AI: The Experience Revolution in Customer Engagement

The landscape of customer engagement is undergoing a monumental shift. This is being driven by a new generation of customers that have vastly different expectations from brands, than any previous generation. Further, online behaviour is undergoing a transformation led by prompt-based information discovery, which will overtake traditional search and the expectation of individualized interactions and experiences. Traditional SaaS tools and platforms, no matter how cutting edge, will not be able to deliver on these expectations. 

Serendipitously, consumer accessible AI infrastructure and consumer facing AI applications are now mainstream. And just in time, as AI will be the  force accelerator required, enabling brands to navigate these disruptive changes and unlock new value. 

At its core, customer engagement fundamentally revolves around four pillars: to

• Inform (tell them what they should know), 
• Incentivize (give reasons to act), 
• Assist (proactively help with needs), and 
• Simplify (make actions easier). 

With AI tech, the 4 pillars can be implemented and augmented in completely new ways.  This convergence will bring about an experience revolution in how customers perceive and interact with brands. Some of the strategies to do this are:

• Interactive Experiences: These are dynamic, real-time, two-way interactions conversations. Customers are no longer passive recipients of information and instead they can actively participate and influence their journey with ai-powered tools like chatbots, individualised content and gamified experiences, among others. AI tech and data analytics are crucial here, generating emotionally contextual content and letting customers “pull” what they need at their convenience and then creating their own journeys and experiences. With today’s advanced reasoning and decision making LLM’s becoming commonplace, AI is at the centre of this strategy. 
  
• Immersive Experiences: These engagements are seamlessly integrated “in-the-flow” of the customer’s natural journey while being aligned to the brand’s business objectives. The goal is to embed relevant prompts or nudges that drive action without disrupting or altering the customer’s journey. Individualisation again plays a crucial part here where customer context and intent has to be identified in real-time and journeys crafted accordingly, again in real time. Creating such immersive experiences requires new levels of collaboration between product management, growth marketing, transactional business, and customer service teams, which are again made possible with the use of continuously trained AI agents.
  
• Inconspicuous Experiences: Inconspicuous Experiences are subtle, intuitive, AI-powered orchestrations operating behind the scenes. They anticipate customer asks, using AI for intent analysis, decision co-pilots, predictions, and emotionally resonant recommendations to avoid being “stupid” for not having the right answer. So no matter whether a customer is interacting for product discovery or support, the brands will be able to deliver on all its objectives in that single interaction, all powered by a combination of bespoke LLM’s, agents and user inputs. 

It’s incredible to think that none of these were imaginable even three years ago. Similarly we have no idea about the possibilities three years from now and so brands need to make AI use a Board level conversation and then implement strategies and tactics to prepare and deploy infrastructure and tools to adapt to these changes. 

Marketers and product managers must rethink their approach to deliver what customers expect. By prioritizing user-centered design and intelligent automation enabled by AI, organizations can deliver seamless, user-focused experiences that build trust and drive loyalty. Our 3I Framework provides a powerful roadmap for this AI-first future, transforming engagement from reactive to proactive and continuously optimized.