AI is making bad personalisation worse
Opinion
AI can supercharge great experiences — but if your customer journey is weak or broken, it will just help it fail faster.
AI is now commonplace in nearly every stage of the marketing process, from campaign planning and personalisation to customer service. We’re living through massive transformation, with powerful new tools promising speed, scale and automation.
But when it comes to personalisation, many brands are jumping in before getting the basics right. AI can supercharge great experiences — but if your customer journey is weak or broken, it will just help it fail faster.
At a time when trust, relevance and experience are everything, poorly applied AI can degrade the very outcomes brands are trying to improve — triggering the kind of consumer backlash we’ve seen with brands like Duolingo and Audible.
The lesson? AI can’t cover every crack. Sometimes it turns them into a gaping abyss.
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Personalisation paradox
There’s no doubt that personalisation works. According to our ecommerce report, 80% of consumers say they prefer brands that personalise and they spend 50% more with those that do. But the margin for error is shrinking.
Too much personalisation feels intrusive. Poor targeting feels lazy. Consumers want relevance — not creepiness — and they expect brands to know the difference.
Now layer in AI. Generative tools and predictive models make hyper-personalisation easy to scale. But when brands use AI to amplify shallow segmentation or flawed assumptions, they don’t create better experiences — just more noise, faster.
And the trust gap is real. Only 40% of consumers fully trust AI to personalise correctly. Brands have a narrow window to get this right or risk losing customer confidence altogether.
The cause of, and solution to, most media headaches? It’s the identity, stupid
A loyalty problem
Real customer journeys aren’t neat and tidy funnels — they’re jagged, emotional and unpredictable. Shoppers pause, compare, abandon, return, scroll and convert days later.
So when brands apply AI in overly simplistic ways — like following someone across the web with a product they looked at once — it backfires. Instead of relevance, you get repetition. Instead of connection, irritation. And, at scale, that erodes brand equity.
What started as an efficiency play quickly becomes a loyalty problem.
The best brands aren’t leading with AI. They’re leading with customer insight. They’re prioritising first-party data, real-time behaviour and user experience enhancements that respect consumer behaviour.
Sometimes the smartest move isn’t doing more. It’s doing less — better. That’s where AI excels: not as the architect but as the accelerator of well-designed systems.
3 essentials for effective AI personalisation
AI delivers its full value when paired with smart strategy. Brands should structure their approach around three pillars:
• AI for anticipation: using machine learning to predict and remove friction
• First-party data for depth: understanding customers beyond transactions
• Real-time signals for context: adapting by moment, channel and behaviour
But none of this works without great content. Personalisation needs substance.
Brands must invest in high-quality, structured content that reflects who they are and meets real customer needs, from product descriptions to content hierarchy to metadata.
AI can scale and tailor content — but it can’t fix it.
Need for leadership
Strategic AI use requires more than software. It requires structure, safeguards and, above all, leadership. It’s about making considered ethical choices that support long-term value for brands and their customers.
Too many C-suite leaders still view AI as a cost-cutting exercise. But marketing isn’t a cost centre. It’s where loyalty is earned. Strip away the human element and you lose what AI was meant to enhance.
As The Media Leader recently reported, many executives are underestimating the emotional, behavioural and ethical complexity of AI adoption. We see this every day — over-engineered journeys, irrelevant recommendations, loyalty schemes that confuse discounts with relationships.
The answer isn’t more automation. It’s smarter thinking.
Behave: Significant gaps exist between C-suite and employees over AI implementation
AI isn’t the hero
AI gives us the power to personalise at scale — but with that comes the responsibility to do it with care, context and respect.
Brands that win are those using AI to augment human insight, not replace it. The future of personalisation won’t be defined by automation alone, but by how intentional those experiences feel.
That’s how loyalty is earned. And kept.
Jonathan Healey is group technology director at IDHL