Do you need an AI strategy?
Charli
Marketing Manager
AI adoption is moving beyond people experimenting with the odd tool for image generation or getting quick answers to questions – it’s becoming fully embedded in workflows and many of the customer-facing processes we interact with every day.
If you’re not already exploring how to integrate AI into customer-facing or internal operations, you could be missing a significant opportunity.
In this post, we’ll look at:
- How AI can help your business and your customers
- The competitive advantage of having an AI strategy
- Important considerations around AI
- How having an expert partner helps you create and execute an AI strategy
How AI helps you
Incorporating AI into the customer experience isn’t just good for internal efficiency – customers want it too. It helps save time, reduces manual tasks, and frees up human teams to focus on high-value activities.
According to Capgemini, over half of consumers have replaced traditional search engines with Gen AI for product and service recommendations, and 71% want AI to be incorporated into their shopping experiences. A survey by Zendesk found that almost half of customers think AI can be empathetic when addressing concerns, and 51% say they prefer interacting with a bot when they want immediate service.
Improving the customer experience
Here are some practical ways AI can enhance the digital customer experience, and how they benefit you and your customers.
| Use case example | Value for the business | Value for the customer |
| Content generation | Reduce time-intensive tasks and repetitive content generation, particularly on things like products. | Time usually spent on resource-heavy content production tasks can be spent on improving other areas of the customer experience. |
| Sales chatbot | Provide quick answers to common questions and pre-qualify leads without having to have a human-operated chat service. | Get answers to questions and receive recommendations immediately, 24/7. |
| Proactive communication (e.g. usage spikes, contract end notices) | Increase customer satisfaction and reduce potential churn without having to manually intervene. | Feel more informed and receive a better ongoing service through helpful and proactive communication. |
| Self-service support/knowledge base | Enable human agents to spend more time on complex queries while common questions are dealt with. | Get immediate responses to common support queries 24/7. |
AI COULD GIVE YOU A COMPETITIVE EDGE
By incorporating AI and streamlining internal processes, you could put yourself ahead of competitors by offering a better experience and faster response times. And the best part is – we’re still a way off AI being fully adopted in the market. A recent Search Engine Journal survey found that only 3.9% of marketers saw AI delivering the most value in customer experience, and just 5.2% used it for segmentation or lead scoring. This suggests a major gap between AI’s potential and current rate of adoption, creating a competitive window for forward-thinking businesses.
Why do you need an Ai strategy?
All of this makes a strong case for building and executing a thoughtful AI strategy within your organisation.
That being said, if you’re hoping to get actual value from AI, rather than adopting a hit-and-hope approach, it’s important to step back and consider:
- Which processes or experiences could it enhance?
- How will you measure return/impact?
- How much human oversight and input will there be?
More so than that, there are some practical considerations involved with implementing AI that need to be accounted for.
What else to consider when implementing AI
Outside of the more strategic decisions, there are a few considerations that need more thought and that you may need support with when it comes to implementing AI:
- Accuracy and reliability – the output of AI is only really as good as the input. Any AI tool you deploy will need to be trained on or plugged into data and information on your organisation, products and services, and there’ll likely need to be some sort of human oversight to ensure that it’s not “hallucinating”.
- Protecting your brand integrity – if AI is “acting as you”, in whatever capacity (chatbot, content generation, etc) – you’ll need to ensure it’s executed in such a way that it doesn’t deprecate your brand and impact trust.
- Infrastructure and readiness – does your tech stack support the integration of an AI tool? Do you have the data systems in place to train it? Do you have the capacity to scale it?
- Maintenance and upkeep – as your needs evolve, products, services and messaging change, your AI tool will need to be updated and might need to be retrained or connected to different data sources- you can’t just set it and forget it.
- Transparency and compliance – While most implementations won’t fall under “high-risk,” it’s important to understand if compliance with any relevant legal and ethical standards is required.
Get expert help for your AI strategy
When developing your AI strategy, partnering with an expert can help you navigate complexities and extract long-term value.
An AI implementation partner can help you:
- Identify and assess possible use cases and implementations for AI that will deliver value.
- Advise and execute on centralising data and connecting with the right tools and executing in the right way.
- Advise on feasibility, scalability, cost, and the infrastructure you need in place to support your strategy.
- Keep your implementation up-to-date and running smoothly, and the information/data source feeding it is accurate.
Key takeaways
- AI is no longer experimental—it’s embedded in customer-facing workflows.
- Customers increasingly see the benefits of and even come to expect AI-driven, instant, and highly personalised service.
- AI can improve efficiency, reduce churn, and boost customer satisfaction.
- Strategic implementation – backed by the right infrastructure and level of human oversight – is key.
- Partnering with an expert can ensure long-term success and scalability.
Want to turn AI from a buzzword into a business advantage? Get in touch to start building your AI strategy.
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