Rusty Warner

If you’ve seen this post’s titular film, you know it portrays a rag-tag group fighting against a dystopian AI-controlled future. I’m not worried about AI cloning our children or mastering teenage mind control via social media doom scrolling (well, maybe a little!). But I’ve already seen brands use AI to accelerate bad marketing and destroy trust with disconnected promotions.

We’ve all done it: We’ve had to repeatedly prove that we are human to access digital services. I’ve personally failed to click on all the boxes that include AI-generated bicycles or bridges, and I’m sure I’m not alone. It’s especially frustrating when you have to prove your humanity just to have an online conversation with a less-than-helpful AI-enabled chatbot. As brands deploy more AI use cases, they’re taking human-in-the-loop, human-on-the-loop, or even human-out-of-the-loop approaches.

In an ideal world, brands would focus on ensuring their customers realize value. But organizations struggle with cross-functional collaboration, conflicting team metrics, and strategies that prioritize revenue growth over total experience (TX). And that’s only the business side; technology infrastructure can be just as problematic. Although there’s no simple solution, investments in real-time interaction management software (RTIMS) can help operationalize your customer obsession vision.