Every Interaction Becomes a Conversation
Agentic AI has a unique potential to change consumer experiences dramatically and to enable both novel services and dramatic improvements in personalization. A set of fundamental capabilities enables the change. AI can now understand text, images, and even fuse unstructured and structured data in entirely novel ways. AI now also shows the emerging capabilities of aligning deeply with human reasoning, replicating human responses to psychological experiments in-silico on a still broader set of topics, and with increasing accuracy.
This has a fundamental impact on how brands can collect and understand customer data. Every customer interaction, every chat, click, and purchase, can now feed a single ongoing conversation, and be understood by the same AI.
Every customer interaction, every chat, click, and purchase, can now feed a single ongoing conversation, and be understood by the same AI.This happens both directly through chats, but also indirectly through streams of interactions. Each view, each click, each purchase can now be analyzed to tell part of the same story.
Where we once captured data in silos, transactions, surveys, browsing behaviors, we can now stitch across these and let AI synthesize meaning: a shift in motivation, an expression of a consumer trait, a recent intent.
From Static Touchpoints to Conversational Journeys
This indirect capture has a profound effect on our ability to personalize the brand conversation. It fundamentally changes how we use and build models. Accelerated by the emerging capabilities of AI to align with human behavior, we can now meaningfully synthesize motivations and customer needs. Even if AI does not fundamentally reason itself like humans, its ability to successfully mimic human reasoning in a context is a very powerful tool. We are already seeing for the work-horse of ecommerce, the recommender systems, where AI agents semantically understand previous purchases to predict the next.
But the perspectives are bigger can recommenders. Essentially, we'll be able to have 1-to-1 conversations with our high-value segments, in-silico, as naturally as we have conversations with ChatGPT today.
The competitive edge
These conversations will be heavily fueled by the world-model of foundation AIs, which can 'interpolate' between missing datapoints. This turns AI's tendency to hallucinate into a useful feature, helping to create natural conversations even with incomplete data. The quality of the conversations will depend strongly on the availability of first-party data, essentially gatekeeping how well Brands can align the AI with their real customers. The alignment will be strengthened by classical ML models, layering in high-precision predictions on churn and affinities.
Brands with an existing focus on first-party data still stand to gain the most. They will be able to harvest conversations, gain insights and novel behavioral predictions, delivering new levels of increased personalization.
Brands with an existing focus on first-party data still stand to gain the most
The Stakes Are Rising
The outcome will be a new baseline for customer experiences. What feels like magic today, with AI that understands customer intent and responds accordingly, will be the expectation of customers tomorrow.
Early movers will capture a compounding advantage. Both in terms of the conversations they capture today, that in turn becomes training data for tomorrow's predictions, but also in the know-how and shaping of platforms and tools to harvest the agentic AI technology to match the evolving customer expectations.