Hey Siri! What’s intuitive technology? In fact, Siri, Alexa, Cortana, and the ever-expanding family of digital assistants are just some of the more familiar examples of intuitive technology. There are hundreds of others, with new use cases being born every day.

Intuitive technology is already in most of our lives, seeking to interpret and understand our intentions in order to enhance, simplify, or accelerate a range of everyday experiences. Relatively commonplace examples include:

• Facial/biometric recognition (e.g. Apple Face ID, Touch ID or Amazon One)
• Speech recognition (e.g. Siri, Alexa or Google Assistant)
• Gesture recognition (e.g. Microsoft Kinect)

And business is booming. In our recent report, Beyond the Metaverse: CX Predictions for 2023, 70% of businesses indicated they are planning to offer more intuitive ways to interact with customers. The gesture interface market is forecast to double in size by 2026, and the voice interface market will reach the same milestone a year later (making them worth $25bn and $46bn, respectively).

Most of us are pretty comfortable interacting with our smartphones or other smart devices through zero-touch intuitive interfaces. But the technology has moved on from these first generation deployments of intuitive technology and its potential for marketing is only just beginning to be explored.

The promise of intuitive technology for marketing

Intuitive technology could be a game-changer for marketers, with increasingly sophisticated interfaces translating nuanced gaze, motion, emotion, biometric, and voice data into actionable insight. Providing lakes of previously untapped first-party data, the technology offers the chance to provide positive customer experiences minutely tailored to the individual. Experiences capable of responding to customer needs or moods in the moment.

Digital systems are, for example, becoming increasingly adept at recognising outward signs of human feelings. Sentiment analysis technologies are being developed to perceive people’s emotional state and direct interactions accordingly. You can picture it, the TV streaming service that tailors its on-screen recommendations according to a real-time understanding of viewer mood – feel-good flicks and comedies only for the sad and weary! Stranger things have happened.

When I think about intuitive technology I always think of a particular scene in the sci-fi movie ‘Minority Report’.  An on-the-run Tom Cruise is trying to make his way unobtrusively through a futuristic mall but is repeatedly scanned by biometric sensors outside every store, triggering a series of loud personalized marketing messages. But really, this digital dystopia needs to be shelved in the fiction section. Firstly,  the processing power for this kind of real-time 1-2-1 interaction is years away. 

More importantly,  intuitive technology in marketing is geared to improving CX, tailoring experiences to the individual to strengthen relationships with brands. Take a couple of great innovations from Google last year, for example. Camera Switches and Project Activate enable the use of eye movements and facial gestures to navigate and interact with Android phones (completing calls, texts, music and such). In so doing, Android devices became instantly more accessible to anyone with speech or motor impairments. 

This example does highlight, however, a subtler but potentially more important marketing opportunity using customer data from intuitive technologies. And that’s buyer behavior analysis. Or more specifically, identifying key behavioral or biometric indicators at point-of-purchase decisions. What emotional state were they in? Were there visible ‘tells’ when they shifted from “Hmmm” to “I’m buying it”? Why did they buy at that moment and can we replicate the situation, environment, or experience? No other technologies can come close to this and the bottom-line ROI possibilities  from predictive analysis are huge.

Hurdles to overcome

There’s no getting around it, some aspects of intuitive technology make people uncomfortable. It can feel intrusive, a breach of privacy. Is my smartspeaker listening to me? Am I being studied in order to influence the adverts I see? These are commonly voiced but relatively low level concerns. 

But moving towards the use and analysis of detailed biometric and sentiment information changes the conversation entirely. This data is incredibly valuable and deeply private. So naturally there will be concerns on how it’s used, and effectively managing customer data security and privacy concerns will be critical to brand success. 

Customers need to see and feel that the technology is being used in a way that respects their privacy and their rights. The key is to build customer trust via careful customer engagement. It’s not just about getting their consent, it’s about taking them on the journey with you, meaning:

• Provide an unambiguous opt-in to data usage.
• Provide clear assurances of how you will look after their data.
• Provide a vivid picture of how they’ll benefit if they share their data.

This last point, the value exchange, is also crucial. To consent to the data from intuitive tech being used, it has got to be worth it – saving customers time, money, or inconvenience (ideally all of them at the same time). Otherwise, they simply won’t engage – and they won’t let you within a hundred yards of their data.

The road ahead

Intuitive technology isn’t futuristic. It’s here. As digital processing power increases, more and more use cases will reveal themselves and become commonplace. From a marketing perspective, the technology is simply allowing us to do what we’ve always done – figuring out what customers want, and responding with improved experiences in order to drive conversions. It’s just the response time is a lot faster, the data is new, and the sources are more personal. 

But with precise, watertight data privacy processes and a clear value exchange, intuitive technology looks set to provide rich pickings for marketers. Take your pick: enriching brands’ data backbone with new first-party data, high-definition views of buyer behaviors, predictive analytics supercharged with sentiment data, responsive nurture journeys, mood-literate communications – all geared towards provision of enhanced, hyper-personalized experiences that build loyalty and drive sales. Some of this is already here. The rest is coming. Watch this space.

Check out our report, Beyond the Metaverse: CX Predictions for 2023, to learn more about how both brands and consumers feel about developments in intuitive technology, and explore some of the other trends that will shape customer experience in the coming months.