Constellation is a company that is inventing the world’s first and only creative marketing technology made for highly regulated industries. And the company’s end-to-end compliance solution features built-in verticalized engines designed to streamline the creative process for many companies with an automated solution that scales creative content and the regulatory approval process. Pulse 2.0 interviewed Constellation CTO Nauman Hafiz to learn more about the company.
Nauman Hafiz’s Background
What is Nauman Hafiz’s background? Hafiz said:
“My name is Nauman Hafiz, and I lead the Technology, Data, and Security organization as CTO of Constellation with a keen interest in helping engineering, data science, and design drive cohesive product thinking and platform innovation – with a focus on delivering real value to customers. I came to Constellation having spent 10+ years on the technology leadership team at R/GA, working closely with premier brands such as Nike, Disney/Marvel, Samsung, Johnson & Johnson, and Uber to help architect and lead development to drive innovation, business, and growth.”
Formation Of Constellation
What are your primary responsibilities? Hafiz shared:
“I help guide Constellation to scale its core technology and data platforms into a comprehensive suite of industry-leading products across verticals, from automotive to pharmaceuticals.”
Favorite Memory
What has been Hafiz’s favorite memory working for the company so far? Hafiz reflected:
“We are currently seeing immense development within our technology/product team. It has been very fulfilling to watch our team leads, some of which joined the company within its first few years as recent college graduates, take ownership of the products and the company’s vision. It has been exciting to see our team leads grow, take ownership of their department within the product engineering org, and see our ecosystem of features mature and evolve exponentially. We have some exceptional projects in the pipeline that wouldn’t be possible without the mix of homegrown talent and innovative thinking within our organization.”
Core Products
What are the company’s core products and features? Hafiz explained:
“Founded in 2016 in New York City, Constellation is a cutting-edge AI solution that empowers highly regulated and complex industries with the insights and content they need to fuel their business. Specializing in healthcare, automotive, insurance, and finance, its powerful data and AI insights tools inform the creation of compliant content at scale. We enable our customers to harness their data and streamline the creation of localized, personalized content.”
“Constellation focuses on three main areas: data, content, and compliance.”
1.) Data: Constellation’s data offering brings together business and contextual data to surface AI-driven insights and drive content creation. Businesses have a unique opportunity to democratize so much data, but it is usually siloed and hard to extract and manage. That’s where Constellation comes in. We enrich a customer’s owned data by breaking it out of its silos and combining it with contextual data such as AI social intelligence, competitive insights, industry trends, and more. Constellation’s AI models deliver insights that can drive strategic choices regarding media mix, content, brand reputation, business operations, and more.
2.) Content: Constellation’s modular content engine streamlines the entire content supply chain to ensure that a company’s assets are data-driven, personalized, localized, optimized across channels, and fully brand and legal-compliant. Users can even syndicate content across websites to ensure timely updates for inventory, offers, seasonal messaging, and more. Constellation enables its customers to generate and enhance imagery for their content, in turn eliminating the timely and costly work of sourcing background images, resizing assets, and enhancing things like composition and lighting.
3.) Compliance: Constellation’s tech solutions were built to ensure every customer’s content is brand and regulatory-compliant. It allows customers to automate compliance reviews with AI monitoring, streamlining the process and the generation of disclaimers at a local level.
Challenges Faced
What challenges have Hafiz and the team faced in building the company? Hafiz acknowledged:
“Generative AI is incredibly powerful, but it comes with an inherent level of unpredictability. At Constellation, we have been primarily focused on scaling our use of AI to meet our enterprise customer’s needs, making their own data, as well as industry-specific data sets accessible and scalable within a simple interface while keeping a privacy-first mindset. This includes delivering results with speed, precision, and confidence, which can be challenging in a constantly changing data and technical environment. This is a challenge we continue to address through thoughtful adaptations.”
Evolution Of Constellation’s Technology
How has the company’s technology evolved since launching? Hafiz noted:
Over the last eight years, our core tech stack has evolved significantly to meet the unique needs of our clients. Each of these iterations has reflected the size and complexity of our company and has carried us into the next generation of business expansion. We are looking forward to deploying the third version of our platform in the coming weeks, which will 10x the overall capabilities of our platform – across AI, creative scale, and cross-channel deployment.
Significant Milestones
What have been some of the company’s most significant milestones? Hafiz cited:
Last year, we took the foundations of what we had built for our early automotive clients (a turnkey solution to create incentive-based creative) and scaled the automation and deployment engine to allow it to create 40,000+ pieces of content for a key OEM in the automotive space. A deal with a Tier 1 OEM in this capacity has always been a goal of ours, as it allows us to continue the support of content democratization for automotive dealers at all levels with heightened scale.
Customer Success Stories
Upon asking Hafiz about the company’s success stories, he highlighted:
“Early on, we worked with Lithia to launch the first iteration of our platform. During this period, our technology provided a streamlined content development solution and direct deployment into various media channels. After several years of development and adaptation, our team had the chance to sit in on a presentation they put together at their annual conference to showcase the benefits of our technology in terms of speed to market, efficiency, and scalability.”
Future Company Goals
What are some of the company’s future company goals? Hafiz pointed out:
“On the front end, we’re working to adapt the platform to solve each of our customers’ specific requirements out of the box. At a macro level, we’re using Generative AI to close the gaps in existing manual decisions that need to be made while using the platform.”
Additional Thoughts
Any other topics you would like to discuss? Hafiz concluded:
“Technology is moving so fast. At Constellation, we acknowledged early on that we would have to constantly step back, rethink, and rebuild our technology to keep up with the pace. We pride ourselves on our flexibility and insatiable curiosity; it drives everything we do.”
