Let's make 2025 the year of Empowering our Customers

Being the last week before the holidays, naturally, my thoughts go towards looking backwards and forwards.  Yes, it has been an incredible year for me, especially due to the book, but also because I have been exposed to so much new thinking, mostly from the many new companies and people exploring where we are going in this AI-driven push towards personalization.  A lot to contemplate, so I do have a few observations to share that I hope can spark some thought:

1. Overlooked populations: Several of my newsletters have focused on populations that marketers are just not thinking about -- with distinct passions, needs, and accessibility -- but who could get left out when brands think about personalization at a generic level.  For example, older seniors, such as the points I made about my mother-in-law, who have to now live a life dependent on digital interfaces, but who have no idea what a "hamburger" menu means, or how to manage the storage capacity on their device. Personalization should be about finding new ways, perhaps through tailored videos, proactive chatbots, or even simple "curricula" to engage and EMPOWER these people who have the buying power but lack digital savvy.
2. Truly EMPOWERING people. Whenever I am in a group talking about personalization, the questions immediately turn to how creepy people feel about the marketing they get, and they fear it will only get worse.  That is a massively flashing warning sign! If brands continue to just bombard people after they happened to visit a site and look at some shoes, or overload them with discount pitches after they've moved, no-one benefits. Again, we have to put the "value" back in a brand's "value proposition," and one of the most important ways of doing that is how one delivers an EMPOWERING customer journey. Are we really taking the time to think through how we are helping customers do something they could not do before because we are now using customer information about them for their benefit? Please ask your team this. Often.
3. That includes EMPOWERING employees. Some of the best use cases for personalization are in helping call center reps get access to an immediate view of everything they need to know about a customer, including what their problem might have been. AI can now provide reps a single pane of glass from which to actually help someone, and also train them on how to get better. Clients I work with who are rolling out these capabilities are seeing more retention, higher employee satisfaction, and also higher satisfaction from their customers. Instead of just thinking about AI and chatbots as a way to reduce call center staff, think of it as a way to scale them, make them more effective, and create a pipeline for constant learning on how to improve
4. For me, for us, for our customers. Every survey I see shows well over 30% of employees using AI for some aspect of their jobs, but less than 10% of companies saying they are using it as a core asset. What's going on?  It is a simple evolution. Individuals are using the LLM's to help them get work done, whether or not they have company access, in many cases, fearing that someone might find out.  But the improvements to one's own productivity are undeniable. So people will be experimenting on their own "For me", and business leaders, with the right guardrails in place to secure company IP, should support that.  Then, the next step is when companies are starting to change specific processes to take advantage of the speed and new capabilities AI can offer.  Managing business contracts. Getting large scale email programs out the door. Finding anomalies in customer service. These "For us" applications are starting to expand, and again, benefits are accruing, especially as new providers emerge to offer specialized support at a vertical or functional level.  The furthest horizon, "For our customers," happens when companies realize they can use AI to dramatically improve the customer experience, mainly through new forms of personalization.  Having an app that can immediately know your complete context and dynamically greet you with the right interface for the moment, making it super-easy to place a quick order or answer a tough question. Providing proactive alerts to customers when something is going out of whack, such as a power surge, a trend in their spending, or a spike in a medical measure. The possibilities here are endless, and of course, that's what we focused on in the book.  But the reality is that leaders who are already reaping value from AI are accelerating their way through the "for me, for us, for our customers" trajectory
5. Is "agentic" doomed to be the most overused word of our time? I just saw a news show that claimed it was, and the talking heads pledged not to use that word. Who cares?  The point is that new capabilities will allow AI to execute tasks on people's behalf, not just respond to prompts. Will people want it?  Again, I go back to the "for me, for us, for our customers" framework, and assert that we'll see a surge of employees creating their own mini-applications to help with repetitive tasks, and companies will then also use AI to proactively take action, such as following up on a customer trigger to reach out. But changing customer experiences through "agentic" capabilities, will not only take a bigger sell, but also will be seen more as offering "solutions" than offering "agents."  Help me manage a bathroom renovation. Help me plan and coordinate a trip to Spain.  Guide me through my hip replacement surgery recovery. All of these have many steps needing coordination, and also many parties needing to be coordinated. The power of agents will be unleashed when brands can coordinate an ecosystem of parties to provide these types of solutions.  There's a whole range of capabilities that will need to be in place for that, not the least of which is managing people's information for security and privacy, but I am confident we'll see the emergence of new "solution" offerings next year.

So, I see us on the cusp of an exciting time when brands can create new kinds of relationships with customers based on unlocking the powers of AI to truly empower their customers. BUT it is a choice.  It requires a mindset that EMPOWERING and providing SOLUTIONS are what a brand wants to stand for. Just testing and tailoring minor tweaks in creative for advertising will reap some benefit, but I doubt it will give us the breakthroughs in growth heralded by our AI providers. Let's use 2025 to get back to thinking about our customers and not getting caught up first in the cool new capabilities we can exploit.  

How are you looking to manage this struggle in the year ahead??