Think back a few years and recall how you once booked a taxi. You’d call the taxi service’s call centre and join a queue to be answered, then wait longer again for a cab to arrive – if one was even available. Now the whole process takes a few taps on your phone, and even a five-minute wait seems like an inconvenience. The world is changing rapidly and so are consumer expectations. 

Ride-sharing apps are just one example of how companies that use technology to successfully overcome customers’ pain points can create significant disruption in the market. Keeping up with this ever-shifting landscape creates new challenges for marketing, sales and service teams. Meanwhile, in the C-suite, leaders need to maintain healthy revenue growth despite fewer resources and intensifying social and economic pressures. For everyone involved in keeping customers happy, charting a path to success has never been more demanding. The good news is that emerging technologies like generative artificial intelligence (gen AI) can increase your company’s relevance and drive growth. 

Though gen AI is still in its early days, it has already been effective at opening up new possibilities for businesses across the world. Many businesses have been enticed by its promise of optimised operations, and tailored and dynamic customer experiences. One of the superpowers of gen AI is its ability to crunch data at lightning speed, which means it can produce hyper-personalised content and give real-time visibility into customer sentiment. It is also being widely applied to automate low-productivity tasks, thereby giving time back to workers and enabling them to focus on more creative tasks. 

US retailer Best Buy is leveraging gen AI to good effect, partnering with Accenture and Google Cloud to create an improved customer support experience. Best Buy is using gen AI to create new and convenient ways for customers to get the solutions they need via an independent self-service option. It is also supercharging its customer service agents by providing them with tools to make interactions more efficient and personalised. During interactions between an agent and customer, these tools will also assess, recap the conversation, detect sentiment of the interaction, and provide agents with real-time, relevant and human-focused recommendations. 

When customer-centric companies start to see gen AI as a driver for reinvention and not just another layer in their tech stack, it means they can evolve more quickly with their customers and give them what they want. They can unlock incremental value by adapting to change and becoming trailblazers in their field.

Fail to adopt and you won’t keep pace

Gen AI is already making a splash across industries in Australia. Over the past 12 months, more businesses have started working with gen AI, ranging from experimentation to development and usage. According to Accenture’s new research, ‘Generative AI for customer growth’, the majority of chief marketing officers (CMO) in Australia expect the technology to be transformational. A significant percentage (82.5 percent) said they expect gen AI to disrupt their industries in the next five years, and almost 89 percent believe it will change customer relationships. 

Gen AI isn’t just a productivity tool, it’s about transformation. Early adopters are already building gen AI capabilities and reaping the benefits ahead of competitors. They show the promise of gen AI by using it to differentiate themselves and keep customers happy. In the retail sector, we have seen our clients embed gen AI to save resources and increase operational efficiency. For them, taking small steps isn’t enough. They are completely reshaping how they work. 

Gen AI moves the needle for all stakeholders. Most of all, it benefits customers and when customers are happy, that means a better outlook for companies. Our research suggests companies which use gen AI in customer-related initiatives can expect to achieve 25 percent higher revenue after five years than companies focused only on productivity. They are also 3.7 times more likely to use gen AI to identify new and unmet customer needs. 

Gen AI has already demonstrated its benefits and an increasing number of companies are using it to become more competitive. That means Australian consumer-centric companies must act now in order to keep pace with the change. The good news is that there is a growing consensus among Australian CMOs who believe their organisations have undergone a fundamental change with the advancement of gen AI. The vast majority (94 percent) is accelerating its use.  

But this optimism is paired with an equal sense of concern among leaders. The majority (75 percent) of Australian CMOs are planning to ‘wait and watch’ until they fully understand the risks of gen AI, and 80 percent are unsure how to realise their ambition or where to start. 

The concerns many businesses have around gen AI’s potential drawbacks are fair. Even with growing experiments, it is still a new and complex technology with its own set of risks. But with the growing number of businesses already using it to become more competitive, the biggest risk is inaction. The time to adopt, scale and reinvent responsibly is now. 

Here are five ways for companies to succeed with gen AI: 

1. Put customer value first

To provide value to customers, companies must move beyond use-cases and prioritise using gen AI to reinvent processes and use it across their business capabilities.

2. Understand and develop an AI-enabled, secure digital core

With a strong digital architecture, companies can provide a more meaningful experience to their customers. 

3. Reinvent talent and work

Hire and train employees to be creative and curious thinkers who make connections across departments, solve problems by seeing the big picture and develop new ideas. 

4. Close the gap on responsible AI 

Be mindful when designing, deploying and using gen AI to minimise risks while driving value. Only two percent of companies said they operationalised an approach to responsible AI. This is an opportunity to embrace a wider strategy for differentiation through relevance. 

5. Keep reinventing

At the heart of using gen AI is a strong C-suite strategy that resonates with everyone on the board and aligns with the company’s vision. This equips organisations with the change management muscle and infrastructure to constantly drive reinvention. 

Also, read new report from Intuit reveals brand trust is the greatest influence on purchases.