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AI-timacy (or: How I learned to stop worrying and love the machine) PART 2

  • 15 hours ago
  • 7 min read

Recap – In part 1 of this blog we explored the conceptual aspects of emerging AI intimacy.

We are moving from personalisation to persuasion as the next frontier of AI and customer relationships. AI could reshape customer decisions and relationship management through its potential to manufacture relationship ‘intimacy’. While many remain sceptical about the ability of AI to emulate the experience of human relationships, it does not need to be truly human to change human behaviour. The real commercial question is whether AI can become useful and trusted enough to intimately influence what people think, feel and buy.


Functional intimacy in the moments that matter


This capacity for functional intimacy has major implications for customer experience.


For decades, customer service has been treated as one of the key human moments in the customer journey. It is where a customer hears a voice, is reassured about choices, explains a problem and hopes to feel recognised as more than a ticket number. We need to be wary though of overly romanticising the intimacy in these moments.


Many customer service experiences are already manufactured intimacy. The person on the other end may be kind and skilled, but they are often constrained by resources, scripts, systems, targets, fragmented data and limited authority. They often do not know the customer, remember the last conversation, nor be empowered to solve the problem. Frankly, they may not care as much as the brand hopes the customer believes they do.


AI has the potential to improve this, not because it cares, but because it can simulate some of the behaviours we associate with care: attention, patience, continuity, personalisation, responsiveness and recall. A good AI service agent could know the customer’s history, understand the product, remember previous interactions, identify patterns, explain options clearly and stay calm through frustration. In many routine contexts, that may be enough to achieve functional intimacy.


For many customers, the benchmark will not be “is this human?” It will be “does this resolve my problem, remember my context, make me feel less ignored and make me feel good about my choices?”


CX traditionally focuses on making the brand feel more human but may have to pivot more to making AI-mediated interactions feel useful, trustworthy and respectful without feeling manipulative or pretending they are something they are not. The greater relationship risk may shift from whether customers will reject AI because it is inhuman, to feeling betrayed when they realise the functional intimacy they experienced was designed primarily for extraction, upsell or control.


Intermediated customer relationships


The bigger shift, and more disruptive scenario, is not only brands using AI to talk to customers but customers using AI to talk to brands.


Imagine a personal AI assistant that knows your budget, preferences, values, household needs, health goals, travel plans, past purchases, complaints, subscriptions and decision style. You ask it which insurance policy to choose, which superannuation fund to consider, which washing machine is best value, which holiday is realistic, which provider is hiding fees, which brand is genuinely sustainable and which customer reviews look suspicious.

This transcends just searching to become personalised curating – your personal assistant compares, summarises, questions, filters, remembers preferences, identifies emerging needs and recommends.


Eventually, it may be trusted to negotiate and even buy. At that point, the customer journey changes shape and the brand is no longer speaking directly to the consumer but through its intermediating AI filter.


That has profound implications for marketing. Brands have spent years optimising for human attention. While these things will still matter, AI intermediaries may care less about the cleverness and visual impact of the campaign and more about whether the brand can be reliably understood by machines for methodical comparisons.


Brand focus vs AI intermediary focus

Current typical brand focus

Likely AI intermediary focus

Visual salience

Evidence

Emotional storytelling

Clarity

Search visibility

Interoperability

Social proof

Reviews at scale

Ease of recall

Service history

Distinctive assets

Price transparency

Frictionless conversion

Policy detail

In other words, brands may need to become not only emotionally compelling, but machine-legible as the future of brand preference may be shaped partly inside a private conversation the brand cannot see.


The intimacy paradox


The privacy paradox has long defined digital life. People say they worry about data collection, yet still give many platforms intimate access to their private lives. They are unsettled when algorithms know too much, yet frustrated when recommendations are irrelevant or personal details are forgotten.


The famous Target teenage pregnancy story remains a useful example (although its veracity has been questioned) - the predictive model was right but triggered a marketing response that felt intrusive, premature and socially inappropriate.


Traditional personalisation inferred things about us from behaviour but it can now also leverage conversation. It can ask follow-up questions, remember what we disclose and respond “emotionally”. That moves us from the privacy paradox to the intimacy paradox.

The more helpful AI is and the more personal context it has, the more powerful and potentially invasive it becomes. The more it feels like it understands us, the more likely we may be to trust it with decisions that previously sat with friends, experts or were kept to ourselves.


This suggests the next era of personalisation needs a clear trust architecture.

Customers will want to know when AI is being used, how their data is being interpreted, whether they can challenge automated decisions, and whether recommendations are genuinely aligned with their interests or merely optimised for commercial outcomes. Transparency should be part of the experience.


Recommendation to persuasion


Perhaps the most provocative question is whether AI can persuade while making the decision feel like your own. This is where “AI-timacy” becomes commercially explosive.


A personal assistant that knows your budget, routines, anxieties, aspirations and constraints could become the most powerful recommender ever created. It could know you are worried about heating costs, feeling tired, trying to spend less, wanting to look more put together at work and drawn to a particular colour you keep mentioning.


It takes its time and nurtures your customer journey over several months with useful suggestions. One day as the weather gets colder it suggests in a relevant chat moment a green jumper from a certain brand. It is warm, within budget, ethically made and on sale. Just what you thought you needed.


Is that manipulation? Or is it good advice that meets your unique needs?


But what if:

• AI had been trained to favour certain retailers?

• AI had subtly shaped the need before satisfying it?

• AI has effectively subliminally planted the seeds of ‘your’ future decision?


Is this akin to the plot of Inception? Could using AI to support the countless micro decisions in our lives start to rob us of self-determination and effectively free will?


The darker version is not hard to imagine: political influence, emotional dependence, exploitative financial nudges, vulnerable people steered towards products or beliefs over weeks or months.


The more ordinary version may matter more because it will be harder to see as marketing persuasion becomes more patient, private and cumulative. It will look like trusted impartial advice not like an ad. It begs the question of when does help become influence? When does influence become manipulation? When does believing it was all your own idea become dangerous?


What should brands do with this?


For brands, the implications are both strategic and ethical. AI will make marketing more efficient and it will also make some old forms of marketing less effective.


Brands may need to market to both humans and their AI agents - First, assume AI will become part of the customer decision journey. Not as a gimmick, but as an intermediary. Customers will increasingly ask AI to compare, explain, challenge and recommend. If your proposition is unclear, inconsistent or hard to verify, AI may quietly route demand elsewhere. AI may shift influence from public advertising to private conversation.


Second, make your brand machine legible. Product information, pricing, claims, policies, service standards, reviews and evidence need to be clear enough for both humans and AI systems to interpret. The future of discoverability will go beyond search engine optimisation to “answer engine” optimisation, agent readiness and trust signalling. CX design will need to balance efficiency with emotional impact.


Trust, transparency and consent will become core brand assets - Third, design for consent and disclosure. If AI is being used in customer interactions, say so. If data is being used to personalise advice, explain how. If recommendations are sponsored or commercially weighted, make that clear. The brands that try to hide the machinery may gain short-term conversion and lose long-term trust.


“Human touch” may be reserved for higher-stakes moments - Fourth, decide where humans matter most. AI may handle routine interactions better than many current systems but the value of human contact may increase in high-stakes, emotional or ambiguous moments. The goal should be the right form of support for the right moment.


Loyalty will be harder won - Finally, resist the temptation to confuse intimacy with loyalty. A customer may feel known by an AI assistant, but that does not mean they feel loyal to the brand behind it. In fact, the more powerful personal AI becomes, the more it may strip away weak loyalty built on habit, friction or information asymmetry.


The big takeaway


Debating whether AI can think, feel or become conscious is a profound questions with moral, legal and philosophical consequences. However, the commercial transformation will not wait (or care) for that debate to be resolved.


AI does not need to be human to change human behaviour. If we cling too tightly to romantic ideas of human uniqueness, we may underestimate what is coming. If we rush too quickly into AI intimacy without transparency, restraint or ethical design, we may build systems that are persuasive before they are accountable.


The future of customer influence is likely to shift from who shouts the loudest to who earns a place in the quiet conversation happening every day between a person and their trusted machine.



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Author


Tai Rotem is a consulting partner at MYMAVINS with several decades experience in consumer, financial services, public health, and social research.


Reach out to him at Tai@mymavins.com.au

 
 
 

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