MANIFESTO
AI First Brands
Marketers must prepare for a world
of AI first brands, where the first
touchpoint for any brand is AI.
of AI first brands, where the first
touchpoint for any brand is AI.
Are your brands ready to become AI first?
We are entering an AI first world where a consumer’s first contact with any brand will be made via artificial intelligence – creating AI first brands. The implications of AI for communications and marketing are profound. AI will have a far-reaching impact on the full scope of brand communications, marketing, personal communications and media.
Business automation is accelerating at breakneck speed, primarily driven by cost savings and the ability to optimise business processes, communications and customer interactions at enormous scale. As a result, more and more customer conversations are being automated with the introduction of AI chatbots, voicebots and, more recently, smart robots.
We must now carefully consider AI’s role in positioning brands. We know that emotions – not logic – still power the vast majority of consumer buying decisions. Emotions build and shape brands. However, we are in danger of placing our brand relationships in the virtual hands of agents devoid of emotional intelligence.
Is your brand prepared for our new AI first world?
Business automation is accelerating at breakneck speed, primarily driven by cost savings and the ability to optimise business processes, communications and customer interactions at enormous scale. As a result, more and more customer conversations are being automated with the introduction of AI chatbots, voicebots and, more recently, smart robots.
We must now carefully consider AI’s role in positioning brands. We know that emotions – not logic – still power the vast majority of consumer buying decisions. Emotions build and shape brands. However, we are in danger of placing our brand relationships in the virtual hands of agents devoid of emotional intelligence.
Is your brand prepared for our new AI first world?
AI FIRST BRANDS
Decades of research show that emotions influence practically all consumer decisions. Will AI weaken or strengthen our emotional connections with brands?
AI FIRST BRANDS
What’s going to change?
Here are six ways in which we can expect AI to have a profound impact on brands.
A new dimension to brands
AI voice is fast becoming our universal translator, as more and more brands embed voice commands into their products and services. AI voice is providing brands with new access to consumers and creating a new dimension to consumer relationships with brands. How consumers feel about their brands is going to be increasingly influenced by conversations with their products.
New AI media
AI will continue to change the nature of media, entertainment and content consumption. It has already brought big changes the way content is consumed, allowing platforms to offer more and more personalisation. AI will soon enable new multi-directional media communications channels that could fundamentally change the way our media industry works.
Fully automated CX
From the outset, business automation has been used to guide the customer journey, bridging the gaps between human interactions and consumer buying. Today, AI is beginning to automate the entire journey, only introducing human agents when something goes badly wrong. In our new world of AI CX, human-to-human interactions are beoming exceptions to the rule.
Changes in consumer behaviour
Just as social media brought about massive changes in consumer behaviour, new AI platforms and services will reshape customer behaviours and expectations. Our latest Generation Zs and their successors will grow up as ‘AI natives’, with their own needs, preferences, behaviours and habits developing in tune with our new AI first world.
Hyper-personalisation
AI is enabling a revolution in marketing, providing deeper consumer insights and richer context to allow extreme personalisation of customer experience, more seamless customer conversations and higher conversion rates. This is a new era of hyper-personlisation, where every brand communication can be optimised based on your profile, history, habits and preferences.
Marketing as a conversation
The current race for organisations to embrace, implement and optimise AI means that, increasingly, a consumer’s first contact with any organisation – business or government – is likely to be with AI. As conversational AI becomes ubiquitous, this also means that all your brand’s future communications, marketing and customer service could start with an AI conversation. AI will allow brands to have dialog with millions of consumers.
AI FIRST BRANDS
Gartner says that organisations are able to reduce call, chat and email inquiries by up to 70 percent after deploying AI assistants. What’s the impact on brands of replacing that human contact with AI?
AI FIRST BRANDS
How should we prepare for AI first brands?
Many organisations chose not to prepare for the mass adoption of social media in the late 2000s and 2010s, discovering – often to their cost – that just because your brand isn’t active on a certain platform doesn’t mean that it can’t have an impact on your brand. So, regardless of whether you feel that you will have an AI first brand, the new ways that AI affects communications and marketing will influence your brand, your customers and your communications in general.
For some brands the impact that AI has on their marketing and communications will be incremental. For others, introducing new AI systems that change marketing and communications may have an immediate affect creating AI first brands practically overnight. In both cases, there may well be a tendancy for organisations to focus on core functions rather than the broader range of potential outcomes, such as changes in brand perceptions or loyalty.
Today’s organisations should ensure that they have the strategies, frameworks and processes in place to adapt, optimise and future-proof their communications, whilst managing the way in which AI positions their brands.
For some brands the impact that AI has on their marketing and communications will be incremental. For others, introducing new AI systems that change marketing and communications may have an immediate affect creating AI first brands practically overnight. In both cases, there may well be a tendancy for organisations to focus on core functions rather than the broader range of potential outcomes, such as changes in brand perceptions or loyalty.
Today’s organisations should ensure that they have the strategies, frameworks and processes in place to adapt, optimise and future-proof their communications, whilst managing the way in which AI positions their brands.
AI FIRST BRANDS
Read more about our new AI first world
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