Digital screens and VR is cool, but artificial intelligence is creepy to most consumers | City A.M.

Fingerprint scanners, voice recognition, targeted ads, home voice assistants. These technologies are all part of everyday modern life and are revolutionising the way retailers sell their products to consumers across the world.

But have we actually taken the time to stop and consider what customers think of our ever increasing arsenal of tech tricks to entice and persuade?

Every year we survey consumers in the UK, France and Germany to gain an understanding into what technologies they think are ‘creepy’ or ‘cool’. The results from this year’s survey are just in – giving us a top 5 ‘creepy’ and top 5 ‘cool’ list of tech that shoppers love or loathe.

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It’ll come as no surprise that the tech considered ‘cool’ are those that make shopping more convenient and enjoyable either by speeding up transactions or by improving the customer experience, without being deemed as invasive to their privacy.

In contrast, at the top of the ‘Creepy’ list, with 57.98 per cent of the public vote, is emotion detection technology – a cutting edge marketing tool that adapts your in-store shopping experience depending on your mood. Following this was facial recognition technology (56.83 per cent) and the concept of retailers receiving an alert when you’ve been paid at the end of the month (56.45 per cent).

The survey also gauged consumers’ attitudes towards artificial intelligence and data sharing. Perhaps unsurprisingly, 80 per cent of consumers want greater transparency from retailers on the use of artificial intelligence. In addition, Brits are also less willing to share their personal data than their French and German counterparts.

GDPR is a great example of this. Concerns around how data is being used has led to a change in EU law that gives consumers greater protection and requires retailers and businesses to be more transparent with their customer data.

Much of this mistrust could be explained by the fact that 75 per cent of respondents from the UK admitted to having a very limited understanding, if any, of what artificial intelligence actually is. As such, to start putting our customers’ minds at ease, it’s clear that we need to better define what artificial intelligence is. Retailers can be at the forefront of this by being more open and transparent about how they use artificial intelligence in their marketing and sales processes. And it starts with selecting the right open platforms that are transparent, with visibility into the “why” and “how” choices were made by the AI in the first place.

But, this is only just the beginning. Businesses across industries need to champion the benefits it presents us with and communicate this to the public. From a retail perspective, AI-driven personalization enables us to improve the customer shopping experience like never before and we need to let our customers know it.

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