As brands adopt personalized communication, customers’ expectations continue to change dramatically. Consumers used to Netflix-like movie recommendations now expect similar experiences in the finance and healthcare sectors.
Over 70% of today’s customers crave personalized interactions from brands.
McKinsey
In fact, personalization has become a matter of life or death for most businesses:
Get it wrong and nearly 40% of your customers might turn their backs on you.
Deloitte
The irony is that technology, like AI, can help make those interactions feel more personal and more human than ever. It might sound counterintuitive, I know, but that’s what we’ve been observing in implementing AI-powered solutions into our campaigns. What you need is to know when and how to use AI to connect with customers effectively and make those connections matter and stand out in their minds.
Table of ContentsHow Artificial Intelligence Personalizes Communication Segmenting Your Target Audience Connecting with Customers in Real-Time Interacting with Customers on Their Terms Keeping a Finger on the Pulse of Trends True Personalization Is Impossible Without the Human Touch Establish Clear Roles Build Stringent Guidelines Request User Feedback Share Real-World Stories Delivering Personalized Experiences in the Era of AI
How Artificial Intelligence Personalizes Communication
AI empowers companies like Netflix to deliver personalized experiences to 103 million users, each with unique needs and preferences. How do they do that? With AI-driven tools, of course! Marketers can connect with audiences in ways that were once unimaginable. Here are some examples of how AI helps tailor communication at scale:
Segmenting Your Target Audience
AI-powered segmentation lets you target customers with surgical precision. Technology processes data on demographics, pain points, needs, and preferences, helping you better understand your audience.
Depending on your sector, you can create three to nine segments and refresh key messages every five to six months to make a stronger impact. While tailored marketing means greater investment in advanced analytics, it usually pays off with higher engagement, loyalty, and conversion rates.
Connecting with Customers in Real-Time
Sometimes, companies shrink customer segments down to just one person. Marketers analyze behavioral data from different sources to identify messages that will resonate with an individual.
Delivering personalized messages can be especially tricky in highly regulated industries like pharma and life sciences. These companies have a lot of groundwork to cover before achieving hyper-personalization. They will need to break their content into modular pieces, get those pieces approved, and then combine them based on what behaviors they see in real time.
Recently, we launched a rep-triggered email campaign to drive engagement with healthcare providers (HCPs). Clicking the link in the email takes providers to a webpage where the pre-approved content adjusts dynamically to their needs. Based on their activity on the site, the HCP gets a highly personalized follow-up email.
The customer relationship management (CRM) system captures every HCP’s action. This allows medical representatives to better plan and personalize future face-to-face interactions with providers.
Interacting with Customers on Their Terms
Your goal is to make your marketing so seamless that customers do not even realize personalization is taking place. This means giving consumers the content they need at the appropriate time, in the preferred format, and through the right channel. This way, your campaign feels like the support they have always wanted rather than an annoying disruption to their day.
To achieve this, building a comprehensive omnichannel ecosystem with an AI-driven solution at its core is essential. This goes beyond just having a CRM system. You will need a marketing automation platform to support data-driven marketing.
Take Salesforce Marketing Cloud, for example. It offers an AI feature called Einstein Send Time Optimization. Using machine learning algorithms, the solution analyzes engagement data for 90 days to pinpoint the best time to send messages. This increases the chances customers will open your email, read it, and respond.
Keeping a Finger on the Pulse of Trends
Brands use AI not only to personalize messaging and build omnichannel journeys but also to stay ahead of industry trends. Keeping up with sector developments is another form of personalization, as you tailor strategies to the current needs of the majority. While this approach may not be as granular as individual-level personalization, it is still crucial for positioning a brand as forward-thinking, innovative, and competitive.
With AI, you can analyze real-time and historical data to forecast trends. Social listening helps you understand what’s on your customers’ minds and makes it easier to spot the next big thing. It also gives you an edge by tracking your competitors’ moves.
At our company, AI has been pivotal in both identifying and driving trends. For example, with AI-powered analytics, we found that video gets way more engagement than text and images combined. This insight led us to introduce a new feature to our product: AI video avatars. Users just type in their text, and the avatar brings it to life with natural expressions and gestures.
True Personalization Is Impossible Without the Human Touch
Technology enables tailored experiences to a point. Real personalization always needs a human touch. If customers feel they are only dealing with robots or AI-generated content, your business is heading for trouble.
People crave authentic connections with brands – emotional, relatable, and interpersonal. Without that human element, you risk fading into the background, blending in like a grey rock. Here are a few key steps to ensure human input and build a meaningful bond with your audience:
Establish Clear Roles
The first step is to clearly define responsibilities for both AI and your employees. For example, AI is great at analyzing large data sets and automating repetitive tasks, such as data tagging or identifying content errors. On the other hand, your employees should focus on detecting ethical biases, crafting creative content, developing strong strategies, and addressing complaints or feedback.
It is also important to train your team to collaborate with AI, not just work alongside it. They need to combine AI-generated insights with their creativity, empathy, and emotional intelligence—qualities that set humans apart from technology.
Build Stringent Guidelines
Adopting AI for communications comes with the risk of losing brand authenticity. To prevent this, your content must stay true to your corporate values and maintain a consistent identity across all markets and channels.
Strict content guidelines ensure a unified tone, word choice, and brand-focused themes. Even with advanced content review tools that follow your business rules, human oversight remains essential. It ensures the outputs reflect your brand’s unique voice and sets you apart from competitors using similar AI solutions.
Request User Feedback
While marketers must review content before it goes live, seeking input from your audience is equally important. Feedback forms and surveys can help you understand whether your content and interactions meet your audience’s needs and expectations.
If you are in the B2C space, using social listening tools is a smart move to uncover your customers’ true sentiments. What do they vent about to their friends? Are they enthusiastic enough to share your products in their stories? Have they had a negative experience compelling enough to write a new post?
Share Real-World Stories
How do we connect with others? Often, it is through shared experiences and showing our vulnerable, human side.
No matter your industry, incorporating real-life stories into AI-generated content helps build emotional connections with your audience. When your brand speaks with a human voice, it becomes more relatable, especially if customers see their own struggles or aspirations reflected in your story.
Take pharma companies, for example. While they use AI to produce content at scale, they also share real patient stories to connect on a deeper level. When patients read about others overcoming serious health challenges, it empowers them and gives them hope to keep fighting.
These authentic stories encourage feedback and inspire others to share their own experiences. This kind of two-way communication creates meaningful bonds and builds loyalty.
Delivering Personalized Experiences in the Era of AI
Can AI personalize communications at scale? The short answer is yes. It can segment your audience, recommend the next best action, and craft smooth omnichannel experiences.
But AI alone cannot make communication feel truly personal. To get it right, you will need human oversight for certain tasks, customer feedback, and real-life stories. This is the formula for combining AI scalability with the creativity and authenticity that only humans bring to communication.
©2025 DK New Media, LLC, All rights reserved | DisclosureOriginally Published on Martech Zone: Can AI Truly Enhance Personalized Communication at Scale?