As AI forges through all sections of society, David Edelman questions whether some people will benefit or be left behind.
Can AI really ignore this section of our community?
This article is from my newsletter series called “Personalized! Prompts from the Frontlines.” You can sign up for my newsletters here: https://dedelman.substack.com/
Over the holiday weekend, I had the pleasure of spending time with my 86-year old mother-in-law, a remarkable woman who is still as sharp as ever.
But seeing her struggle with various online actions that she needed to complete, simply to function in today’s society, really worried me.
She’s very smart, but so much she had to do was far from intuitive.
And that has ramifications for all of the dreams we have as marketers to distinguish our branded experiences through personalization.
Similar to the discussions about bias in AI models which have not had experience with certain populations, those who are designing customer experiences in most companies have significant biases and blinders.
They are probably not thinking about seniors, despite one out of six people in the US being over 65 years old, a figure that is increasing.
They are probably also not naturally thinking about many populations, since most applications and systems designers are so deep in their tech, and all the business people around them so familiar with the digital tools they use everyday, that they don’t think about situations such as an older iPad’s memory is now full, a child of someone who recently passed away has no means of getting through all of the security hurdles to a parent’s accounts, or someone has no idea that the “hamburger” icon opens up a menu. And on and on.
Personalization is about creating value for a customer based on understanding their context. But context is much more than what they last bought and which emails they respond to. It means thinking about how you are designing experiences in the first place.
AI is not going to provide the answers, or at least it won’t if you are not asking it the right questions.
We still need real research: Ethnographics to get a much deeper understanding of the compromises different people face and the needs they have.
And especially what goes wrong.
Key points include:
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Ethnographic research
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Personalization issues
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An aging population
Read the full article, AI For All Ages?, on LinkedIn.