AI poised to overhaul the customer journey

AI is poised to take over the customer journey for a wide range of products in the next five years. CIOs who ignore the trend risk losing major ground to competitors, AI and marketing experts suggest.

AI-driven product recommendations are already a common component of customer buying journeys, but AI tools coming soon will act as personal concierges, providing hyper-customized recommendations, after-sale add-on suggestions, and post-purchase support, says Naveen Sharma, senior vice president and global head of AI and analytics at Cognizant, an IT consulting firm.

These AI concierges will anticipate customer needs, recommend new purchases, and, where enabled, automatically buy products — kind of an Amazon subscribe-and-save service on steroids. AI concierges will follow the buyer, instead of being linked to a specific seller, enabling them to learn and develop a deep understanding of the customer’s preferences and lifestyle.

Jason Hishmeh, cofounder and CTO at IT services provider Varyence, sees such AI innovations infiltrate every level of the customer journey in the next five years.

“Imagine walking into a store where every shelf magically knows exactly what you need before you do,” he says. “That’s the charm of AI concierges transforming the sales landscape — turning every customer interaction into a bespoke experience, one personalized recommendation at a time.”

Power to the customer

New e-commerce AI shopping tools will turn the current opaque, data-broker-driven customer profile model on its head, Cognizant’s Sharma says. Customers will be able to decide how much of their data to share, based on the transaction.

“If you’re buying a bag of potato chips, I don’t know if you want to open the curtain at all,” he says. “But to buy something fancy and expensive and hard to replace, you might be willing to pull back the curtain a little bit more, expose more about your data, your usage, your behavioral patterns, to help you make that decision.”

A new generation of buyer, generally people now between ages 18 and 44, will be comfortable with using AI shopping assistants, according to “New Minds, New Markets,” a recent report from Cognizant. Sharma envisions AI concierges coming early to the retail, travel, and wellness sectors.

Companies selling most types of products “can no longer afford to ignore AI,” Sharma says. “AI is going to be a part of the decisioning and evaluation criteria in their future.”

AI-friendly buyers drive spending

Buyers comfortable with AI could drive about half of all consumer spending in the US, Germany, and Australia by 2030, the reports claims, amounting to $4.4 trillion of purchases in the US alone. Customers in the UK will lag slightly behind, but nearly 40% of consumer spending in the country will be done by AI-friendly customers by 2030, the report projects.

Nearly half of 8,400 consumers from the four countries say they are already comfortable using AI to choose products and services, according to a mid-2024 survey from Cognizant. More than a quarter would be comfortable with AI buying low-priced items, but three-quarters say they are unlikely to allow AI to automatically reorder or pay for expensive items without the customer in the loop.

The shift to new AI concierges will be a major project for many companies, Sharma says. “You can’t just sprinkle AI over an existing process,” he says. “That’s going to require a fundamental amount of re-engineering, and companies that don’t do it right could get seriously left behind.”

Sellers that fail to adopt AI concierges will “probably suffer, and bigly,” adds Lars Nyman, CMO of CUDO Compute, a cloud GPU platform. “I’d think of AI concierges as the Amazonification of everything, with the scale turned up to 11.”

Major changes needed

The new AI tools will help sellers better understand their buyers, Nyman says, a common challenge for companies. But integrating AI concierges and understanding their value will take time and effort from IT, sales, and marketing teams, he says, and adaptability will separate the survivors from the casualties.

“Companies can’t just dust off their current sales playbook and slap ‘AI-enabled’ on it,” Nyman adds. “If you’re still forcing buyers through labyrinthine customer journeys with 10-click checkouts and uninspiring product descriptions, you’re toast. If you use AI in-depth, to improve on actual user journeys, you’ll do well.”

Companies will have to rethink the way they market and sell products and services to clients, Nyman says. AI concierges will go far beyond the 2010s functionality of recommending products, he adds.

“They help make decisions, execute purchases, and over time, build brand loyalty,” Nyman adds. “Your sales process needs to evolve from reactive to more preemptive. It’s no longer about answering questions; it’s about predicting them before they actually form.”

Sellers will not only need to rethink their income strategies, but they will also need to be prepared for a major IT project, adds Varyence’s Hishmeh. “Integrating AI gear calls for a strategic overhaul, from leveraging records analytics to deeply apprehending patron conduct to making sure that AI structures can supply tailor-made answers seamlessly,” he says.

However, AI concierges will also create challenges for companies, with building trust in the tools a major issue, Nyman says.

“AI concierges are basically digital butlers with infallible memory, taste, and initiative,” he says. “Customers won’t just let them into their lives if they think brands will exploit that intimacy though. Transparency around how data is collected, stored, and used is beyond just a regulatory box to tick ­— it could well be table stakes for survival.”