customerexperience

When AI Optimizes Everything, What Makes a Brand Different?

A closer look at where brand distinctiveness truly lives when optimization becomes table stakes.

In a recent TED Talk, Vinciane Beauchene asked a provocative question: If AI could take over all your team’s tasks tomorrow, who would you keep – and why? The talk reframes the “Will AI take our jobs?” anxiety, but as a marketer, that made me think of another question: If you removed your humans tomorrow, would your customers care… and why?

AI is rapidly becoming excellent at functional execution. It can optimize pricing, personalize recommendations, automate workflows, generate content, and coordinate across systems without fatigue. In many industries, that covers a surprising share of what we traditionally think of as marketing work. When everyone can execute at that level, functional excellence stops being a differentiator. And when optimization becomes table stakes, what makes customers choose you?

To answer that, it helps to step back and look at value in layers. Every company competes across three levels:

  • Functional value – speed, convenience, price, performance
  • Emotional value – how the experience makes customers feel
  • Identity value – what choosing you says about them

AI will compress functional advantages first. It will increasingly simulate emotional ones. The real strategic question is: where does your identity and trust equity live?

Let’s look at Costco as an example. At first glance, Costco looks purely functional. Low prices. Tight SKU selection. Supply chain efficiency. Those are all areas where AI can and will optimize aggressively.

But look deeper: emotionally, Costco creates the thrill of discovery. The treasure hunt effect. The feeling that you are getting access to something special and well curated. Customers feel smart shopping there. They feel protected from being ripped off.

At the identity layer, it goes further. Being a Costco member signals something. You are savvy. Practical. Not flashy, but informed. You belong to a tribe that values value. The membership card itself reinforces that identity.

Now imagine Costco becoming a perfectly frictionless, fully automated purchasing engine. No humans. No curated surprises. No in-store serendipity. Just optimized bulk fulfillment. It might be more efficient. But would it feel the same?

This is the risk many organizations face as they pursue AI. The danger isn’t that AI makes them worse. It’s that it makes everyone equally good at the functional layer, while unintentionally eroding the emotional and identity layers that drive loyalty.

Before automating aggressively, companies should ask:

  • Where does our differentiation truly live?
  • Which parts of our experience build emotional equity?
  • Where does human presence increase trust?
  • What would customers actually miss if it disappeared?

This isn’t a workforce exercise. It’s a customer understanding exercise. In the age of AI, the companies that win won’t simply automate more. They will automate wisely, while deliberately protecting and strengthening the human moments that anchor identity and trust.

If you’re exploring AI in your organization and want to understand where your differentiation truly lives across the functional, emotional, and identity layers, I’d be happy to talk about how we apply the Decoder Lens to uncover what your customers actually value – and what must stay human to protect it. Contact me at info at bureauwest.com.

Source: “Will AI take your job in the next 10 years? Wrong question,” Vinciane Beauchene, TED@BCG, October 2025

Posted on by Jay Zaltzman

Customers don’t always want delight

I recently completed a post-booking survey for Expedia. One of the questions asked whether I felt “amazed” or “delighted” by the experience.

I paused. Not because the experience was bad – it wasn’t. It worked exactly as intended. I found a hotel, compared prices, booked it quickly, and moved on with my life.

But that was the point. I wasn’t hoping to be amazed. I wasn’t seeking delight. I was in task mode. I just wanted the process to work efficiently. That question felt off not because it was poorly worded, but because it revealed a deeper misunderstanding about how people actually experience value.

Many digital platforms – travel booking sites, airline apps, banking portals, insurance dashboards – are not emotional destinations. They are functional systems. Their primary job is to reduce effort, reduce uncertainty, and reduce time. When those systems work well, the dominant emotion isn’t delight. It’s relief. And relief is rarely measured.

Instead, many companies reach for aspirational language – delight, wow, magic – and then build surveys to validate those ideas. The problem is that when you ask emotional questions of a functional task, you don’t get insight. You get noise. Worse, you risk steering teams toward the wrong priorities: polishing moments that don’t matter while overlooking friction that does.

There’s a subtle but important difference between no emotion and no emotional work required. In many everyday buying contexts, people don’t want to be engaged – they want to be done. That’s not a failure of brand ambition; it’s an expression of buyer reality.

This is something I see repeatedly in my research. Emotion still matters, but it’s not always where companies expect it to show up. Often, the strongest positive signal isn’t excitement or delight, but quiet confidence that the system will do what it promises without getting in the way.

Sometimes, the best experience is the one you barely notice.

This pattern – and others like it – is a core theme in my upcoming book, Mind of the American Buyer, which looks at how people actually make decisions in the real world, rather than how brands imagine they do.

Curious where your customers are actually seeking delight – and where they just want things to work? You can reach me at info at bureauwest.com if you’d like to discuss the best way to understand that difference.

Posted on by Jay Zaltzman

AI Is transforming customer experience – but not always for the better

Have you ever had the experience where customer service tries to get you to use a chatbot (“the online service has all the information our representatives have”), but you know it’s not going to answer your question and you just want to get to a human? That got me wondering: are chatbots actually improving the customer experience, or are they just one more hoop we have to jump through?

It turns out that, while many companies are racing to adopt AI for customer service, research shows that customer satisfaction hinges on how AI is used – not whether it’s used at all.

AI can be brilliant – when it’s used thoughtfully. Across industries, AI is quietly powering some truly impressive improvements in customer experience. For example:

  • Sephora uses an AI chatbot to recommend makeup based on your skin tone, weather, and preferences. Customers say it feels like having a personal stylist on call.
  • Capital One’s AI assistant, Eno, flags suspicious charges or unexpected fees before you even notice. That kind of proactive help builds trust.
  • Tripadvisor now offers an AI-powered itinerary planner that can build a multi-day travel agenda based on your interests, budget, and travel dates—all in seconds.

These tools work well because they respect the customer’s time and reduce friction. They enhance the experience without replacing the human touch entirely.

However, AI doesn’t always lead to great customer service. Customers expect to escalate to a human when needed – a but many chatbots don’t make that easy. Forrester found that fewer than 20% of chatbot interactions are fully resolved without human support. In other words, customers are often left feeling stuck. And when that happens, satisfaction drops. Fast.

The problem isn’t AI itself – it’s poor implementation:

  • Bots that can’t understand nuance
  • Rigid, rule-based scripts
  • No clear way to “talk to a person”
  • Privacy and data concerns

What works best is the “human-in-the-loop” model: AI handles the repetitive, high-volume tasks, and humans step in for the complex, emotional, or nuanced ones. That is, AI works with humans, not instead of them.

MetLife, for example, uses AI to listen in on service calls and provide live coaching to agents – suggesting responses or flagging when a customer sounds frustrated. The agent stays in charge, but gets a digital co-pilot. That’s a smart use of AI. It boosts speed and empathy.

If you’re considering how to use AI to improve your company’s customer experience, here are three places to start:

  • Look for friction: Where are customers getting stuck, delayed, or dropped? AI can help – but only if you’ve clearly mapped those trouble spots first.
  • Respect escalation: Don’t make customers “prove” they deserve to talk to a human. Make the human option easy, fast, and friendly.
  • Keep it transparent: Let people know when they’re talking to a bot. Let them know what the bot can and can’t do. Set expectations up front.

And finally: make sure your AI is improving the emotional experience – not just the technical one.

The bottom line: AI can absolutely improve customer experience. But it doesn’t always. The difference lies in whether the tool is designed to make customers feel more understood – or just more processed.

Like most things in business (and life), tech works best when it’s paired with a human mindset. That means empathy, curiosity, and a deep understanding of what your customers actually need.

Want to know more about how AI can improve the customer experience at your company? Ask about our presentation “AI-Driven Customer Experience: Unlocking Loyalty, Retention, and Growth.” Email me at info at bureauwest.com.

Sources: “Consumer Insights: Trust In AI In The US, 2024,” Forrester, October 6, 2024; Bureau West research

Posted on by Jay Zaltzman

Uncovering unconscious motivators (part 1)

We’ve long known that the unconscious mind plays a major role in customer decision-making. Influential researchers like Daniel Kahneman, Dan Ariely, and Gerald Zaltman have written about how emotions and unconscious memories shape our choices. (Note: Gerald Zaltman is not related to me… as far as I know!) People’s decisions are largely based on emotions and unconscious memories; yet, when asked how we come to our decisions, we use our conscious minds to come up with a rational answer – which may or may not be accurate!

One of the advantages of qualitative research is its ability to uncover these hidden motivators. Projective techniques, for example, help us get beyond surface-level responses to reveal deeper emotions and drivers. Lately, I’ve been exploring neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) and hypnotherapy – two fields that specialize in accessing the unconscious mind – to see what qualitative researchers can learn. There are several powerful techniques we can adapt and apply in our work.

One particularly useful technique is guided visualization, commonly used in NLP to retrieve unconscious memories and imagine desired outcomes. In qualitative research, we can leverage this method to help participants recreate past experiences and envision ideal future scenarios – both of which yield richer insights than traditional questioning.

Take a retail client, for example. Instead of simply asking customers about their last visit to the store, we can immerse them in the memory:

  • In a one-on-one interview, have the participant close their eyes and relax. Guide them through their last visit: “Picture yourself walking into the store. What do you see? What do you hear? How do you feel?”
  • Move through the entire experience: browsing, interacting with staff, making a purchase. Probe for emotions: excitement, hesitation, satisfaction, regret.
  • What feelings lingered after the visit? Would they return? What made the experience memorable – or forgettable?

This technique activates the senses and emotions tied to the experience, unlocking deeper insights that may not emerge in a standard interview. It helps clients understand not just what customers do, but why they do it – and how they feel about it.

But we don’t have to stop at recreating past experiences. Once the participant is fully engaged, we can ask them to visualize an improved version of the experience.

  • “What would make shopping here more enjoyable?”
  • “If this store wanted to feel extra premium, what should change?”
  • “What would make you want to return more often?”

Instead of asking customers to rationally brainstorm improvements, this method lets them feel their way into the answer. It often reveals insights we wouldn’t get through direct questioning.

Guided visualization is just one technique that can enhance qualitative research. In my next Research Tidbit, I’ll explore the ego state approach, a method from hypnotherapy that can help uncover internal conflicts in decision-making. Customers frequently have a part of them that wants to make the purchase and part that doesn’t: we can learn how to appeal to both sides.

Let’s discuss how to uncover your customers’ unconscious motivators. Email me at info at bureauwest.com.

References: “Hidden Minds,” Harvard Business Review, June 2002; “Thinking, Fast and Slow,” Daniel Kahneman, 2011; “Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions,” Dan Ariely, 2008

Posted on by Jay Zaltzman