Total Experience: Why CMOs Need To Think Big About the Next Generation of Experiences

“Talking to a computer has never felt really natural for me; now it does.” – Sam Altman, on the recent release of ChatGPT-4o

Sam Altman’s quote is telling. For me, a millennial growing up in the 1990s, this was what the future looked like. Whether it was Knightrider or Star Trek or Minority Report, when the future arrived, we would converse with computers, in natural language, and have them respond instantly with speech, images, audio and video. Often with advice and an opinion what we should do next. The machines would be our guides.

This is why Open AI’s recent announcements about GPT-4o and its ability to deal with audio are so revealing. Not just about the rapid technical advances of AI. But more importantly about the future of how we shop, work, access healthcare and financial services and generally go about our day-to-day lives.

The technical advance is impressive enough. Prior to GPT-4o, you could use “Voice Mode” to talk to ChatGPT, but it was noticeably slower to respond than regular human conversation. GPT-3.5 had an average latency of 2.8 seconds, while GPT-4’s latency averaged 5.4 seconds. Now, OpenAI’s announcement claims that GPT-4o’s voice modality “can respond to audio inputs in as little as 232 milliseconds, with an average of 320 milliseconds, which is similar to human response time in a conversation.”

But audio is just one example of GenerativeAI’s rapid progress towards natural, multi-modal interactions. There are three advances that together will rewrite the rule book for how we build customer and employee experiences.

Firstly, the ability to understand natural language. Secondly, GenerativeAI’s ability to be multi-modal (to understand and create text, image, audio and video). And thirdly, its ability to be context aware, to understand and tailor content and tone to the individual and to act on our behalf.

Together, these change things. The old user interfaces, the era of point and click, lists and buttons is coming to an end and will be replaced by intuitive, responsive, conversational interactions.

Or, to put it another way, in the near future you can have a conversation with a department store, a drugs catalogue, a relational database and a fridge. All in the same day if you like.

The whole way we interact with technology and information is set for disruption. What does this mean for the marketing leaders tasked with designing the experiences in this new era? How should CMOs be thinking about building for a future defined by more natural, personalized, and context-aware interactions?

Imagining the next generation of experience is one thing, getting there is another

Generative AI technology opens up new vistas when we look at the future of customer and employee experiences. New experiences will look very different. They will be dynamic, responsive to individual preferences and needs, emotionally intelligent, able to switch effortlessly between video, audio, text and image and between channels and evolve naturally as a conversation.

To date, the dominant metaphor for the role of AI in business has been the copilot. But when we think about the experience perhaps there’s a better metaphor: AI as concierge, orchestrating experiences around the needs of the humans involved, be they customers, employee and partners.

For CMOs however, imagining this future is not the hard bit. The real challenge lies in how we get there from where we are now, encumbered as we are with legacy interfaces, processes and architecture.

These changes open the aperture for what ‘experience’ encompasses. Discussions about experience until now have tended to focus on the front-end, the user interfaces and the platforms we build these on. But responsive, adaptive, multi-modal experiences place a new set of requirements not only on the surface layer but also on the data architecture and engineering, on content processes, on decisioning about what information to share with whom and in what format, on privacy and governance. Much of the magic happens in the ‘subterranean’ layers beneath the surface experience.

This is why at Rightpoint we use the term Total Experience to refer to not only the way customers and employees interact but the way data, content and knowledge are managed to make more personalised, data-driven experiences possible.

To build winning modern experiences, we believe CMOs need to consider their performance across the three layers of experience:

• The front-end interfaces and how they will become more fluid, natural and responsive

• The orchestration needed to surface the right content, in the right format, at the right time

• The decisioning needed to decide what to share, with whom and when to share it

CMOs’ ability to compete – whether it is for attention, for wallet-share, for customer satisfaction, for users, whatever the goal is – their effectiveness will be in large part defined by their ability to stitch together these three layers, at speed, to deliver tailored interactions for each individual.

In the next articles in our series on the Future of Experience we’ll look at these three layers of Total Experience and explore the considerations for CMOs in each one.