With 51% of the respondents in the survey coming from B2B companies, I’m not so sure there’s sufficient data points to truly illuminate “hyper-personalization” strategies. The overall direction and shape of the results (from predictive analytics to open-question chat bots) probably does resonate with many practitioners. Being human, we like to control and predict future events as much as possible and predictive analytics fulfills that need while reducing a lot of uncertainty. No doubt there’s an immense value and effectiveness in predictive analytics, but how we construct and imagine other opportunities, say open-question chat bots, artificially limits our ability to objectively assess the potential effectiveness. To truly deliver on the promise of personalization, companies will need to combine multiple types of complementary technologies together: contact via chat bot, recommendation engines using artificial intelligence, robotic process automation confirms and completes the transaction and updates the customer’s profile and follow-on communications. Just as in business we’re pushing to eliminate organizational and data silos, we need to take a wider view of technology and how to harness that… Read more »

The fact that predictive analytics tops the list is really not much of a surprise since that’s where most of the energy has been and — in terms of executable strategies — remains. As to whether the “barriers around deployment” will come down “soon” I think we need to remember a couple of things. First, AI is really in its infancy. Promising? Without a doubt. Mature? Not even close. Next, it all depends on what you mean by “soon.” If soon is 12 to 18 months, the answer is probably not. If on the other hand we are talking in the 24 to 60 month range, the answer is probably an unqualified “Yes.” Our problem is how we look at technology — in isolation, not calculating consumer recognition/acceptance factors well enough, and looking for instant payback or proof of concept. AI will play a critical role at retail, just not tomorrow.

Another name for hyper-personalization is “individual human preference.” Randomly fascinating, 95% of human emotion is managed by our individual, completely subjective, unconscious preferences. Giving us humans the extraordinary capability to know immediately if we like a dress, a car, a couch, a home. Daily, individual shoppers share their most personal product preferences with retailers. Retailers need a new way of looking at the same problem, the human aspect, so as not to waste time and resources. Leveraging AI inside of interactive intelligent knowledge platforms is key to eliciting individual human preference for “hyper-personalization.” Otherwise, just a new version of segmentation.

So we are surprised about chatbots? Finding out the most impersonal of technology can’t deliver a highly personal experience? Okay. No surprise there.

The caution we need take with the “hyper-personalization” is self-evident in the title. Because anytime we “hyper-“ things we fight diminishing returns — where the cost to do something outweighs the value of doing it.

A database of buyers broken into 30 or 40 sub-groups can deliver a tremendous step in helping profitability. Breaking those groups far smaller pots is unlikely to return enough additional profits to pay for the cost of the effort.

It’s not surprising that the tech folks like Adobe and Salesforce would preach the value of using their technology to do this. What’s surprising is that there aren’t more people ignoring them.

Predictive analytics, Artificial Intelligence (AI), and personalization will all become ubiquitous in years to come as they continue to mature. They are all part of the “crystal ball” effect. Retailers and brands would like nothing more than to have a direct connection into everyone’s limbic system in order to “sell” products before we even know we want them!

I found the challenges around content creation and curation noteworthy. There are workflows and systems available to make the curation and automated cross-channel delivery of relevant content far more achievable than understood. That is an area worth exploring.