AI Is Bringing Brands And Consumers Closer Together

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is quite a pervasive technology in the present-day environment. Even regular consumers with no technical knowledge are becoming aware of AI and are comfortable interacting with these systems. Examples are all around, from Siri on the Apple iPhone to the movie recommendations made by Netflix and song playlists on Spotify.

But there are many other ways in which consumers are beginning to interact with AI systems and many of them are not so obvious, at least to the end consumer of the services. Think of self-driving cars. They may not be common yet, but they are being tested all over the world and they rely on AI to constantly monitor the environment outside the car and to decide what to do next to keep the vehicle safe.

AI can also help to predict what people will do in the future. Facebook can tell if you are likely to take your own life based on recent posts. Stanford University trained a system to detect if you are gay or straight based just facial photographs. The HR system designed by IBM can predict who is likely to quit their job. The implications for these insights are fairly clear – imagine what an insurance company or government could do with this data.

Perhaps more positively, there are now investment algorithms that outperform regular investment managers and AI-powered disease diagnosis means that your virtual doctor will be aware of any relevant research and drug trials – even if it was just published yesterday.

Most consumers will be largely unaware of these developments, but there is one area where people are creating a huge demand for greater investment and research into AI systems and that is personalisation – the interaction between consumers and brands.

Years ago it was Amazon that really started this wave of personalisation by offering deals or recommendations based on the specific shopping behaviour of the individual customer. This was extremely innovative at the time because most brands could only ever offer the same deal to all customers at the same time. Now this is commonplace and expected. A clothes retailer needs to know what the customer likes, dislikes, their shopping history, and what they have browsed and lingered over in the past. All these insights would be impossible for a person, but an AI system can figure out what to offer the customer – either as a recommendation or as a special offer – and ensure that the offer is made at exactly the time that the customer is most likely to respond positively.

Now these personalised insights are not only becoming more common, but customers know that brands have the data so they are expecting greater personalisation. Customer demand is creating a wave of IT research and development. AI is moving quickly from being interesting and innovative to becoming essential for brands across many industries and it is customer expectation that is driving this change.