Customer Experience Strategy in the AI age
How brands can use technology without losing emotion, trust or distinctiveness
Successful brands are using technology selectively to protect and enhance what really matters to their customers
BY: DR Fiona Maciver | Brand & Experience Strategy AdvisorPUBLISHED: 08 June 2026
AI is making brands faster and more efficient. But is that enough to make customers care?
The AI whirlwind is making businesses faster, more responsive, targeted and efficient. It personalises recommendations, predicts demand, automates services, analyses behaviour and removes friction from the buying journey. All are game-changing advantages that most businesses are now exploring.
But when it comes to customer connection, there’s a catch: A brand can become more efficient but less memorable at the same time.
Emotional resonance is what makes customers choose, trust, return to and recommend one brand over another. Just because a customer journey is optimised, that doesn’t necessarily make it meaningful to the people it serves.
Brands that deploy AI indiscriminately risk creating an experience that functions well, but feels bland and forgettable. Businesses need to be selective and strategic about when and how to use AI tools, and not adopt them just because they exist.
This article looks at a range of businesses using AI intelligently to enhance their customer experiences. Their approaches are noteworthy because they're not just looking to automate processes. Rather, they’re asking how tech can enhance how the brand behaves and interacts with its customer. They're using AI to be more like themselves, and in the process build even stronger bonds with the audience.
“A brand can become more efficient and less memorable at exactly the same time.”
The sameness problem
Before we look at successful adoption, I want to examine the pitfalls of poorly judged tech use in the customer experience. As AI tech become widely accessible and adopted, it's creating a gravitational pull towards the middle ground. For a direct-to-consumer brand, it manifests as this: Identikit brand tones-of-voice, the same chatbot dialogues, indistinguishable product descriptions, and the same ‘personalised’ messages that feel as if they could have come from any brand in the category.
This makes for emotionally thin experiences.
What is an emotionally thin customer experience?
Emotionally thin customer experiences operate in a forgettable, middle-of-the-road space. They don’t draw people towards brands, but nor do they repel them. They’re functional and technically competent, but they don’t deepen relationships, create lingering memories, or give the customer any reason to choose the brand over the next best option.
For brands built on meaning, not just utility - and that’s most brands - this is seriously risky.
Customers don’t choose premium brands (e.g. Burberry), loved brands (e.g. Liberty), or cult brands (e.g. Supreme) purely out of convenience. They choose them because of the emotions those brands stir. They signal something deeper - like a feeling of confidence, ease, pleasure, identity, taste, belonging or reassurance - that the customer wants more of.
But try to automate that feeling and a sleek new optimised experience isn’t actually an improvement on what’s gone before. It becomes hollow and meaningless.
“People choose brands because of the emotions they stir. They signal something deeper - like confidence, ease, pleasure, identity, taste, belonging or reassurance - that the customer wants more of”
The principle in action: Four brands using AI tech well
This principle is evident all around, in good ways and bad.
For this article, I’ve picked four examples of brands using AI successfully to enhance the connection with the customer. These businesses are all using AI in different ways, but in each case, it’s designed to fit with the brand ethos.
The examples I've chosen show that there’s no one correct way to use AI in customer experience. Its success depends on the context in which it impacts the customer, and whether it supports the emotional promise of the brand. The key consideration is whether technology strengthens or weakens why customers come to the brand in the first place.
McDonald’s
McDonald’s has been investing heavily in AI and digital tech across its global restaurant system, from predictive stock maintenance and operational analytics to tools that can improve order accuracy, stock management and service speed. Much of this work is designed to solve problems customers feel immediately, such as long queues, missing items, or broken machinery.
In this context, AI succeeds because it works in the background to remove the irritations that leave people in a bad mood. It meaningfully improves the customer experience.
However, this has taken much trial and error. McDonald’s previously trialled IBM AI voice ordering at drive-throughs, before ending the programme in 2024 after a series of widely-reported ordering mistakes (bacon ice-cream, anyone?). The "takeaway" here isn't that AI has no role in the drive-through experience: the company is continuing to test customer-facing voice automation. The lesson is that some customer-brand moments carry immense emotional weight, and must always score highly. The drive-through experience is one of those.
The drive-through is one of the primary human interactions in the McDonald’s experience. When that moment breaks, it disrupts the sense of familiarity, ease and accessibility that customers expect from the brand, as well as causing inconvenience.
Using AI intelligently means to understand where automation supports the customer-brand promise, and where it risks damaging it. It doesn't mean automating every possible interaction.
TAKEAWAY: Use AI to remove customer frustration without damaging important brand momentsSephora
Sephora’s core promise has always been built around beauty discovery and expert guidance. Customers go to Sephora because they feel reassured that someone who understands beauty can help them find and choose the right product.
That makes its use of AI strategically interesting. Sephora has invested heavily in digital tools, loyalty data and personalised recommendations, and earlier in 2026 started to pilot a ChatGPT integration that allows customers to receive product guidance informed by their individual 'Beauty Insider' profile.
For example, a customer asking for help finding a foundation for oily skin doesn't just receive a generic recommendation. The bot experience will draw on preferences, purchase history and beauty profile data to offer specific and tailored product advice.
This is a particularly effective use case because it attempts to scale the core brand promise, rather than replacing it.
Sephora is using AI to become an enhanced version of itself: Helpful, expert, choice-rich and discovery-led. The digital experience attempts to replicate the emotional familiarity of the store experience: The feeling of being guided through a complex product array by someone who has listened and understands what you are trying to achieve.
The technology is fully serving the emotional promise of the brand.
Takeaway: Use AI to scale guidance, not replace tailored expertiseGreggs
Greggs is an interesting case because its unglamorous tech approach reflects the brand ethic.
The business has invested in digital infrastructure, customer data management, loyalty- and app-based ordering, and operational systems that help support a more complex, omni-channel business. Behind the scenes, better data and digital capability help with availability, convenience and consistency.
But notice that the technology largely operates behind the scenes, preserving the simplicity of the front-of-house customer experience.
Greggs has been astute not to let technology interfere with the thing customers actually value. The brand is value-driven, fast-moving and unpretentious. Any attempt to make the experience feel sophisticated or premium would risk weakening the characteristics that make the brand so well loved in the UK.
It's a very useful takeaway. The tech should merge into the background to support the customer experience. In many cases, the best customer experience strategy is to use digital tools to make the operation work better, while protecting the personality and tone customers already trust. AI doesn't need to shout, even if it is advanced.
At Greggs, technology helps the queues move quickly, the app work smoothly and customers get what they want. In that sense, it protects the brand’s equity. By being background, it enhances a personality that is rooted in being friendly, self-aware and part of everyday life.
TAKEAWAY: Let tech support the operation without diluting the brand personalityUniqlo
Uniqlo offers a different lesson again. The brand has long positioned itself around simplicity, practicality, quality and everyday functionality. Its technology supports that same ethos: It helps customers find the right product, check availability, choose a size, complete a purchase, or move more easily through the store.
Tools such as Uniqlo IQ, its virtual shopping assistant, are designed to help customers search, select and navigate rather than push them towards a sale. In-store tech such as RFID-enabled checkouts have also helped make the buying process faster and smoother.
Like Greggs, Uniqlo doesn’t try to impress its audience with AI. Rather, it's used intelligently to make its experience clearer, easier and more useful. That is what customers expect from the brand.
The emotional value is an unfussy competence - a reflection of its products. Customers receive a stress-free, effortless experience. That too is customer connection.
TAKEAWAY: Use AI to make the brand experience clearer, useful and more functionalThe takeaway: Use AI only where it serves the emotional promise
One principle emerges clearly across all these examples: AI is successful when it serves the brand’s emotional promise. Intelligent AI should always support the promise, rather than changing it.
McDonald’s uses AI most effectively when it reduces operational frustration while protecting accessibility. Sephora uses AI to scale the guidance and expertise customers already associate with the brand. Greggs uses digital capability to support convenience while preserving friendliness. Uniqlo uses technology to make the experience feel simpler, clearer and more useful.
Each brand has a different emotional promise with its customers. Tech should be adapted around that promise.
To achieve that, leaders must first understand precisely what their customers value, before examining how technology can deliver it.
Three questions every brand leader should ask before automating parts of the customer experience
01 : What moments carry the emotional weight of your customer experience?
Some touchpoints are more high value than others (e.g. the McDonald's drive-through).
Moments like a complaint, a high-value purchase, a first interaction, a need for reassurance or recommendation, a delay, or a mistake carries far more emotional consequence than a routine transaction.
These are the make-or-break moments for brand-customer connection. They might be expensive to staff well, but they can add disproportionate value and should be protected.
What this reveals: Where automation may improve efficiency, and where human judgement is needed to protect trust
02 : Is your personalisation strategy actually personal?
There is a difference between recognising a customer and understanding them. Sending 'generically personalised' communications (like a name in a subject line, a product recommendation based on a previous click, or a generic abandoned-basket email) may technically be personalised. But they don't really make the individual feel special, and in some cases even annoy and dilute the brand promise.
Real personalisation should make the experience feel more considerate, or more relevant to the customer’s life. It's challenging to do, but that's what can build a long-lasting bond with a customer.
What this reveals: Whether your customer data is creating genuine connection, or simply producing more automated marketing
03 : What are the golden moments your brand would lose if it were fully automated?
This is a very revealing question. If every interaction, recommendation, response and service moment was automated, what would be removed from the connection?
For instance, would the brand lose its warmth / confidence / expertise / humour / atmosphere / taste / reassurance / care? The answer to this question will point to the areas of the brand experience that carry the most important and distinctive value.
What this reveals: What must absolutely be protected as the brand scales
Efficiency is the baseline, but advantage comes only from customer meaning
Efficiency is the baseline of good customer experience, and AI can help brands enhance that. However, instilling deeper meaning - a connection with people - is the factor that marks out distinctive, emotionally strong experiences.
The brands that build a deep, authentic connection with customers in the AI-first age are those who are clear about who they are, what their customers value, and what moments in the experience carry most emotional weight.
There are countless ways that AI is bringing competitive advantage - moving faster, seeing patterns, reducing effort and scaling service. But when implemented poorly, it can dilute the brand experience so much that it becomes indistinguishable from anyone else.
AI should always be used to support the deeper brand meaning. It alone can’t pinpoint what really matters to people. That still requires customer insight, sound judgement, and astute experience design.
In these times, efficiency is the baseline. But the advantage comes only from creating meaningful connection.
ABOUT Dr Fiona MaciverI’m a Brand & Experience Strategist, PhD in Design Strategy, and former UX Research Lead at Meta. I bring together experience from design and marketing, research and innovation, alongside practical techniques I teach at Central Saint Martins, London.
I help businesses develop original thinking and more distinctive brands.
Get in touchShape a brand people remember
If your business wants to get and stay ahead, work with me to notice what your competitors have missed, and turn that into your distinctive point of view.