Creating Brand Love Through AI-Powered Customer Experiences

To stay ahead of the curve in customer engagement, brands must move beyond delivering AI-generated content (AIGC) to delivering AI-powered consumer experiences (AICX). While AIGC levels up content by creating content at scale, AICX levels up the customer experience by creating personalized interactions. Applying AI to CX is not just about chatbots for customer service, it's about adopting a customer-centric approach across all functions, from product development to marketing, and across all touchpoints, from digital to retail, all enabled by AI. AI has the ability to create intimate and hyper-personalized one-to-one interactions across all touchpoints of the consumer decision journey, and will be a key factor in how brands are perceived, valued and ultimately loved by consumers. Here’s how, in three ways.

AICX levels up storytelling.

Applying AI to consumer experience means moving from advertising a brand world, to participating and engaging in a brand world. The most discerning audiences in the world are demanding nothing less than a seamless and immersive brand experience: 73% point to brand experience as an important factor in their purchasing decisions, right behind price and product quality. Here are the ways brands are already leveling up engagement via immersive brand experiences powered by AI, and developed by Media.Monks:

• Building smart and immersive flagship stores. Chinese EV brand JIDU launched the world's smartest showroom in Beijing, powered by Baidu AI technology. This immersive space offers a unique brand experience with life-size avatars and captures valuable user data. 
• Opening up new dimensions of brand expression. As an enabler of originality, adidas knows the importance of self expression. But the options to self express in the metaverse are limited. Enter Ozworld—the world’s first personality-based, AI-generated, unique-to-you, interoperable avatar platform that can be taken to 2,000+ metaverse platforms. 
• Embedding consumers directly into any story. Intel’s AI-powered technology connects young people in China to their remarkable heritage by scanning and mapping their faces in real time onto historical figures in a series of animated films that were projected on the city walls of Xi’an.

AICX levels up personalization.

The benefits of personalized customer experiences—one-on-one interaction between a customer and a brand—helps to massively uplift sales and loyalty. Research suggests that personalized and tailored CX drives over 66% of customer loyalty—more than price and brand combined. Meanwhile, 78% of consumers are more likely to make repeat purchases and recommend companies that personalize their interactions. 

• Creating hyper-personalized celebrity content at scale. In collaboration with Spotify, we created an interactive listening experience with a deep fake version of The Weeknd giving users a personalized greeting using data from their Spotify accounts. We created an AI to synthesize the artist’s voice allowing for an interactive listening experience between the fan and the artist himself. Over 600K fans visited in the first few hours—and The Weeknd knew every one of them.
• Personifying an AI personal shopper. What if your customers could have a conversation with an AI personal shopper that could recommend style tips and products, creating cross-selling and repeat purchase opportunities for higher customer lifetime value? For a long time, brands have tried to do this with chatbots to handle questions or complaints in a customer service capacity further down the funnel, but now conversational UI creates a smoother experience and will be used earlier in the funnel for ecommerce exploration. 

AICX levels up co-creation.

Involving consumers in product development very early on in R&D is proven to drive product success, advocacy and conversion. Companies that involve customers in the product development process see numerous benefits, including a higher customer advocacy, than those that don't. The proof is there, but brands find it very difficult to execute on immersive co-creation because it typically involves different departments and different organizational structures. That’s where AI comes in. Here are some AI-powered co-creation applications that we’re helping brands experiment with today.

• Generating consumer insights. At the Estee Lauder R&D Experience Center in Shanghai, the beauty brand engages consumers and key opinion leaders in product testing, validation and co-creation sessions for new products. Touch tables and magic mirrors powered with AI technology enhance workshops and ideation sessions and support the generation of consumer insights from participants in the room.
• Co-creating new products with customers in real time. What if a fashion lifestyle brand could run live design sessions with their community, their best creative directors and celebrities in a livestream that could generate the must-have sneaker, handbag or you-name-it based on their input…in real time? Not only would it speed products to market, but community co-creation and input would virtually guarantee success.

Get ahead by embracing AICX now.

The evolution of AI technology—from analyzing and processing data, to creating more content faster and at scale, to facilitating personalized storytelling through experiences that deepen the collaboration and intimacy between brands and its customers—is extremely exciting…and disruptive. There are new developments in the technology and its application for brand engagement literally every day, and brands that are able to harness AI’s power will be able to build stronger, more meaningful relationships with their customers and drive business growth like never before. Again, this will mean looking beyond AI’s power to merely build efficiency; in an environment of content overload, delivering AICX is how brands can truly deliver value.