Professional service firms must add brand and marketing people to the teams developing their AI technology strategy.

Busy bees

Can you hear it? The cogs whirring and the synapsis firing? At this moment, somewhere in every professional services firm in the world, a bunch of super-smart people are busy developing their firm’s technology strategy—AI technology in particular.

It’s a tough gig, and honestly, it’s not a technology I can claim to know anything about.

However, I do know a bit about something that almost none of these teams of smart people are thinking very much about, if at all: ‘how their AI strategy is going to impact and reinforce their firm’s brand experience.’

The Starbucks/Deliveroo comparison is this. Almost every store transitioning from take-away to mobile ordering and home delivery opted for the Deliveroo model. It works, it’s easy, it’s convenient. But, it also totally commoditises the customer brand experience.

In many ways, from the customer’s point of view, the restaurant’s brand experience is the Deliveroo brand experience––from ordering and paying through to delivery and any troubleshooting. And the restaurant’s contribution? They make some food in the kitchen.

“When you’re controlling a premium, differentiated brand and product, there has to be some form of governor on introducing disruptive innovation.”

Grande ambition

Starbucks, on the other hand, created their own app. According to Howard Shultz, it’s the most transformational innovation the business has ever adopted. He claims that the app has not only helped maintain customisation –– one of Starbucks’s core brand attributes –– it’s increased it.

According to Shultz, “When you’re controlling a premium, differentiated brand and product, there has to be some form of governor on introducing disruptive innovation and technology to monitor how it’s being used and abused”.

By the way, Shultz doesn’t think that Starbucks got everything right with their app –– far from it; he also calls it the brand’s Achilles Heel because it created expectations that the stores weren’t geared up to deliver properly. But, even for a guy who admits to being a technology sceptic, he believes the app has been positively transformative and mainly brand-positive.

“Professional service firms must be wary of hurtling down the AI road without giving more thought to the firm’s brand experience.”

Cookie cutter

OK, there are obvious reasons why a 3-store pizza business in Woking wouldn’t want to try to create its own customer app. But, the analogy helps frame why professional service firms must be wary of hurtling down the AI road without giving more thought to the firm’s brand experience.

You can imagine a scenario in 5 years’ time where some premium professional service firms have unconsciously but effectively outsourced a big chunk of their brand experience to Microsoft/Open AI.

And shortly afterwards, their clients discover that the mid-range firm they also work with (aka the much cheaper firm) uses exactly the same Microsoft technology, only is charging them much less for the privilege. This is the commoditisation of a previously premium brand experience that clients were willing to pay a premium for.

“Firms…need to add brand and marketing people, today, to the teams that are developing their AI technology strategy.”

EQ + IQ in equal measures

I’m not in any way advocating a let-up in the pace to embrace AI. Any more than it would have made sense for Starbucks to say, “the Starbucks brand is all about human interactions, so our customers can just stand in line like they always have”.

What I am saying is that professional service firms of all shapes and sizes –– the most premium, most of all –– need to add brand and marketing people, today, to the teams that are developing their AI technology strategy and not leave it up to the CTO’s team entirely.

Building differentiation into a professional service firm’s client experience and value proposition – online or offline – isn’t easy. But if you’re “controlling a premium, differentiated brand,” you must work out how.

By the time the new AI tech is ready to go and it’s handed over to the CMO to launch to the firm’s clients, it will be far too late in the day for the CMO to put a spoke in the wheels about the danger of commoditisation of the brand experience.