The empowered consumer

In brief

• Consumers are finding buying decisions overwhelming, and walking away from purchases.
  
  
• Generative AI is powering hyper-personalized experiences, cutting through the noise and deepening consumer relationships.
  
  
• Shifting three key phases of the consumer journey will transform the role companies play in people’s lives, driving relevance and loyalty.

People are overwhelmed by noise and choice

In the last quarter of 2023, 74% of consumers surveyed for Accenture’s Consumer Research 2024 walked away from purchases simply because they felt overwhelmed. Despite focus on customer-centricity and personalized experiences over the past few years, most people (71%) see no improvement — or even see an increase — in the time and effort required to make a purchase decision.

Information overload is impacting people’s confidence in their purchase decisions across the board, from small things like moisturizer to big ticket items like a washing machine.

But there’s good news both for consumers and the companies seeking to serve them: new and emerging AI tools can help companies deliver hyper-personalized experiences that not only cut through the noise, but also simplify decision-making, deepening loyalty in the process. 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.

Ultimately, we expect this shift to trigger the largest reconsideration in decades of what and how consumers buy. Companies that effectively harness technology to empower consumers with easier decisions will earn deeper loyalty, leaving competitors behind.

Shaping the ultimate in consumer empowerment

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. 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.

As consumers rely more on AI-powered tools to decide what to buy, the tech will learn more about them — even if their preferences change — and become increasingly relevant and sophisticated.

Generative AI is becoming a vehicle for empowered decision-making.

Empowering consumers will transform how they think about brands such that they become a part of life beyond a single purchase. To remain relevant into the future, companies must rapidly build deep and hyper-personalized relationships — generative AI will enable them to do this on a scale never seen before. That’s why early movers can capture a distinct competitive advantage. Companies that watch and wait are unlikely to catch up.

Fundamental shifts across the consumer journey

01 Discovery

Whether as intuitive digital services or human agents, generative AI-powered advisors are an incredibly accessible way to access the hyper-personalized advice that consumers crave. We expect the rise of these tools to fundamentally redirect the role of consumer marketing away from mass advertising and toward evidence-based information.

Generative AI-powered advisors can calm the confusion consumers feel by helping them compare options based on the metrics they care the most about — whether those are benefits, sustainability credentials, nutrition labels or something else.

02 Conversion

Conversion comes down to what happens at the point of purchase and consumers don’t all share the same expectations. For consumers seeking independence, multi-modal search engines imitate the flexibility and agility of the human mind to create more accurate search results. For companies, analyzing search semantics allows an understanding of the intent and context behind a user’s search rather than simply matching keywords to recommendations.

This could make the shopping experience significantly more personalized, adding value and easing the information gathering workload.

03 Loyalty

Companies can cultivate loyalty by sharpening the value exchange with consumers, such that it’s worth sharing more usable data in return for hyper-personalized experiences.

Because of how they understand consumers, generative AI tools make it possible for organizations to design experiences based on human purpose, not brand purpose. This is a profound shift. It enables companies to create “human” relationships with consumers that extend beyond a single purchase, so they become embedded in people’s lives.

Be data-powered and delightfully human

The key to truly understanding and engaging consumers is being data-powered and delightfully human. Companies need a robust data foundation — including structured, unstructured and synthetic data — in unified data platforms to maximize the potential of generative AI. At the same time, they should make decisions with the human experience as the touchstone. Instead of focusing solely on removing the pain points of the journey to purchase, organizations should also consider what gets consumers excited about the process.

Consumer-facing companies have always been grounded in relationships with consumers, and those relationships are constantly changing. Right now, consumers want a lighter load and a quieter experience when making purchases. Ultimately, companies that empower the consumer with simpler experiences will drive loyalty and breakthrough growth. Technology that is human by design has tremendous potential to transform the buying experience — and people are increasingly open to it.

This is a huge shift, and it’s happening now.