Anyone who worked in tech long enough knows that tech-first marketing only works in summer very specific situations and for very specific segments. Most customers care only about whether the system solves their problem in the minimum amount of time/money/effort. Branding a specific solution to their problem is usually a sure way to get them to feel cheated.
Sixty percent of US consumers say 'AI' in brand messaging is a turnoff
471–480 of 608 posts
Re: Sixty percent of US consumers say 'AI' in brand messaging is a turnoff
#472>No customer or user wakes up and says, ‘I hope I get to talk to a chat bot or an AI agent today This is so true. I led the implementation of an AI customer service agent and even though management thinks it’s a great success the metrics tell a totally different story. Our customers hated it. I haven’t seen anything in tech that is hated more. Before you think we did a bad job with our solution, I can tell you we wen…
Do the customers know they're interacting with AI? If so, is that the intention?
Re: Sixty percent of US consumers say 'AI' in brand messaging is a turnoff
#473Are they consumers of AI or consumers of media?
Re: Sixty percent of US consumers say 'AI' in brand messaging is a turnoff
#474I could be wrong, but it feels like one issue is that AI seems to cater more as a signal to venture capital and the internals of the tech industry in a lot of these products, while consumers just want to know "what is this product going to actually do for me," and care less about whether it is implemented with the buzzword du jour.
We launched an AI feature and there was immediate blowback in the form of negative feedback. We then rebranded it as "Advanced Search," kept the sparkle icon and everything, literally just a find-and-replace of instances of "AI" with "Advanced," pretty much. The negative feedback stopped. The very next day someone wrote in and said it was an incredible feature. Branding is wild. The modern media environment is wild.…
Is it possible that the team collecting the feedback is reporting specific feedback for 'AI' terminology ?
Renaming customer service team to customer success team and claiming customer service issues reduced is like corporate/leadership strategy 101.
Re: Sixty percent of US consumers say 'AI' in brand messaging is a turnoff
#475>No customer or user wakes up and says, ‘I hope I get to talk to a chat bot or an AI agent today This is so true. I led the implementation of an AI customer service agent and even though management thinks it’s a great success the metrics tell a totally different story. Our customers hated it. I haven’t seen anything in tech that is hated more. Before you think we did a bad job with our solution, I can tell you we wen…
What is is about management where they can't see how bad and half-baked these customer service agents are, but the customer can tell INSTANTLY they're AI and just not helpful in the slightest
If you can save millions in costs every quarter for the degraded experience, I can see why leaders want to take the risk. Really depends on who is making the calls I guess, for the services that depend on customer experience I would think an AI service agent would probably be out of the question.
Re: Sixty percent of US consumers say 'AI' in brand messaging is a turnoff
#476Earlier quoted context omitted.
Another signal that prominent mentions of "AI" in your marketing sends is "this product is going to shoe-horn AI into this somehow". Plenty of products that people use every day at home or in work - Google search, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, Jira, and more - have had some kind of AI-first redesign. In each case some AI functionality has been placed prominently either somewhere that you accidentally press it or in…
I think AI has also become synonymous with slapdash, low effort, probably steals my data
And why shouldn't it? There are so many prominent examples of badly implemented AI solutions. It's like how China is associated with cheap copycat products even though they are perfectly capable (and do!) produce many well made, quality things.
Re: Sixty percent of US consumers say 'AI' in brand messaging is a turnoff
#477Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's an incredible search, research, and learning tool, and far better than a search engine. You can get almost anything explained at any level up to undergrad, with the option to ask questions if you don't understand, and with links to references, so you can check that what you're learning is correct. The low-quality content machine angle is one of the least interesting things about it.
But the "research" you're getting from the AI is also low-quality content. And particularly susceptible to the X-Y problem because unless you're already learned in a subject you won't even know how to craft the prompt to get the answer you're looking for.
It really isn't. I'm not talking PhD grade R&D, I'm talking about everyday queries that take a long time manually and are easily automated with AI.
Without going into details, I have used AI to find genuine, provably effective solutions to multiple real world problems that would either have been impossible without AI or would have taken a very, very long time.
And it would have been a boon if it had been around while I was getting my degree, because it's been excellent at clarifying foundational concepts.
It's not perfectly reliable, but neither are human professionals.
Re: Sixty percent of US consumers say 'AI' in brand messaging is a turnoff
#478One of the best ads of seen is for the Ava AI Sales Agent. I have to stare at it because of its location near one of my favorite spots. They've found a model with dead eyes that perfectly capture the existential dread you feel as you see a future with fewer humans in your life, and instead it's just more machines.
Not sure if that's their conscious intention, but somewhere along the creative process, some living soul was able to express itself in the final product.
Re: Sixty percent of US consumers say 'AI' in brand messaging is a turnoff
#479I could be wrong, but it feels like one issue is that AI seems to cater more as a signal to venture capital and the internals of the tech industry in a lot of these products, while consumers just want to know "what is this product going to actually do for me," and care less about whether it is implemented with the buzzword du jour.
In addition to the wonders of the physical world, national parks, lakefront properties, skiing locations becoming owned by and run for the rich, advertising is moving further from the consumer to investors, their true market. They don't need the poors anymore.
Re: Sixty percent of US consumers say 'AI' in brand messaging is a turnoff
#480>No customer or user wakes up and says, ‘I hope I get to talk to a chat bot or an AI agent today This is so true. I led the implementation of an AI customer service agent and even though management thinks it’s a great success the metrics tell a totally different story. Our customers hated it. I haven’t seen anything in tech that is hated more. Before you think we did a bad job with our solution, I can tell you we wen…
What is is about management where they can't see how bad and half-baked these customer service agents are, but the customer can tell INSTANTLY they're AI and just not helpful in the slightest
In my experience, AI customer service agents can be really helpful for some things, but when they aren’t helpful they are the most annoying thing in the world.
I think this leads to a problem because leadership might see metrics showing that the AI service agent successfully helped with 80% of the questions it is asked, but they don’t realize how damaging that 20% is. Over time, more and more of your customer base is going to hit that 20%, so eventually everyone is pissed off at you.
It would be like if 1 in 100 Cheerios in a box were made of poop. It doesn’t matter that most of them are fine, people are going to remember that one cheerio more than the 99 others.