In this exclusive op-ed, Klaviyo’s director of customer success, Nicole Birbas, argues that AI’s honeymoon phase with consumers is over. As Australians become more selective about where they spend their money, they’re also becoming far more discerning about the content brands put in front of them. Generic, mass-produced AI messaging may be efficient, but it’s increasingly easy to spot – and even easier to ignore. Drawing on changing consumer behaviour and emerging trust gaps, Birbas explores why brands can no longer rely on automation alone, and why the marketers who succeed next will be the ones who use AI to create more meaningful, relevant and human experiences that genuinely earn attention.
The honeymoon phase with AI is officially over for Australian shoppers, and they’re not being subtle about it.
We’ve spent the last few years marvelling at what these tools can do – and fair enough. The speed, the scale, the sheer novelty of it.
But 2026 has brought us somewhere different. Australians have become experts at spotting when something just feels… off. Not wrong, exactly. Just hollow – like a message that was written for no one in particular, delivered to everyone at once. We’re calling it the slop detector.
Here’s the uncomfortable truth about where a lot of AI-generated content has landed – it’s rarely wrong, and it’s almost never interesting.
It ticks the box, and it sounds professional. It answers the question while somehow missing the point entirely.
You know the feeling – the customer service chat that’s technically helpful but weirdly flat. The email that uses your name in the subject line but treats you like a demographic in the body. The reply that’s polished but could have been sent to literally anyone.
This is the byproduct of deploying AI for efficiency and stopping there. The output is competent, but the connection is absent.
And Australians, it turns out, have a remarkably low tolerance for it – even as they’ve become among the world’s most frequent AI users.
The frequency hasn’t bred acceptance. If anything, it’s bred a sharper eye.
According to Klaviyo, 40 per cent of Aussies say they regularly spot low-quality AI content in their feeds, and just as many say it actively reduces their trust in the brand behind it. The Macquarie Dictionary even named “slop” its 2025 word of the year.
Coincidence? I think not.
What’s changed isn’t just consumer sentiment; it’s shopping behaviour.
We’re seeing Australians take longer to decide, view more products, and show much stronger intent before they commit. Impulse is declining and consideration is increasing. People are buying less, but spending more carefully when they do.
In that environment, speed and automation alone don’t win. What wins is relevance – the kind that makes someone feel like you actually know them, rather than know their postcode.
The brands figuring this out are leaning into channels that feel personal by nature. Text messaging is the clearest example: a channel that, done badly, feels like spam – while, if done well, feels like a message from someone who pays attention.
There’s a version of this that’s easy to ignore. The metrics look fine. Open rates are holding. Revenue is ticking along. But consumer trust erodes quietly before it collapses loudly, and by the time the numbers show it, the damage is already done.
More practically – if you’re flooding your channels with generic AI output now, you’re training future customers, and future AI models, to expect nothing better from you. You’re building a brand that’s easy to ignore.
This isn’t about avoiding AI entirely. It’s about using it in a way that helps brands cut through, instead of adding to the noise.
So, the question many marketers have been asking – “how do we automate this?” – should now be replaced with something far more important – “how do we show up in a way that actually earns people’s attention?”
CREDITS
Brand: Suntory BOSS Coffee
Creative Agency: It’s Friday
Producer: Darren Bailey – Generator United
Production Company: Mr +Positive
Director: Connor Gilhooly
Executive Producer: Peter Grasse
Producer: Susannah Myerson
Post Production: Eden Studios
Photographer: Adam Eden
Retoucher: Mark Sterne
Sound and Music: Studio Tonic
