By Angus Marshall, Digital Producer, Imagination
Brands have spent years refining their voice. They’ve developed identities and carefully crafted every customer touchpoint to communicate who they are. Yet until recently, translating that precise brand voice into automated, real-time conversations was nearly impossible.
That’s beginning to change.
The key shift we’re seeing is the proliferation of AI across all sectors.
Discourse around AI has focused largely on efficiency and productivity gains. But conversational AI has opened the door to something completely different. Advances in Large Language Models (LLMs), voice technology and digital characters mean AI is moving beyond simple chatbots and scripted customer service interactions. Brands can begin creating experiences that respond naturally and communicate with genuine personality.
Instead of simply delivering information, brands can begin to build relationships through dialogue. As conversational AI closes this ‘intimacy gap’ between digital interactions and human conversation, it creates opportunities for richer customer experiences.
Just as brands have spent years investing in visual identity and tone of voice, conversational AI is creating another way for organisations to express who they are. The way an AI responds and even asks questions can become a recognisable extension of the brand itself.
The conversation advantage
People build trust through conversation. It’s how relationships are formed and personalities come across. With conversational AI becoming more sophisticated, brands have the opportunity to bring those same qualities into digital experiences.
Instead of treating AI as another customer service tool, businesses should begin thinking of it as an expression of their brand identity. The way AI speaks and the language it uses both contribute to how a brand is perceived.
This becomes even more powerful as conversational AI evolves beyond text. Expressive models are already capable of delivering responses with natural tone and emotion, opening the door to interactions that feel increasingly genuine. This technology can function as a unique layer for customer engagement, bridging the emotional gap between text and voice.
Many brands are already leading the charge with this technology. Spotify’s AI DJ creates a personal way to discover music by combining recommendations with conversational commentary, while Duolingo’s AI-powered video calls allow users to practise languages through realistic dialogue rather than static exercises. These features are early examples of conversation becoming part of the experience itself. Those working in live experience design can draw on these examples, looking at ways they can incorporate conversational AI in the physical world, allowing audiences to interact directly with brands.
The cost of waiting
Despite rapid progress, many organisations are still approaching conversational AI with caution. Healthy scepticism is important, but failing to explore innovations like conversational AI could prove to be the bigger mistake long-term.
Brands that gain the greatest advantage won’t necessarily be those that launch first. They’ll be the ones that spend the next few years learning where conversational AI improves customer experiences and how it should represent their brand.
Conversational AI prototypes can help brands explore different voices, personalities and interfaces before committing to full-scale deployment.
The experience sector should be no exception. Brands should begin exploring how they can incorporate this technology into their designs and experimenting how audiences interact with them – whether that’s conversational avatars or digital guides that can welcome, inform or teach. These experiments are about building practical knowledge while the technology is still evolving.
Every major technology shift follows a similar pattern. The organisations that reap the biggest rewards are the ones that start learning early enough to recognise meaningful opportunities before everyone else.
Experiment with purpose, not without guardrails
Of course, experimentation doesn’t remove the need for guardrails. Conversational AI introduces risks, from hallucinated responses to behaviour that falls outside a brand’s values. A well-publicised example saw a car dealership chatbot persuaded into selling a car for just one dollar after a customer discovered a loophole.
Examples like this demonstrate why thoughtful design and extensive testing are essential from the outset.
Strong prompt engineering, clearly defined behavioural boundaries and detailed brand guidance all play a critical role in shaping how conversational AI behaves. Just as importantly, brands should define what AI shouldn’t discuss and when it should defer to a fallback response when it doesn’t know the answer.
Conversational AI will continue to improve. Voice models will become more expressive and interactions more intuitive. Brands can’t control that pace of change, but they can decide whether to start learning now or wait until competitors have already developed the knowledge and confidence that comes through experimentation.
The question is whether brands have spent enough time experimenting with conversational AI to understand how to use it well. The smartest organisations are already finding this out.
