We are all too familiar with the issues facing e-commerce businesses every day. Their world is more complex than ever, and there’s no sign of slowing down. Daily dealings include complex organizational structures, hard-to-identify insights, legacy tech, meetings-upon-meetings, and consensus.

Each one of these issues is the enemy of progress.

Customers are becoming increasingly frustrated too. 73% of retail customers use multiple shopping channels, researching what fits their needs best. They struggle with a lack of personalization, clunky experience design, lack of relevance, and inefficient search.

Each one of these issues is the enemy of conversion.

As 76% of consumers are more likely to purchase from brands that personalize, we know that making stronger connections with your customers leads to loyalty.

But personalization has historically been an empty buzzword that everyone is trying to give meaning without the system or infrastructure to make it match its dictionary definition.

With generative AI and machine learning, we’ve got the magic wand to create meaningful experiences that are catered to each individual visitor - tailoring messaging to their needs, and showing how products provide value to their unique lives.

But, traditional ways of thinking are holding brands back from being able to deliver on this amazing opportunity. To me, this comes down to three hard truths:

01 Your brand isn’t yours anymore

Consumers are taking to social platforms with their own reviews, describing how your product brings value to their daily lives. They are creating content around your brand - the type of content that they want to interact with. For brands, it’s not about losing their brand identity, it’s about making it more relevant to each individual. With a strong brand framework, brands can align customer interests and needs to their brand culture.

02 Humans are dynamic

People can’t be grouped into boxes, despite most marketing team’s attempts. Brands need to embrace all the different facets of their customers. When we better understand the individual customer, we can align the potential emotional value of products and showcase what they can bring to the person’s life instead of just listing generic product features. The result is a beautiful user experience, one that actually answers the questions your customers are hoping to answer as they do their research.

03 You’re chasing technology

Companies are focused on jumping on the next new thing… versus understanding what outcomes they desire. Technology needs to be intentional. By simply building the infrastructure that curates content that the customer is looking for, brands can offer the personalized interaction that customers want.

With all of that said, where do you start? Who do you trust?

Start with technology that understands

Our new reality is clear — AI is personalization. When technology understands consumers, we can make meaningful connections and adapt to our customers over time.

Over the coming years we’ll see the evolution of experiences that are bespoke to each customer who lands on your brand's platform. Not one experience will be the same. Similar potentially but not the same.

With AI, personalization never has to force our customers through a fragmented journey again. They don't have to visit multiple sites to find information. They don’t have to see ads for a shoe they already bought.

Support your brand with intelligent systems

Generative AI is the differentiator in personalization. Generative AI has given technology language. The ability to interact with you, react to your needs and evolve with you.

Here’s how.

Large language models can provide insight based on behaviors and patterns. Things like interests, activities, levels of engagement, culture, etc. On top of that, your brand and product data pairs with an individual personality - brand guidelines, brand messaging, product inventory, visual libraries. Both of these combined with a branded large language model can power a personalized experience through fluid Q&A, assistants, recommendations, SEO pages, semantic search and entity extraction.

Where do we go from here?

Personalization and specifically AI will bring everything together into one place, all of the stories your world creates. Whether it comes from the CEO, a campaign, or from your customer’s YouTube channel, it will all exist together.

By simply building the infrastructure that curates the content that your customer is looking for, you offer the same personal interaction that customers often get from a physical retail store in the digital space.

Your challenge as a brand is to make your customers belong in the world that you’ve built. The newest generations are hungry for the truth, that sense of reality, that honest no bullshit brand that understands them. And guess what? AI isn’t just about efficiency and speed, it's about giving your world a language that serves up exactly what your customers want, when they want it. AI understands.

Photography by: Tiffany Kao