An opinion piece from the technical director of Great State, a digital product and service design agency.

AI is integral now to so many routine tasks and day-to-day activities that we barely notice it. We are progressing rapidly from sporadic or exceptional usage to consistent AI integration into consumer-facing services and business operations.

Many businesses are increasing their budgets and developing strategic plans to include AI tech to provide more personalized experiences for consumers and to leverage data more efficiently. The global AI market is expected to reach $267 billion by 2027 and 37% of businesses and organisations employ AI – investment is snowballing as digital capabilities become smarter and more sophisticated.

Although content is obviously a critical part of customer service, relationship management, loyalty and marketing, the wide-spread adoption of truly modern Digital Experience Platforms (DXP) or Content Management Systems (CMS), powered by AI has been relatively slow – despite industry leading efforts from the likes of Sitecore.

The importance and benefits of providing one-on-one personalized customer experience (CX) is something that has been talked about by DXP vendors for many years. In other words, creating and deploying tailored content that is most relevant to the individual in the moment.

However, achieving this without automation either means investing a large amount of time into creating, managing, deploying, analyzing and optimizing the system and its content development manually with the obvious impact on overheads. Or not doing it very well.

So, what’s stopping businesses from investing in an AI driven DXP? And what are the benefits if you do?

Trusting the tech

The two main concerns slowing investment in an intelligent DXP are trust in the capability of the technology and the availability of data.

There are seemingly infinite possibilities when AI is brought into the conversation, but over the last couple of years there have been many cases where the capabilities of some AI-driven functionality marketed in DXP systems have not lived up to expectations.

Over-hyped or disappointing tech doesn’t help people overcome natural worries about relinquishing control of something as human as dialogue and editorial, and handing it to an unknown entity.

Concerns about AI running amok with inappropriate content can be mitigated by gradual trialing and integration. You do not have to let the AI loose on your customers with full autonomy to automatically update content on your behalf.

It could initially be limited to analysis and predictions, feeding suggestions to the content editors so that they can choose whether to apply it or not.

Fuelled up on data?

As with any AI project, it needs to be fuelled by data for it to work. The more data it can collect and ingest the more useful and accurate it can be with the predictions it makes.

Investment in data management and integration has been the dominant narrative behind digital transformation. But even now some businesses are behind the first-party data curve. They simply don’t have data of enough volume, quality or relevance to make some AI systems work or achieve full potential.

There is no point in investing in DXP AI unless you have the data to fuel it.

A CX advantage

If as many people believe we are living in an experience economy where quality of CX drives growth to a significant extent, AI driven systems can completely overhaul organizational performance.

As the AI gradually learns an individual person’s behavior by tracking and analyzing each customer though their journey, across all channels and devices, the content and appearance can be adjusted in real-time in response to small, nuanced changes in a user’s behaviour.

An AI integrated DXP system also allows for predictive analytics and auto-personalization. It can automatically identify specific trends and segment different user types, dynamically updating different elements on websites or apps with only the most relevant tailored content for each unique situation.

Alongside this, AI can carry out hyper-intelligent and contextual searching to provide highly personalized and relevant search results, if you can find ways to enrich the core data. This can be done by blending additional layers of explicit user data and/or third-party data sources such as geolocation, weather and user type, and feeding this into the AI decision-making engine.

In a digital-first world, speed matters, especially when you consider that the probability of a bounce increases by 32% if page load time goes from 1 to 3 seconds. Getting customers to the most relevant content, as quickly as possible, is essential.

Business efficiency

While a CX angle is certainly a driving factor in the AI debate for DXPs, it’s also important to consider the implications for business operation and management.

For example, an AI-led DXP can provide operational efficiencies for content editing teams – supercharging the process of creation, management and delivery of relevant content.

This could be particularly helpful in smaller teams that are understaffed or are struggling to find employees with sufficient skill to fulfil the demands of the business.

Housekeeping exercises such as automatic summarization of large amounts of text into smaller, more digestible sections can be done in an instant, pulling out only the most relevant parts for a specific user.

Automatic smart tagging of content using Image Detection and Natural Language processing (NLP) capabilities to extract key meta data from text, images or video - saving content teams significant amounts of time especially when maintaining large amounts of content and assets.

Analysis of the behavioral data, identifying trends, personalization rule decisioning, A/B testing and user/persona segmentation can be done dynamically to target groups or even individuals, using automated AI systems and without the need for the allocation of business resources – something that grows exponentially as you increase your user base and complexity of personalization and is very costly to a business, especially with limited access to staff.

When we combine AI and the emergence of no code/low code systems, we could be entering an era of business where specialist data scientists are not fundamentally necessary for businesses to set up effective DXP that enables one-on-one personalization at scale.

An easy-to-use AI digital tool could enable any business to establish advanced technological infrastructure to compete with even the biggest of competitors.

If content is king, a big part of CX success and growth can be solved by a commit to DXP AI.