GenAI is disrupting customer experience with a new era of hyper-personalisation and innovation, opening up new experiences for consumers and new revenue opportunities for brands bold enough to experiment. GenAI bridges the gap between expectation and product/service delivery, taking customer satisfaction to a whole new level. Across the spectrum from retail, travel, hospitality to consumer product goods, brands are undergoing transformation in customer experience, marketing, NPD and innovation.
Consumers just want to Experience More
The Experience More megatrend is forecast to generate propensity to spend of USD888 billion by 2033, where consumers increasingly value experiences over material things. GenAI’s mainstream multi-modal use across the consumer spectrum, from customer experience, customer service, NPD, innovation, to marketing and design, is ushering in exponential leaps forward in digital transformation, creating new revenue streams and breathing new life into existing streams.
New GenAI entrants, new business models, new experiences and new platforms are emerging, unleashing significant creativity in areas such as experiential retail, product design and marketing. The speed of change is breathtaking and GenAI is only at the beginning of its potential. Personalisation is in hyper-drive thanks to GenAI and machine learning, while innovation is taking place at unprecedented speeds. Brands have been quick to adopt customer-facing GenAI from trip planning, shopping recommendations to customer assistance.
Laggard brands face irrelevance if they fail to jump on board the GenAI bandwagon, especially where consumers are AI Ambivalent (according to Euromonitor’s Global Consumer Trends), indifferent to the hype, adopting it where helpful, not always aware of it and not so concerned about the ethics.
GenAI elevating the customer experience bringing brands to life
Despite the acceleration of digitalisation across all aspects of consumers’ lives, there is still an innate desire to connect, engage and experience joy in the real world. GenAI is the glue that binds and weaves digital, personalised and seamless into the phygital experience that embraces the best of both worlds, especially in areas such as retail, sports, travel, hospitality and entertainment.
Despite high online penetration and exponential leaps forward in digital transformation, where the Shopper Reinvented megatrend tops the list of spending, real-life and omnichannel experiences remain paramount to consumers. Retailtainment continues to transform and provide immersive experiences to consumers, tapping into the five senses and overlaying the digital on the physical.
The propensity to spend per capita by 2033 will be dominated by Shopper Reinvented followed by Experience More at USD325 and USD102, respectively
Source: Euromonitor’s Megatrends Quantification Model
The success of brands that have embraced experiential retail – Apple, Amazon, IKEA, Nike and Sephora – continue to top lists of top brands based on net promoter scores (NPS), showing that customer experience matters for loyalty and customer retention to help minimise cost of customer acquisition.
GenAI is creating new experiences, customer service, NPD and design, while shifting from AI-enhanced to AI-first experiences. New consumer engagements with next-gen AI-first products and services such as AVs and humanoids are emerging. A new generation, Beta, will be AI natives, so-called “Artificials”, with heightened expectations. Generation Beta are born between 2025 and 2039, and will experience first-hand the transformation of AI, artificial general intelligence (AGI) to superintelligence. With 2025 potentially marking the year of AGI where AI surpasses humans’ problem-solving ability, the speed of change could be highly disruptive. Beta Babies are already being born into an ever more hyper-connected, personalised and seamless world where traditional boundaries no longer exist as the phygital becomes the default way to experience things. By 2040, Gen Beta will account for over one fifth of the population (21%) amounting to 1.9 billion people aged 0-14.
Thanks to Web 3.0, AI and supercomputing, a new age of hyper-connectivity is on the horizon for a personalised, immersive and seamless brand-consumer relationship that is in a constant reinforcing feedback loop.
Not every company will be AI-first in the next five years, yet companies need to be AI ready, deploying responsible AI aligned with business goals, ready for the next generation of consumers and interactions that are “always on”. However, over the long term, a major transformation will be required to be AI-first to ensure a sustainable future.
Learn more about the Experience More megatrend in our report, Experience More with GenAI for Value Creation, to unlock new opportunities for sustainable growth and uncover new insights into future consumer trends.