5 Comments

We as digital customers don't advocate as we should, and the business side just wants to extract value from us however they can

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Ahh, but input, at least from the travel industry, is that while they see their future as a push for more personalisation, holding personal data on their servers is becoming increasingly toxic due to GDPR and related legislation-based fines and cyber insurance premiums related to personal data breaches.

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We have a generation of digital strategists and leaders who have become experts at the existing model, and it's very hard to recognize the opportunity that could be created by a new model which requires an entirely different approach to strategy. I don't think it's a function of bad intentions or lack of intelligence — just an understandable bias toward a paradigm that's been effective for creating success and career growth in the past. If we find a button that dispenses a treat when we push it, we tend to prefer that button until the treats stop. Progress for customer-side tech and data will feel slow until we reach a critical-mass tipping point, and then it will feel very fast (think the rush to e-commerce in the early 2000s). Visionaries will demonstrate the value and FOMO will pull the rest along afterwards.

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Agree with ll of this Dan, but it also creates the vulnerability that the new "treat" won't be customer-centric or privacy-enabled. That's where we need paradigms broken in advance.

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No question.

However, AI needs a customer-centric approach to help individuals collect and organize their data, requirements, and preferences. That needs to be captured and managed so that customers can review, understand, and correct it, not be buried in an only AI-understandable cache. An observation on the travel industry is that it attempts to leverage the online behavior and snippets of your data, etc., you expose when working with existing apps and, for example, using AI to guess your interest based on what you've clicked on an online travel agent website/app.

The average consumer isn’t equipped to understand how to create and manage their personal online profile. So, an entirely different type of solution (likely AI-assisted) must be created to build and manage customer data and act as a highly competent gatekeeper to ensure selective disclosure of data, safeguarding the privacy and security of the customers.

It is going to be interesting to see how this plays out.

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