but a possible means to an end.) My new report, “The Best Of Times And The Worst Of Times For Segmentation,” […]
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YouTube’s Algorithmic Pedo-Failure
This week, YouTube turned to Facebook and said, “Hold my beer.” Yesterday, after intense pressure, the platform decided to demonetize channels that promote hate speech and discrimination. And in a terrifying story on Monday, The New York Times reported that YouTube’s recommendation engine surfaces videos of partially clothed children to viewers who’ve watched similar videos […]
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AI, Automation, And Robotics . . . Oh My!
As companies strive to improve customer experience through better customer and employee engagement, they inevitably face the problem of scalability. How can we provide a seamless, convenient, and consistent experience to all our customers? And how can we best equip our employees to do so, as well? The technologies in our recently published “The Forrester […]
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Game, Set, Match: Deliver Fan Obsession In Sports With Fanalytics
With millions of rabid fans tuning in and turning out to watch these spectacles unfold in real time, customer insights pros are met with a tremendous opportunity to create meaningful moments of engagement for their fans using data and analytics.
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Orchestrate Your Customer Analytics Practice With The Next Best Experience
In the world of customer analytics, soaring solos only get you so far. Delivering harmonious customer experiences across the customer life cycle requires careful collaboration across different business functions.
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Facebook’s Most Recent Ethical tHUD
Today, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development announced it is suing Facebook for violating the Fair Housing Act. It accuses the tech giant of “encouraging, enabling, and causing housing discrimination” by allowing advertisers to block real estate ads from race, religion, country of birth, and other protected characteristics. Advertisers could effectively red-line by […]
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Scoring Big With Data: The New Age Of Analytics In Sports
Sports: the games we know and love. We love to play and watch these games so much, in fact, that in the US, there are only two days during the year when the four major pro sports leagues aren’t playing a game (i.e., MLB, NBA, NFL, and NHL).[i] One of the most anticipated games in […]
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Artificial Intelligence Has A Probability Problem
AWS just announced Amazon SageMaker Ground Truth to help companies create training data sets for machine learning. This is a powerful new service for folks who have access to lots of data that hasn’t been consistently annotated. In the past, humans would have to label a massive corpus of images or frames within video to […]
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Join Me In London Next Month To Discuss The Ethics Of AI
In about a month, I will have the honor of presenting my research on “The Ethics Of AI: How To Avoid Harmful Bias And Discrimination” to attendees at CX Europe 2018. The event will take place in London on November 13 and 14 and will feature several of my esteemed analyst colleagues, as well as […]
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Join Us At Forrester’s First-Ever Data Strategy & Insights Forum
You’ve been sold on the value of data and analytics: If you embed data and analytics across your business, you will make better decisions to grow customer lifetime value, increase operational efficiencies, and differentiate from the competition. It just makes sense. But have you been able to actually do it, at scale, across your organization? […]
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When Goofy Kicks Donald Duck, Your Company Loses
I just had the pleasure of attending a Forrester Leadership Boards workshop followed by our Consumer Marketing Forum in New York City. As usual, data challenges remain top of mind for most marketers – siloed data, dirty data, inaccessible data… the usual suspects. However, there was also a data manifestation of an age old organizational […]
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The Ethics of AI: Don’t Build Racist Models
It seems that almost every week these days, there is a news item about the dangerous potential for artificial intelligence to discriminate against groups of people. Earlier this week, a presentation at the Artificial Intelligence, Ethics, and Society (AIES) conference on an AI system trained to help the LAPD classify crimes as gang violence had […]
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Benchmark Yourself, Then Find The Help You Need
With the passing of the autumnal equinox, it’s time to rake leaves, sip pumpkin spiced lattes, and take stock of the summer’s activities. For most CI pros, this summer was spent wrangling and analyzing customer data for insights- hopefully with some much-needed R&R sprinkled in. For me, this summer was also busy and productive resulting […]
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The Beginning Of A New Age For AI
These days it seems like you can't open a newspaper (ok, web browser) without coming across an article on artificial intelligence. Well publicized breakthroughs like Google AlphaGo's unprecedented victories over human Go champions have heralded the promise of a new golden age for AI. Add to that the personification of personal assistants in Apple's Siri and […]
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