I saw this video on Instagram recently. It looks exactly like a typical car advert. Dramatic drone shots of an impressive Volvo car easily handling sweeping mountain roads. It’s a beautiful piece of cinema-quality film that draws attention to the car and the Volvo For Life fund.Except this isn’t an ad for Volvo.
Volvo had nothing to do with this film at all. It was created by a photographer and artist called Laszlo Gaal in less than one day. The entire project was created using text to video artificial intelligence, specifically RunwayML Gen-3 Alpha.He used text prompts to create the entire video.Imagine how this changes the game for the advertising industry. There is no need to drag an entire film crew up a mountain to spend days filming a car when an expert in AI prompting can conjure up a film in a day.I thought about this video when I saw a recent report from Engage Customer titled ‘CX in the age of AI.’ Two important statistics jumped out when I read the report. The first was that 75% of CX directors are struggling to find any return on investment (ROI) from AI initiatives. Then I noticed that 41% said that ‘AI is nice to have and is likely to grow in importance over the next few years.’These figures seem astonishing and hard to explain. Most industry analysts are talking about AI as the next industrial revolution and yet the CX directors surveyed for this research are talking about it as something that’s nice to have, but still doesn’t have any profitable purpose.The founder of research company TrendzOwl, Stephen Loynd, explained this situation
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Something happens when a technology concept outpaces the terminology we have to describe it. Across the customer experience landscape, vendors start applying the same label to wildly different things. For instance, industry leaders start buying into the AI label instead of its real operational capability. And somewhere between the pitch deck and the production environment, the real question gets lost: does any of this actually address a real operational need? Agentic AI has reached that stage.
clearly on a recent podcast
. He was talking about his new book ‘The Widening Turn’, which is focused on innovation in the USA.
The book looks back at history to create a sense of where we are today. When the exploratory mission led by Ferdinand Magellan managed to circumnavigate the entire world in 1522 the world was not ready to process what it really meant. It was proven that the earth is a sphere, and not flat, because someone sailed all the way round, but most people did not appreciate the significance of this knowledge.
Stephen Loynd argues that we are in a similar situation today with AI and I would argue that the data coming from Engage Customer proves his point. AI is fantastically powerful, but most managers today are seeing it as an upgrade, rather than a revolution. Why?
In 1999 the British writer Douglas Adams published his ‘Technology Rules.’ Adams famously once said: “We are stuck with technology when what we really want is just stuff that works.” He was the first person in Europe to own an Apple Macintosh in 1984 and is best known for his comic science fiction, such as The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy.
The technology rules state the following:
Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.
Adams is entirely on target. Managers that have spent their entire career building processes and services that don’t rely on AI are often not the best people to see where it might be transformational.
The problem is that the potential change is so vast that it can be difficult to comprehend - entire industries might change or vanish. The World Economic Forum founder, Klaus Schwab, named the time we are now living through as the fourth industrial revolution. Schwab believes that we will see a blend of the physical, digital, and biological worlds through technologies such as AI, gene editing, and advanced robotics.
Sometimes there will be a breakthrough and we will be able to clearly grasp what is happening. The Volvo video is a good example of this. A high-end cinema-quality ad for a new car would traditionally cost over a million dollars and require a large crew and time to shoot and edit the film.
If text to video can now generate films in just a few hours without the need for any film crew at all then it is likely that almost all corporate and commercial film-making will migrate to this. Even if you are making a simple commercial for laundry liquid, it will still be far easier to create a film using AI on an Apple Mac, rather than hiring actors, a set, a lighting crew, and everyone else needed to make a traditional film.
In the customer service environment there is an enormous opportunity for Generative AI to help customers navigate the FAQ pages. Most brands have developed an FAQ library over time that is either on their website or is used within the customer service team to capture all the most common problems and solutions.
With all that product knowledge in one place it’s a fairly simple process to train an AI chatbot. Now the customer doesn’t need to struggle through an FAQ library, using keywords to try finding the answer to their problem, they can just ask a question and receive an answer that is created specifically for them. In natural language, as they would if they were talking to a person.
Finding information more easily is helpful, but it’s not revolutionary. The world of customer service will probably need to see the equivalent of the Volvo advert and then the opportunity will become clear.
Until that time, I’ll keep on posting my ideas right here on this newsletter. It would be great to hear your ideas about what might signal a dramatic change in customer experience design.
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