Leveraging Generative AI for Customer Expansion

We are witnessing a transformative era shaped by generative AI, where businesses harness productivity gains and invest in customer growth. Companies leveraging generative AI for customer-focused initiatives can anticipate a 25% increase in revenue over five years compared to those solely concentrating on productivity.

Implementing generative AI creates a synergistic effect, potentially bridging the relevance gap between brands and their customers.

The growing disparity between what companies provide and customer expectations has created an urgent situation for marketing, sales, and service professionals. Combined with social and economic pressures and the demand to achieve more with fewer resources, it is understandable why many seek refuge or wish to revert to 2018.

Adding to these challenges is the rapid emergence of generative AI.

Despite the significant hype surrounding generative AI, our work with numerous companies demonstrates its unparalleled impact compared to recent technologies. Generative AI affects every industry, organization, and, most importantly, people. This influence extends to talent and processes, necessitating new work methodologies and imperatives such as responsibility. Generative AI is not merely an additional layer in the technology stack; it is fundamentally different.

Generative AI is the resource-augmenting, creativity-enhancing, and strategy-prioritizing tool we have been anticipating. It has the potential to bridge the relevance gap between brands and their customers finally.

We are witnessing a transformative era driven by generative AI at scale, enabling product innovators to gain real-time insights from customer service feedback and shape R&D accordingly. Marketers can now execute highly creative campaigns with personalized messages, informed by detailed knowledge of product sales to specific customers. This enhancement of sales and service interactions leads to innovative solutions that make customers feel valued. Insights from one part of the customer value chain fuel new insights across other areas, fostering meaningful connections between businesses and people on a large scale, and ultimately driving business growth.

To unlock this potential, generative AI must be viewed as a catalyst for reinvention rather than merely a technology to implement. Framed in this way, its potential and role in the reinvention roadmap become evident. While the risks associated with generative AI are real, the greatest risk lies in inaction. Failing to act will not only impact current business productivity but also hinder future growth, risking businesses falling behind their competitors.

Generative AI for Enhancing Productivity and Driving Customer Growth

Generative AI is a powerful tool for boosting productivity and driving customer growth. Insights from our involvement in over 50+ generative AI projects across various industries and business functions, along with data from a global survey of 1,000 business executives, illustrate how organizations are achieving substantial growth by leveraging generative AI to enhance productivity.

Businesses adopting this strategy are making deliberate decisions on where to implement generative AI to enhance customer relevance across their operations—from product design and development to marketing, sales, and service functions. This approach helps create capacity, capability, and confidence, resulting in measurable value. By using generative AI to increase profitability today, companies open up new opportunities for the future, aligning their operations with customer demands.

According to our survey, 90% of businesses currently utilizing generative AI are focused on improving productivity through automation. This focus is crucial as a foundation for growth. However, the real differentiator lies in how companies build upon this foundation: embracing productivity enhancements now can drive reinvention across the entire customer organization, leading to stronger growth.

How businesses leverage generative AI to enhance customer value

In the rapidly evolving retail landscape, marked by structural challenges, companies, especially those operating on narrow margins, are turning to generative AI to optimize resource allocation. This optimization enables them to reinvest in operational enhancements, necessitating a fundamental shift rather than incremental changes. For these companies, generative AI is not merely a concept to be proven but a core component of their strategy, integrated into production processes to drive innovation across marketing, sales, and service functions.

Pioneering organizations are revolutionizing their entire customer value chain, from strategic planning and product development to creative campaigns and storytelling. Our survey analysis indicates that these early adopters are 3.7 times more inclined to use generative AI for identifying novel customer needs. By synthesizing extensive customer and market data within a responsible AI framework, they derive unique insights to test and refine product concepts. Through our collaborative efforts, these companies have witnessed up to an 80% reduction in data processing time, leading to a 40% acceleration in bringing new products and services to market.

Moreover, our research highlights that these trailblazers are 5.6 times more likely to believe in generative AI's potential to drive radical innovation in marketing. They transform creative concepts into personalized global campaigns efficiently, achieving significant savings in production time (up to 94%) and overcoming challenges related to content production and scalability (resulting in a 300%–400% increase in content variations).

Beyond efficiency gains, the true potential of generative AI lies in its ability to catalyze innovation when coupled with human creativity while upholding quality standards. This synergy is crucial for enabling brands to stand out in the market and forge genuine human connections with their audience.

Transitioning from potential to innovation aligned with customer needs

Leveraging insights from our substantial investment in generative AI, alongside ongoing projects in this domain, we observe significant opportunities and growing demand, particularly within marketing, sales, and customer service sectors. The application of generative AI in areas that enhance customer value balances efficiencies with insights that foster innovation.

We have delineated five essential imperatives crucial for companies to navigate reinvention amidst the generative AI era. Here's how each imperative translates into actionable steps for initiating transformation within the customer-centric domain:

1. Prioritize Value Creation:

- By pivoting from isolated use cases to prioritizing capabilities spanning the customer value chain, businesses can place the customer at the core of their operations. Conducting a comprehensive evaluation across the organization can unveil opportunities for delivering enhanced value and relevance to customers, guiding strategic priorities.

2. Cultivate an AI-Enabled Digital Core:

- The digital core serves as the nucleus for customer relevance, beginning with the utilization of existing customer data—both proprietary and third-party. Harnessing the power of generative AI facilitates the discovery of avenues for offering customers more personalized experiences. Starting with a vision of where value can be added to the customer journey aids in conceptualizing the digital core's role in supporting customer relevance.

3. Transform Talent and Work Dynamics:

- While discussions often revolve around the impact of generative AI on talent, it's crucial to recognize that its efficacy hinges on human involvement and utilization. Automation should be perceived as an opportunity to reinvest in areas that were previously inaccessible. Research indicates that involving individuals in reimagining work processes with generative AI can significantly amplify the pace and scale of reinvention. Creative teams are already exploring the integration of generative AI workflows into the creative process, embracing prompt engineering and Responsible AI principles.

4. Embrace Responsible AI:

- Given its unique engagement and learning mechanisms, generative AI necessitates a robust framework for responsibility and governance, placing ethics and bias mitigation at the forefront. This entails adopting responsible AI principles with a clear accountability and governance strategy, aligning with values such as fairness, trust, equality, and privacy that resonate with customers.

5. Foster Continuous Reinvention:

- The widespread adoption of generative AI across various organizational domains underscores the imperative for C-suite leadership and board alignment. By emphasizing reinvention and making adequate investments, businesses can unlock generative AI's synergistic potential. Integration of generative AI applications accelerates insights and capabilities across the customer organization, fostering innovation and agility to address real-time customer needs, thereby driving growth.

Bring it all together

The advent of generative AI has ushered in a transformative era for businesses, where the focus shifts from mere productivity gains to investments in customer growth. Leveraging generative AI for customer-centric initiatives not only promises a 25% revenue increase over five years but also bridges the gap between brands and their customers.

However, this transition is not without its challenges. The rapid emergence of generative AI compounds existing pressures faced by marketing, sales, and service professionals, urging them to embrace innovation or risk falling behind.

Despite the hype surrounding generative AI, its impact is undeniable. From enhancing productivity to reshaping entire customer value chains, generative AI permeates every facet of business operations, necessitating a fundamental shift in work methodologies and priorities.

By prioritizing customer value creation, cultivating an AI-enabled digital core, transforming talent and work dynamics, embracing responsible AI practices, and fostering continuous reinvention, businesses can successfully navigate the generative AI era. These imperatives translate into actionable steps for businesses to initiate transformation within customer-centric domains, thereby unlocking the full potential of generative AI for driving growth and innovation aligned with customer needs.