EY refers to the global organization, and may refer to one or more, of the member firms of Ernst & Young Global Limited, each of which is a separate legal entity. Ernst & Young Global Limited, a UK company limited by guarantee, does not provide services to clients.
How EY can Help
-
EY.ai - a unifying platform
Read more
GenAI will be a leveler in customer experience
Company leaders look to GenAI for enhanced experience, speed and competitive differentiation. However, the very nature of GenAI makes it a leveler. GenAI provides an access point to the insights of other AIs — from pattern recognition to machine learning and cognitive. It democratizes the ability to query structured and unstructured data, and to create content on the fly.
Every marketer will be able to deploy GenAI to create personalized content at scale. This threatens to swamp the customer with content, much of it generic, creating challenges for brands seeking to stand out from the crowd.
An indication of what could come is provided by what is happening in news, a bellwether for disruptions to content generation and distribution: More than 800 websites use AI to generate ”unreliable” news content without significant human oversight.5 The sites also use AI to promote the content in search and social to achieve higher rankings than traditional news sources.6
Achieving differentiation will be made more challenging by the advent of consumer-controlled AI agents who will stand between customers and companies. The startup DoNotPay has taken a significant step in this direction. DoNotPay’s AI assistants help consumers do things as various as negotiating better lease terms, lowering utility bills and securing hotel upgrades. Rather than companies speaking to customers, corporate AI may soon be communicating with customer AI. By 2026, 20% of inbound customer service interactions will be handled by machine customers, according to Gartner predictions.7
Moreover, as technology — whether AI or other tech — increasingly enables analytics and autonomy, everything related to customer that can be optimized will be, reducing the competitive advantage of efficiency. It was harder to distill customer insight in the past when companies relied on surveys and transactions volumes to understand the consumer. Now companies have an abundance of voice-of-the-customer data. They can analyze every call in a call center, monitor voice stress patterns, track customer behaviors in stores and assess the use of Internet of Things (IoT)-enabled products. Anything previously unstructured can now be structured and analyzed.