Will AI help make your brand part of someone’s daily routine?

Could artificial intelligence powered digital assistants, such as Alexa, take de facto control of your daily routine? And, if so, how much influence could they wield over your brand choices?

Much is being made of Amazon’s Alexa voice recognition technology and the voice platform’s ability to recognise speech and respond to voice requests. Early adopters of Alexa assistants seem to be delighted with the ease at which they can discover new content, control other devices. participate in interactive content and make onlin purchases. However, the best is probably still to come. As artificial intelligence (AI) develops further and leverages other technologies, digital assistants are likely to begin anticipating your needs rather than simply serving them efficiently.

Starting your day with Alexa has become hugely popular among the platform’s enthusiasts. Alexa can be pre-configured to perform lists of tasks, play Flash Briefings with updates on your chosen news topics and answer questions about your daily schedule, the weather, traffic and many other topics. Alexa users can adjust and fine tune their preferred content and responses to various voice commands until they’re happy they have the best morning experience that they can create.

However, we can probably expect Alexa, and its competitors, to get even smarter. It won’t be long until digital assistants actually anticipate your needs after sensing that you’re awake, out of bed, have finished lunch or are preparing to go out. AI-engines will assume that you’ll want to ask similar questions and access similar content to yesterday and the day before, or the first Sunday of the month or the last time it rained. It will also learn based on your usage how to brief you on new information, for what duration and what your likely needs or actions might be after being brought up to date. In short, more intelligent, more conversational, more proactive.

As AI auto-suggestion and AI-driven questions begin to take over, de facto control of your daily routine could also be taken over by your digital assistant. Elements, including brand content, that you would today have to consciously include, configure and ask for using a voice command, will be routinely delivered by devices.

Why don’t you try some Organic Valley half and half Dave?

For brands this will be a crucial development that has far reaching consequences. If we were to compare this to your thought process when buying a box of cornflakes: it is the difference between asking yourself each time that you go to the supermarket which brand of cornflakes you should buy this time and, as many of us do, simply buying a box of Kelloggs without consciously thinking about your brand choice for so much as a split second.

So, are brands that invest in becoming part of our new AI-enabled daily routines going to be more and more likely to remain there as the technology develops? Brand choices will be assumed for us, from buying a new carton of milk to listening to the world news headlines. However, there will be plenty of room for disruption too. Depending on the policies set by the AI-platform provider, digital assistants could, for example, auto-recommend products that claim to suit your needs even better. Imagine Alexa interrupting your established daily routine with the suggestion that you change your favourite milk brand of 10 years to its own recommendation, thereby cutting your intake of saturated fats by 10 percent.

The impact on brands, how we feel about them and our brand choices could be enormous, although still difficult to predict. Will AI, an increasingly personal approach and the access to unlimited data result in a meritocracy among brands, driven by popular metrics? Will marketers focus on using that same data to disrupt established brand positions? Or will platforms such as Alex maintain strict control to protect both brands and consumers? That all remains to be seen.

What is clear, is that AI-driven voice platforms are rapidly going to become the new battleground for brands and new rules will apply. Brands that invest early on get a chance to take prime position, gain valuable experience and distance them from the crowd that will inevitably rush to voice in the not too distant future.