In this exclusive opinion piece, Davy Rennie, CEO of Digitas Australia, argues that AI’s biggest opportunity isn’t simply driving efficiency, but helping brands get closer to their customers. He explores why the businesses that turn AI-powered intelligence into deeper customer understanding will be the ones that gain a competitive edge.
The most interesting thing about artificial intelligence right now isn’t the technology itself.
It’s what the technology is revealing.
The conversations to date, are all too often centered on just efficiency. How much faster can teams work? How can operational costs be reduced? How can content be produced at scale? How can processes be automated? They’re all valid questions, and organisations would be negligent not to explore them.
But increasingly, we need to pose a different question altogether.
For most of the digital era, growth was built around access. Access to media, to technology, to data, to distribution. The organisations with the greatest access generally held the advantage.
Today, those advantages are becoming increasingly democratised. Advanced analytics, automation, personalisation and AI capabilities are becoming available to businesses of all sizes. The barriers that once protected incumbents are steadily lowering. That’s sensational news for innovation.
But once every organisation has access, what actually creates advantage?
Because that’s where every major technology shift eventually leads. What begins as a capability advantage becomes widely accessible. What initially differentiates, eventually becomes expected. The conversation moves away from who has the technology and towards who is using it better.
We’re already starting to see this happen with AI, and it’s changing the nature of competition.
When everyone has access to similar capabilities, competitive advantage shifts to how effectively those capabilities are applied. The businesses creating the greatest value aren’t necessarily the ones making the biggest noises or deploying the most tools. More often, they’re the organisations using AI to become smarter about their customers. They’re identifying needs earlier, recognising opportunities faster, and making better decisions because they have a clearer understanding of the people they serve.
In many ways, AI is forcing us to revisit one of the oldest questions in business.
How well do we really know our customers?
In a world increasingly shaped by AI, customer proximity is becoming more valuable than ever.
Not proximity in a geographical sense.
Proximity in understanding.
The ability to recognise changing behaviours, evolving expectations and emerging needs before they become obvious to the rest of the market.
The ability to stay close enough to customers that you can respond to what matters, often before customers themselves articulate it.
One of the great paradoxes of modern business is that organisations have never possessed more customer data, yet customers regularly tell us they feel misunderstood.
Every interaction creates a signal. A website visit. A purchase. An app login. A service request. A loyalty transaction. A search query. An abandoned basket.
Across most organisations, there is no shortage of information.
The challenge is making sense of it.
Customer data and customer understanding are not the same thing. One is an asset. The other is an advantage.
Customer understanding means better decisions, building more relevant products, creating more useful experiences, allocating investment more effectively.
Understanding becomes a compound advantage.
Historically, there has always been a trade-off between scale and intimacy. Businesses could understand a small number of customers exceptionally well, or understand a large number of customers at a much broader level. Doing both simultaneously was difficult.
AI is changing that equation.
For the first time, organisations can analyse millions of interactions, identify patterns that would otherwise remain invisible, and generate insights at a speed that simply wasn’t possible before. It allows businesses to see connections across behaviours, channels and experiences that previously existed in isolation.
The technology itself is impressive.
But the value lies in what it enables – a shorter distance between a business and the people who determine its success.
This is what helps technology translate into measurable business outcomes. What outcomes are Executives searching for?
Growth. Customer value. Market share. Loyalty. Relevance.
Technology matters because of its ability to create proximity and influence those outcomes, not because of the technology itself.
At Digitas and Publicis Groupe, we’ve become increasingly focused on another component of that equation: Connected Identity.
As customer journeys become more fragmented, organisations are often trying to understand people through disconnected signals. A customer might interact with a brand through a website, an app, a retail
store, a loyalty program, social content, customer service and commerce channels, all before making an important decision.
The customer experiences a single relationship. The organisation often sees multiple disconnected interactions.
Connected Identity is designed to connect customer signals into a more unified, actionable understanding of audiences, helping organisations create a more complete view of the people they are trying to serve.
The next decade won’t be defined by which organisations adopted AI first.
The winners won’t simply automate more tasks or generate more content.
They’ll create stronger relationships. They’ll respond to customer needs with greater precision. They’ll turn intelligence into action and action into value.
In many respects, AI is lowering the cost of intelligence.
The real opportunity is increasing the value of understanding.
