Imagine having your phone unexpectedly die in a financially tight month. In need of an urgent replacement, you turn to your favourite shopping site but face an overwhelming range of product options and conflicting reviews.
Not long ago, you’d have sought recommendations from your friends and extended family or popped into a local store, hoping to talk to a friendly salesperson. But today, you might instead turn to a new trusted advisor—generative artificial intelligence (GenAI). You wouldn’t be alone.
According to Accenture’s Consumer Pulse Research 2024, 51 per cent of consumers are likely to turn to GenAI for help when navigating the deluge of choices, marketing messages, and online chatter that have overwhelmed them in a jungle of consumption. They’re seeking solutions that minimize pain points, provide more informed choices, and offer better links between product and experience, along with end-to-end support.
Soon, it won’t be difficult to imagine a world where parents no longer need to remember to replenish their stock of formula and diapers. Instead, they can rely on their AI advisor (or a team of AI advisors) to provide end-to-end support, taking care of everything from making purchases to providing delivery updates and post-purchase assistance. AI advisors are already managing entire travel schedules—from flights to hotel bookings, local transfers, and daily itineraries.
In this environment, consumer-facing brands must figure out how to remain indispensable in a world where they are catering to AI advisors in addition to consumers. For brand leaders, the path forward encompasses three key strategies: ensuring trust, personalizing offerings, and delivering a superior end-to-end experience. And ironically, but perhaps not surprisingly, the go-to tool for this work will be GenAI.
Ensuring trust
Trust is scarce. Our research shows that fewer than two in five people trust companies to have good intentions, and just 43 per cent believe they make honest claims. And yet, consumers who trust companies are 54 per cent more likely to buy from them again and 73 per cent more likely to recommend that company to others.
Against this backdrop, stringent data protection measures and adherence to privacy regulations along with an unwavering commitment to transparency have become a must for brands. That includes revealing how your brand interacts with AI advisors, what data they collect, and how they make decisions.
Then there is the question of accuracy.
Simply put, brands must leverage their understanding of how AI advisors operate, not only to reassure customers about being trustworthy, but also to improve what the bots themselves find when they spot and assess your offerings. After all, if public information about your products is factually incorrect or incomplete, there’s a risk that third-party advisors will inadvertently misrepresent or even overlook them. One way to mitigate this would be by creating new job roles focused on optimizing results for large language models (LLMs)—similar to how SEO specialists optimize search engine results.
Kayak’s Best Time to Travel tool, which helps consumers compare vacation pricing value against crowds, weather, and seasonality, shows how consumers and your brand can align when you’re proactively managing trust. Using ChatGPT, the AI app makes recommendations based on predictive data from billions of travel queries that enable it to guide consumers on optimal trip times while providing detailed information on average, minimum, and maximum flight prices as well as the least expensive days to travel and the best times to book before prices increase. Users can set alerts for saved trips to stay informed about flight or hotel price drops. This comprehensive and transparent approach builds consumer trust by delivering reliable, actionable insights for travel planning.
If your company delivers on transparency and accurately represents its offerings to the best of its ability, you will win the trust of consumers using AI advisors. In other words, brand equity in the age of AI hinges on you.
Personalizing offerings
GenAI tools “talk” to consumers and will increasingly be able to predict what they want and how they want it. And today’s consumers want brands to know the face behind the money. According to our research, 78 per cent of consumers want AI advisors to recognize them and remember them during discussions.
Brands must play to this desire by developing conversational tools that show consumers they are being understood at a personal level through the AI interface. A brand’s AI-powered tool, for example, might reference past purchases, revealing knowledge of preferences while also finding out (in a very human-like way) if those preferences are still valid or if the consumer wants to prioritize or learn about other features. Over time, these “conversations” will uncover information that can help the company learn more about the consumer, improving predictions and further personalizing interactions. The way forward could be understanding the customer’s tone of voice and responding to their sense of humour, humanizing the relationship and making the consumer feel truly understood and valued.
However, an added challenge will arise when a brand’s AI program interfaces directly with a consumer’s AI-powered “representative.” And since 2025 could see at-scale deployment of bot-to-bot commerce models, traditional marketing that targets consumer emotions needs to be complemented by functional, fact-based content to cater to the purely logic-based decision-making of bots.
The GenAI model will analyze vast amounts of information, including consumer reviews, to provide a balanced view of a product and make an informed recommendation. This shift in how search operates will add a new level of complexity to brand communications. This is why, even in bot-to-bot interactions, it’s crucial to maintain a foundation of human, personal connections to ensure that appropriate decisions are made, even when human involvement in certain transactions becomes unnecessary.
This shift towards humanization of the relationship between consumer and brand is profound. It will enable companies to extend their “human” relationships with the consumer beyond a single purchase. German skin care company Beiersdorf did this to great effect last year when it collaborated with the Real Madrid football team.
The NIVEA MEN Fan Club chatbot engaged Real Madrid fans in playful, conversational one-to-one interactions to educate them on NIVEA MEN products. It achieved a 62 per cent conversion rate, implying that 62 per cent of users who interacted with the chatbot provided their data, which allowed NIVEA MEN to reach out to them again. Emails sent to these consumers had a 41 per cent click-through rate, demonstrating the value of building “human connections” through personalized engagement.
Delivering a superior end-to-end experience
The ultimate goal for consumer brands is being embedded in people’s lives. And since GenAI makes shopping hyper-responsive, allowing brands to understand whether a consumer prefers hands-off autonomy, high-touch service, or something in between, the opportunity for companies is to use AI tools to support consumers at the point of purchase—on their terms.
Delivering the perfect shopping experience also means taking over tedious aspects of purchasing such as reading innumerable product reviews, checking nutritional information, or verifying a brand’s sustainability claims. By having AI advisors carry out these tasks, shopping can become a more enjoyable and memorable experience for consumers.
In 2023, Amazon realized customers had become overwhelmed by the multitude of claims and reviews for products on its platform. To simplify the purchase journey, the company leveraged GenAI to summarize consumer reviews, providing key and concise insights. This advancement eased the decision-making process while setting the stage for the future development of AI advisors and influencers. But while limiting the decision-making workload that consumers don’t enjoy is important, it is equally essential to elevate the parts of the buying process that people love because experience is a critical driver of positive consumer relationships. Our research shows that 62 per cent of consumers find some part of the shopping experience fun or exciting, and 76 per cent of them are quite likely to recommend the fun experience to others, translating into brand promotion.
As businesses prepare for the future, they must be proactive in shaping how AI tools are developed and integrated. After all, as we stand at the cusp of this transformative era, it’s clear that the fusion of AI and commerce is not just about enhancing transactions—it’s about redefining them. The fundamental enabler—what makes it possible to understand and engage consumers—is being data-powered and delightfully human by design. It’s human connection, over transactional loyalty programs, that will drive enduring loyalty and make consumers eager to return for more—even if that connection is upheld and advanced by AI.
By embedding AI with a human touch, brands can evolve from mere vendors to become essential, trusted elements of consumer lives, fostering enduring loyalty and advocacy. Moreover, by unlocking value across the entire value chain—from supply chain efficiencies to personalized customer experiences—businesses can transform every part of their operations. The journey forward is not just about leading in innovation but also about leading with heart while deepening customer loyalty by reducing decision fatigue and offering more personalized, efficient, and trustworthy service.
The authors would like to thank Priya Verma for her editorial contributions to this article, and the Accenture Research Consumer Insights team for their help in developing this research.
