Generative AI can cut info overload, raise loyalty, sales: Accenture

Consumers are on track to adopt conversational AI at scale over the next two years, as they increasingly seek to lighten their workloads associated with making purchases, the Dublin-headquartered company said in a recent report titled ‘The empowered consumer; The key to deeper consumer relationships: reducing the noise around decision-making’.

In the last quarter of 2023, 74 per cent of consumers surveyed for Accenture’s Consumer Research 2024 walked away from purchases simply because they felt overwhelmed.

Despite focus on customer-centricity and personalised experiences over the past few years, most people (71 per cent) see no improvement—or even see an increase—in the time and effort required to make a purchase decision.

Information overload is affecting people’s confidence in their purchase decisions across the board, from small products to big ticket items.

Seventy-three per cent of consumers feel overwhelmed by the volume of available options, but 51 per cent of them are open to using conversational AI solutions.

Search is a critical component of how consumers start the purchase journey, and generative AI is upgrading search from simple to semantic, and from overwhelming to transparent, the Accenture report said.

In different contexts, a consumer may want to browse independently, obtain expert advice, or even outsource the decision completely. Emerging technology offers companies the chance to collect and use granular, life-centric knowledge about each individual consumer to curate uniquely personal experiences.

Empowering consumers will transform how they think about brands such that they become a part of life beyond a single purchase, the document noted.

To remain relevant into the future, companies must rapidly build deep and hyper-personalised relationships, and generative AI will enable them to do this on a scale never seen before, it said.

As 75 per cent of consumers wish they could identify options that meet their needs more quickly and easily, generative AI-powered advisors are an incredibly accessible way to access the hyper-personalised advice that consumers crave.

Accenture expects the rise of these tools to fundamentally redirect the role of consumer marketing away from mass advertising and toward evidence-based information.

As 63 per cent of consumers have had the frustrating and disappointing experience of attempting to buy a product only to find that it is out of stock, multi-modal search engines imitate the flexibility and agility of the human mind to create more accurate search results, the report added.

Fibre2Fashion News Desk (DS)