CMO Roundtable
A
t Neighborly, we’re leveraging AI to make our marketing smarter, faster, and more effective while keeping our focus firmly on helping franchise owners grow their businesses. Our approach centers on using AI within our Customer Engagement Platform to turn first-party data into action in ways that directly impact performance.
STACY LYNN BOURGEOIS
Chief Marketing Officer Neighborly
AI is transforming how we understand and engage customers. By connecting and analyzing customer interactions across brands and channels, we can uncover actionable insights that drive smarter decisions, more relevant experiences, and stronger customer relationships. This intelligence enables us to personalize engagement at scale, optimize creative and messaging, and deliver the right experiences to customers, ultimately improving conversion, increasing lifetime value, and accelerating growth. Rather than relying on a one-size-fits-all approach, we use AI-powered predictive models to identify and prioritize audiences based on their likelihood of engaging, converting, or returning. This enables us to tailor outreach to individual customer needs and behaviors, helping drive higher lead conversion, increase repeat business, and engage customers at the moments that matter most. Delivering this level of personalization manually would be nearly impossible, especially at the scale required to support millions of customer interactions across brands and channels.
AI
has become an important part of how our consumer and franchise development marketing teams operate at Home Franchise Concepts. It’s a tool that can meaningfully enhance our operations and future work, and it would be a missed opportunity not to put it to good use while still preserving the human element of how we communicate and connect with our target audiences.
HEATHER CATES
Chief Marketing Officer Home Franchise Concepts
Today, one of the many ways we are using AI tools is for analytics. AI can organize large volumes of data and identify trends that help us target prospective franchisees and consumers more effectively through paid media, public relations, SEO optimization, and more. Because these tools analyze information much faster, our teams can zero in on the key insights that surface and make informed decisions that drive leads and sales. This level of visibility can ensure every initiative contributes to reach, efficiency, and ROI. It also allows us to learn from past campaigns. AI highlights what drove success, where drop‑offs occurred, and what adjustments will maximize impact moving forward.
In addition, AI allows us to continuously optimize marketing performance. Campaigns are not static; they evolve based on real-time results. We’re constantly testing subject lines, timing, audience segments, and creative with AI helping us learn what works best. We apply those learnings across the system. This creates a cycle of continuous improvement. Another important benefit is the ability to identify cross-brand opportunities. AI helps us better understand customer needs throughout their journey across Neighborly’s portfolio of 19 brands in North America. We can make relevant recommendations that introduce customers to additional services they may need, creating value for both customers and our franchise owners. AI is also changing how customers discover our brands in the first place. As search evolves with AI-driven answers and recommendations, we’re using AI to monitor how our Neighborly brands appear in these new discovery channels, ensuring our marketing keeps pace with where customers are looking. Ultimately, AI is helping us move from reactive marketing to proactive engagement. It equips us with deeper insights, enables greater personalization, and ensures our marketing efforts are consistently improving. Most importantly, it allows us to deliver these benefits in a way that supports our franchise owners, helping them grow revenue while we handle the complexity behind the scenes.
Beyond analytics, we’re leveraging AI for organic visibility. The world of search has drastically changed, shifting from traditional SEO to a very dynamic and interconnected web between search engines and LLMs. Not only do we use AI to understand these constantly changing dynamics, but also to ensure we show up in the right channels and with the right message for consumers. At the same time, our team is constantly in search of ways to unlock innovation and new ways of reaching the consumer in a meaningful way, but this takes capacity. To build that capacity, our team is in a relentless stage of experimentation with AI tools to automate time-consuming tasks. Finally, we’ve been exploring new creative approaches to broaden our library of brand assets. This allows the consumer to expand their imagination of what’s possible while remaining true to the amazing options available within the Home Franchise Concepts portfolio brands.
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Issue 3, 2026 | Franchise Update | 53