Accenture Song: How AI is Changing Brand Discovery

The way customers discover and evaluate brands is not what it once was. 

According to research from Capgemini, 58% of consumers have replaced traditional search engines with AI tools for product and service recommendations. This, the research suggests, may be down to the level of personalisation these tools can offer – with nearly two thirds of millennials and Gen Z reporting that they want content and product recommendations that are tailored to them. 

But as customers discover products and services in new ways, brands are having to reimagine how they access and understand customer insights. 

“The definition of listening has definitely changed,” says Chris Mellish, Managing Director of Accenture Song UK and Ireland . “Today, it’s loosely defined by an amalgamation of behaviour insights, online discussions and AI-generated narratives.”

Historically, he says, businesses would rely on more direct customer feedback – such as quarterly surveys and, occasionally, focus groups. But as customers discover brands through avenues such as AI search, this approach can be extremely limiting. 

“Take LLMs for example,” Chris says. “Customers are forming opinions through models like ChatGPT and Claude. Whilst brands can’t directly listen to customers via LLMs, they can look into the types of questions customers are asking and see where the gaps are for their business.

“With this approach, brands can expand their listening from self-reported opinions to observing their customers' behavioural insights.”

Chris suggests that marketers should be looking at how customers are interacting with a brand’s social media or navigating its website, and identifying the behavioural data they can use to analyse and engage with customers more proactively. 

“Brands should be moving at the same pace as their customers and developing targeted programmes that evaluate every interaction,” he advises.

Proactive listening

Brands looking to capture customer insights need to get more proactive, says Chris – especially when customers are actively looking for new products, with buyers increasingly relying on AI in the decision making process.

In fact, a survey from Accenture released in June has found that nearly three out of four consumers (74%) would trust a personal AI agent more than their best friend to make a purchase on their behalf. 

The survey – which spans 25,590 people across 16 counties – also found that nearly a third of people would let an agent decide what to buy, provided they could make the payment themselves, and 9% are open to an AI agent making fully autonomous purchases. 

“The evaluation phase is where customers are most vocal - they just aren't talking to you,” Chris says. “They're searching, comparing, asking questions in forums and LLMs, hesitating on pricing pages.”

But, by using AI to understand customer insights, brands can listen to that data in real time, “rather than waiting for a post-purchase survey to tell us what we already missed,” Chris says. 

These insights, Chris explains, go beyond straightforward customer signals. 

“It’s not just about understanding customers, but understanding how brands are being searched, selected and purchased by AI agents on their behalf,” Chris says. “That means optimising not only for human consideration, but for how your brand shows up, is interpreted and is chosen within these emerging decision ecosystems.

“We now need to apply human understanding to this frontier, bringing the same depth of behavioural insight to how these systems decide. It’s a rapidly evolving space, but one where we already have the tools and human expertise to help our clients navigate and shape what comes next.”

According to Chris, using AI tools can also help marketing leaders get more insights out of unstructured data. 

“Unstructured data is a bottomless pit of rich, contextual information,” he says. “That’s why any modern CMO should be investing in generative AI to bring that unstructured data to life and transform it into valuable business insights.”

While searching for insights through messy data across social media platforms can be a “laborious task,” for marketing leaders, AI is “hungry,” for that data, Chris says – with the technology able to conduct tasks like summarising the sentiment of a comment section and giving suggestions for future marketing content. 

“Additionally, when combined with structured data, generative AI adds the context needed to enable more human-like communication,” he explains, with the data containing signals for the tone, personality, look and feel that can drive richer interactions for brands.

Creative thinking in an AI era

Despite the impact AI can have on improving customer listening strategies, Chris stresses that the human element is still crucial within marketing strategies. 

“We believe AI is a creative amplifier, rather than a human replacement tool” he says. “While some fear AI will replace human creativity altogether, it should be viewed as an opportunity to elevate the industry by focusing on what humans do best.”

While AI is “exceptional at pattern recognition,” across millions of data points to find key signals, “understanding what that signal means for a real person, and how a brand should respond to it, is still human work,” explains Chris. 

“The brands we see building genuine long-term loyalty and emotional engagement are the ones using AI to get closer to their customers, not to replace the thinking that comes after,” he says. “Technology may move fast – but as I’ve said before, loyalty is still brilliantly human. We’re embracing innovation, but not at the expense of humanity.” 

Instead of overly relying on AI, Chris recommends that marketing leaders view the technology as a tool to elevate the marketing industry by “focusing on what humans do best”. 

“Marketing has historically been guilty of speaking too much in its own language,” he says. “Advertisers rightly have confidence in the fact that creativity can make a huge impact on commercial results but, ironically, we've not always tailored our message perfectly.”

But the creative industries are changing. 

“We're no longer in the era where you produce a great 30-second ad and that's the bulk of a brand's marketing,” explains Chris. “We see creative thinking combined with everything else that now sits across the customer journey: data, technology, content, CRM. 

“The brands getting the most out of their marketing are stitching those pieces together, rather than treating creative as a discipline that sits apart from the rest.

“AI will make this even more important. It has the potential to enable businesses to scale connection with their customers, but poor application risks eroding the trust that earned that connection in the first place – so  marketing will have an even bigger role in the future.”