AI in the shopping experience: what consumers want

2024’s Brand Growth Summit was a huge success!

We welcomed Marketing, Brand and Insights leaders from some of the world’s top consumer brands to London’s Ham Yard Hotel. We heard from top speakers and panels about how they’re using consumer insights and AI to better understand their target customers.

With data from eight major markets, this global report explores consumer attitudes to AI technologies.

Jeremy King – Attest’s Founder and CEO – dissects the areas where shoppers are embracing AI, and how brands can take advantage of their changing behaviour.

He also addresses the issue of consumer trust – from concern over companies’ handling of data collected via AI, through to the difficulty consumers face identifying AI-generated imagery.

Q&A responses

Here are Jeremy’s responses to the awesome questions we couldn’t cover in the presentation.

Can we use or should we use AI to build artificial or synthetic panels?

In my personal view, artificial or synthetic panels can be useful for a few things. Things that don’t suit real audiences (e.g., highly repetitive surveys, where human fatigue becomes a factor). Things are require high volume and would otherwise be too expensive (e.g., testing a very large volume of things, all at small scale). However, synthetic audiences should be treated with caution. Re-using and/or amplifying pre-existing data is always dangerous… more so when it’s presented as ‘live’ or ‘real’ (it is neither). So synthetic data has reasons to exist, but remind me… why don’t we use synthetic radar data for air traffic control?

What’s the risk that AI hype won’t last? What does it mean for our short term and long term marketing plans?

Hype should only last where the subject delivers results. A lot of uses of AI will turn out to be great; delivering previously impossible things. A lot of AI will turn out to be just hype, not delivering on promises made. So, the hype won’t last… because the hype will turn into reality, or will turn out to be just hype alone. The answer is to look for AI products that actually work now, and improve over time (and avoid those that make future promises, but don’t actually work or have a clear path to deliver you value). Be smart, and see what hype is real, and what hype is just hypothetical.