Michael Lee

Strategic Editor

With so much AI chatter, what actually matters?

Every week, we’re seeing new AI capabilities, platforms, and promises, each with its own set of predictions and forecasts. 

But here’s the thing: Nobody has the full picture. 🤷

❌ Not the hyperscalers.

❌ Not the startups.

❌ Not the analysts. 

The technology is evolving too fast for any single perspective to capture it completely.

Instead of making individual predictions about AI, it’s smarter to watch and learn collectively from how things are unfolding across the entire customer experience ecosystem.

In nature, starlings do this beautifully through murmurations — thousands of birds moving as one, with their collective awareness creating order out of chaos.

The same is true in our space: Among the turbulence of AI innovation, there are practical patterns emerging that you can act on today.

The Edge Summit was one such murmuration. This gathering of leaders and professionals helped the collective compare notes on what’s actually working in AI (and why). 

🌀 Here are a few of the patterns we found: 

🔓 Autonomous marketing will unlock your team’s potential

Brands no longer have the time or resources to meet customer expectations around personalization. 

But now, AI agents will take care of the manual tasks while your team focuses on strategy and creativity, transforming (note: not replacing) how your teams work. 

💌 What’s old is new again 

Even with all this new tech, email is still a key channel for most brands.

AI will play a crucial role in personalizing content, optimizing send times, and revamping campaign flows. 

🤖 Shoppers want more conversations 

Consumers no longer want to sacrifice personalization for convenience. 

Conversational AI is empowering brands to engage customers across the entire shopping experience, with 93% of shoppers considering conversational capabilities important.

🧪 You need to start experimenting now 

Your first instinct may be to approach new technology with caution, but your customers aren’t waiting for you. 

Waiting means you’re not learning, which means you’ll be behind when it matters most. Start experimenting with AI now to understand how to use it most effectively down the road.

🔌 The power of patterns

AI will keep changing. By observing the shifts in the industry and how brands are achieving success, you’ll be prepared to pivot at a moment’s notice. 

Dig deeper into the AI patterns we saw at The Edge Summit (and beyond) in Murmurations on the AI Era.

What's triggering my pattern-al instinct

• Strange Pictures by Uketsu — A web of mysteries centered around eerie, childlike drawings. This book immediately drew my attention.
• Cloud Atlas (read the book first, then watch the film!) — A sprawling story of connection through time and space. A real eras tour. 
• Perspectives — Each player has limited knowledge, and you can only solve the cases by verbally piecing everything together. It makes for some viewtiful collaboration.

A CEO's perspective on AI's next chapter

As if to prove my point about ever-changing AI news, ChatGPT recently announced an app store and its Atlas browser. 

Should commerce brands be concerned? 

Bloomreach's CEO and co-founder, Raj De Datta, doesn’t think so. 

In fact, he sees ChatGPT as just another channel that we can adopt into our platform. Read his perspective here. 

And to help companies control their brand experience on these new conversational channels, we've also announced Loomi Connect — a way to extend personalization directly into channels like ChatGPT.

AI continues changing before our eyes, but hopefully, this edition gave you some fresh perspectives. Be sure to keep an eye out for the next issue of The Edge on November 26th!