The AI paradox of invisible branding

Artificial intelligence (AI, artificial intelligence) is the most present innovation of our time that you (almost) never notice. It is the silent force behind translations, customer support, media manipulation, search results, social media, medical diagnoses, logistics and advertising, among other things. There is probably no aspect of life, business or personal, that AI does not influence. However, you and I have very little insight into how and when AI is used. We have no direction to determine for ourselves whether it is useful to us.

WHY AI BRANDING IS NECESSARY

One might wonder if AI needs branding at all. If AI is specifically designed to do all the smart work somewhere in the background, why does it need to give up its anonymity? Because branding has always played an important role in making impersonal processes, technologies and organizations recognizable and relevant. Especially when there are few differences, think Pepsi and Coca-Cola.

Every successful brand puts itself in the market recognizable through clear visual characteristics (logo, font, use of color) as well as by creating a distinctive experience, making the products and services "tangible. The packaging of your new iPhone, the sound of slamming a car door, the color of a pill, the login screen of Spotify, the texture of Magnum ice cream (cracks so nicely) or even the smell of your new shoes. These are all examples of elements that matter for brand perception. Examples that, lifestyle aside, make the invisible "tangible.

INVISIBLE BY DESIGN

The main obstacle that AI must overcome from a branding perspective is the fact that it is designed to remain invisible. AI is fundamentally deployed to help the user in the background and, unlike other branding elements, is really only successful when it is completely invisible.

Compare the role AI plays today with, say, the role of the sommelier in a restaurant. The sommelier's job is to engage in conversation, inspire guests and teach them something new. The guest's experience with the sommelier and his unique human intelligence is actually what artificial intelligence is precisely not. The sommelier is visible, proclaims his or her own opinion and "slows down" the process rather than speeding it up.

On the other hand, we have the AI-driven recommendations of Netflix, for example. This AI owes its success to its invisibility and the way it ensures fewer interactions instead of more. Netflix's AI has achieved its goal if your home page shows exactly what you want to see. Then Netflix has succeeded in pointing viewers to content that is relevant to them. And we are happy to pay for that.

Because, although the user interface is an indispensable part of Netflix, no one subscribes just to scroll past movies and series without ever actually watching anything. Netflix's AI is valuable because it is invisible. If you were to disrupt that invisibility, there is a risk that people will get annoyed by it (remember the MS Word paperclip?) and switch to another streaming service.

INVISIBILITY AS A TRAP

It is a mistake to think that all applications of AI should strive for invisibility. The way AI is shaping the Netflix experience is surprisingly atypical. While AI is indispensable to Netflix, it is not fundamental to the most important part of the experience: watching series and movies.

Compare this to YouTube, which uses an AI-based algorithm that constantly shows users new suggestions for videos. In some fundamental way, YouTube's AI ís the YouTube experience.

YouTube has been widely criticized for the way its invisible algorithm encourages ignorance. If you watch a video about neo-Nazis or conspiracy theories about Paul McCartney, YouTube automatically plays the related racist and/or unscientific suggestions for you. Whatever you watch, YouTube's AI amplifies its message. Especially for young people, for whom YouTube is an indispensable source of information, there is a risk of getting too one-sided a view.

Thus, the invisible aspect of YouTube's AI may be a pitfall rather than a valuable feature. And that could be the case with many other companies as well. Unless companies are able to factor the positive potential of AI into their marketing strategy, they run the risk of being associated with the "one-sided" risks of AI.

LOOKING TO THE FUTURE

But how should companies "burn" AI?

Siri, Google Now and Cortana are examples of AI assistants that help us with useful information when we ask for it. But a brand experience it is not. For these companies, that may mean putting an AI-created experience into a unique, personalized "package. Perhaps Sophia could become the face of Siri (i.e., Apple's AI)?

For one company, it comes down to actively branding the AI experience itself so that consumers understand its operation and benefits and can influence the outcome. Like Albert Heijn's predictive shopping list. The operation is clear, the list is based on previous purchasing behavior. The benefit is also clear, we know when you need what. Pretty handy, as long as consumers can also remove or add products (which the AI learns from in turn). AH cleverly puts its brand experience into this AI application.

For other companies, this might be an opportunity to motivate people to actively contribute to training their AI systems by "feeding" them information. As an avid Waze user, I like to help my fellow road users by reporting traffic jams and dangerous situations. And Google translate is also getting better and better through feedback from millions of users.

As services become increasingly similar, there is a growing need among consumers to recognize which parties we do or do not purchase services from. At the same time, on the contrary, we increasingly purchase our services without being in direct contact with a branded interface, but instead are in contact with often invisible artificial intelligence algorithms.

CONCLUSION

It leads to a peculiar paradox: while the strategic importance of branding to distinguish yourself as a brand is only increasing, we as designers have less and less visual means at our disposal to give that brand hands and feet. Whereas now we have an entire user flow to make our brand identity tangible in, for more and more users we will have to do it through micro-interactions, small animations, just sound or even the light-glow on a smart assistant.