How Do I Separate AI Hype From Reality?

How do I separate AI hype from reality? What can I use AI for in my business today? Where do I start? These are the questions I keep getting from friends working with consumer brands in the health & wellness and travel & hospitality industries.

Consumer brands, especially those with recurring or membership-based customer relationships, are uniquely positioned to take advantage of AI. Why? Because these brands are sitting on rich troves of actionable behavioral data that are ideally suited to drive predictive analytics and automation at scale.

A first-party data strategy focused on the automation of personalized customer journeys is the place to start. The opportunity is large, and the ongoing regulatory shift away from third-party cookies is accelerating the urgency. If your business is collecting any kind of product usage, visitation, or subscriber behavior data, AI/Machine Learning can do a great job of identifying behavior patterns, categorizing customers in cohorts, predicting future outcomes, and automating omnichannel interactions. These capabilities can be especially powerful when integrated with a CRM for efficient and scalable data-driven action.

From an EBITDA perspective, the target should be to increase revenue through improved conversion and retention and to decrease labor through automation. This does not mean that high-touch customer service goes away. Instead, the automation of monotonous tasks frees employees to focus on higher-value customer interactions.

Unfortunately, few brands are yet doing a great job of activating the behavioral data that exists in their systems. Too often, data is siloed, and fails to be governed and structured in a way to make it easily consumable for predictive analytics and scaled automation.

The good news, cloud capabilities that comprise the modern data stack make the previously elusive goal of an actionable, 360-degree view of the customer more achievable than ever. Cloud data warehouses like Snowflake, Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) like Twilio Segent, and omnichannel activation tools like HubSpot, Iterable, Simon, and Braze position brands to ingest, govern, and action data to harness the power of AI. Large, ecosystem players like Adobe and Salesforce offer end-to-end solutions with similar focus.

It’s an exciting time for consumer brands. Hype-aside, AI-driven data capabilities are unlocking the type of scaled customer relationships that have been elusive for years.