Research Report: Technology Vision 2025

As businesses integrate gen AI into customer interactions, a key question emerges: What is your AI’s personality? Where generic agents could lead to a bland experience, diluting brand identity, personified AI offers a solution, breathing personality into agents and unlocking customer relationships like we’ve never seen before.

The challenge is making digital representatives stand out as the customer experience becomes more autonomous. By increasingly using third-party chat platforms and agents, often designed to be generic-sounding, businesses risk losing the uniqueness of their brand voice. But this is not a call to turn away from autonomy or AI in customer experience. It’s a call to use personified AI to marry AI’s scale and efficiency with the humanising power of a company’s brand and values.

Envision a future where every customer interaction is guided by a familiar face—a personified chatbot that embodies a beloved mascot or an influencer’s persona. This agent operates on the company’s channels or can join conversations on other AI platforms. Over time, it gets to know customers individually, building trust by taking relevant actions and leveraging digital tools to meet their needs exactly on their terms. A chatbot like this isn’t just personalising interactions at the surface level—it’s building trusted relationships, autonomously, and managing thousands of these conversations at once.

But while the building blocks of this vision—AI agents, frameworks to give agents relevant data access and the growing field of personified AI—exists, enterprises still need to connect the dots with intention. It is time to bring gen AI to customer-facing roles with purpose. Done poorly, businesses could see the magic of their brands eclipsed. Done right, it’s the beginning of a new era in customer relationships and trust.

Companies that successfully introduce AI with personalities are looking at a technology that can build relationships with customers and meet their needs at an unprecedented scale. They’re taking personified brand, and personified AI, and they’re inventing the personified business.

How do you preserve trust?

To preserve trust, it is essential to keep your chatbots aligned with your brand by meticulously reviewing and continuously monitoring their training data, working with AI experts to set clear rules and boundaries that limit their knowledge and vocabulary. Additionally, demonstrate restraint in data collection by respecting user privacy, preparing for regulatory challenges and providing transparent, customisable privacy settings. This approach ensures that your AI interactions are beneficial, respectful and aligned with your brand, ultimately building a trustworthy, personified brand that users can rely on.

Next steps

If you’re an early adopter?

• Infuse personality into your generative AI efforts
• Ensure guardrails around your autonomous systems

If you’re just preparing to start?

• Develop a personification rollout strategy for high-impact customer experiences
• Build relationships in the growing personified AI ecosystem

If you want to take a slower approach?

• Audit chatbots across your organisation
• Start the conversation between your technologists and brand

03. When LLMs Get Their Bodies: How foundation models reinvent robotics

Robots with embedded LLMs have generalist versatility, enabling them to take on new tasks in human spaces beyond today’s highly progammed use cases.

A watershed moment is underway in robotics as foundation models transform robots from linearly programmed and single-purpose to versatile machines that can reason. LLMs, VLMs and Robotics Foundation Models are giving robots ever greater autonomy in the physical world—allowing them to better understand physics and their environment, have spatial awareness, interact with people, and understand complex instructions and take safe and accurate actions in response. This transition will require the creation of a full built-for-purpose stack but will grow the use cases and operability of robotics while simultaneously making them more flexible, re-purposable and enduring.