By Jack Boitani, VP, Content

Dentsu recently published Mothers of Reinvention, the latest report in its Consumer Vision thought leadership series. Fortified by insights from 30,000 global consumers and 20 experts, the report maps out the future of technology, the future of culture, and the future of consumerism and commerce, to ultimately provide a compass to help brands become future ready.

An Informed Perspective on the Future of Technology

In the future of technology section, titled ‘Symbiotic Systems’, a significant step change emerges when it comes to the perspective through which surveyed consumers are looking at the role that they expect AI to play in their lives. In the previous report in the Consumer Vision series, consumers’ expectation of delegating a large number of activities and decisions to AI tools was imagined on the basis of limited experience with emerging generative capabilities. Now, consumers’ expectations on the role AI will play in their future lives are informed, given many have used AI tools or at least have an understanding of how AI tools are transforming the workplace and the media environments they engage with.

Parallel Presence Across Media Spaces

Using this new context as a launchpad, our latest Consumer Vision research shows that the proliferation of personal, individualized, consumer-side agents will create a new paradigm in which humans will co-create reality with technology. Consumers will live across multiple platforms and apps at the same time, thanks to their agents and proxies. This will create an age of Parallel Presence - a new context for brands to adapt to (as they are expected by 77% of global consumers to develop products and services catered to these proxies ), while they will at the same time need to decode the mosaic these signals form to ultimately engage the humans who will sit behind the agents.

The Personalization/Trust Conundrum

Furthermore, consumers told us they expect the outputs generated by AI to be far less generic than they are today, when most Large Language Models (LLMs) are pointed primarily at public databases. Consumers want outputs that are unique to their preferences and experiences and are open to sharing contextual data with their individual agents in exchange for this level of specificity.

This new threshold of shareability will need to come hand-in-hand with a redefinition of both trust and the inflection points where consumers and brands will either exchange it or take it back.

Unlocking Human Potential

7 in 10 global consumers believe AI will help humans unlock their potential, creating a new mindset around how AI will transform our lives by moving away from the notion of human or AI and towards human x AI.

How can technology not simply take over some of our tasks, but rather become a force multiplier that we leverage across everything we do? The findings in Mothers of Reinvention suggest that this will occur through compressing the time it takes for us to learn new skills and by assigning us a new role as a ‘Consumer CEO’ that sits on top of a board of directors (our personal, individualized AI agents) who can focus on decision design, setting overarching budgets and objectives, rather than decision making (having to be actively involved in every interaction).

Considerations for Brands

What are the shifts that brands need to start putting in place to get ready for this new technology context?

• Marketers need to start thinking about communication with different proxies across different ecosystems. Build an infrastructure that allows them to communicate with the proxy but also across proxies.
• To prepare to deliver differentiated and effective messages for the next generation of consumer-side AI agents, marketers need to identify the unique value exchanges their brand can offer to gain the trust required to produce less generic outputs.
• The brands that will stand apart in this new paradigm will be the ones that invest early in platforms that allow them to build messages and content that leverage what consumers think to form something new, instead of just talking at them.

Check out the full Consumer Vision: Mothers of Reinvention report now.