For marketers, these dialogues will drive massive changes in their quest for personalization. With conversational AI as the interface, consumers can share exactly what they want to share, and brands can focus on great responses instead of suboptimal guesses. Once consumers become more comfortable with engaging in a dialogue, the days of creepy targeted ads and invasions of consumer privacy will be over. When a consumer freely offers details on what they seek and why, the brand can leverage that zero-party data to personalize their experience. Trust is built through dialogues, not infinite monologues algorithmically ranked in search engine results.
Most importantly, these AI-driven dialogues open unprecedented opportunities for brands to engage each person individually. AI-powered discussions will meet every consumer where they are in terms of their language, reading level, cadence and more—an entirely new level of cognitive accessibility.
Offers, not ads
The future of AI-powered conversations points to sweeping changes in brands’ approach to advertising. Today, significant portions of ad budgets are spent on merely defending objective search questions in top search engines: “What time does [brand] store open?” “Does [brand] have [service] available near me?” These types of questions often require defensive ad expenditure, even though the question is clearly for a particular brand. But competitors bid on these brand terms and similar keywords to try to disintermediate the consumer from their brand.
Instead of defending their brand, marketers will be able to shift from ads to offers with gen AI. 90% of consumers find targeted ads intrusive and annoying—often to the point of depleting the consumer experience. However, if a consumer has a trusted dialogue with a brand, sharing only the information necessary to get the answers they need, then brands can deliver truly individualized offers. For example, a consumer planning a trip could engage with a resort directly by first indicating interest in visiting, and the resort could ask questions such as what dates the consumer wants to travel and who they’ll be traveling with. After gathering specific information, the resort is well-equipped to share offers such as activity and room discounts relevant to the consumer and what they’re looking for.
Where in that exchange is an ad appropriate? Never. Conversations like these build trust and enable the brand to customize an offer that meets the needs of that individual customer. This is the future of offer-based interactions, directly controlled by a dialogue with the customer.
Moving from privacy-invasive ad models to trust-centric dialogue models will take time. But for objective questions—which often directly precede conversion and purchase decisions—brands will utilize gen AI aggressively to take back the consumer dialogue from centralized search systems that seek to monetize ad spend.
Subjective data over objective data
Gen AI’s transformation of search starts with a massive surge of AI or AI-human output. The internet is about to see infinite content growth that will clog classic, centralized search or force it to reconsider its algorithms. This is somewhat inevitable, as marketing monologues are still necessary to attract traffic. Despite cries of resistance from SEO strategists, the use of gen AI to create billions of relatively useless blog posts is well underway.