Artificial Intelligence is reshaping customer communications, from simple alerts to interactive, highly personalized dialogues that learn from past interactions and anticipate future needs. Already today, brands such as Oz Hair and Beauty are leveraging the power of such personalized, interactive campaigns to deliver 38X the ROI of generic 1-way SMS offers. With the promise of fully autonomous AI agents on the horizon, businesses are actively assessing how to best integrate these advanced capabilities into their customer engagement models and delineate responsibilities between human agents and AI agents. My stance is clear: businesses must master the art of human-guided strategy amplified by machine-driven scale. This does not negate the need for human interactions; rather, it reinforces the importance of delivering smarter, more personalized experiences that today’s customers demand.
The communication disconnect: personalization as a non-negotiable
Despite significant investments and perceived channel integration by businesses, a critical disconnect persists. Sinch’s recent research on the State of Digital Customer Communications [link] shows that while nearly 60% businesses report their communication channels are fully integrated, while 75% of customers are still frustrated by messages that are too frequent, irrelevant, or repetitive. Without proper oversight and guardrails, AI could easily exacerbate this problem by generating and sending an overwhelming volume of messages. Therefore, cutting through the growing communication noise and making messages truly stand out will be more important than ever. This fundamental gap highlights a huge takeaway: the need for true, customer-centric personalization that transcends mere technological integration. This is exactly where a thoughtfully deployed AI strategy can come in.
The drive for personalization is no longer merely a desirable feature; it has become a critical competitive edge. Customers expect personalization based on factors like their preferences, purchase history, and previous conversation context. Recognizing this shift, businesses are rapidly embracing AI, with nearly half of companies already leveraging AI for advanced personalization. This growing acceptance is mirrored in consumer sentiment, as over half of consumers trust AI-generated answers for informational customer updates such as an appointment reminder or delivery notification, highlighting both an increasing comfort with AI interactions but also the long road ahead.
Soon, however, the absence of AI-powered personalization will be more noticeable than its presence. Companies can reshape how they compete by focusing on micro-journeys or moment-based marketing, improving operational efficiencies, increasing revenue, and developing anticipatory responses to customers at speed and scale. AI brings these capabilities to life with real-time adaptability across any channel and any moment in the brand-customer relationship.
The rise of emphatic AI: Understanding human nuance
AI-powered personalization technologies are increasingly demonstrating the ability to understand people and respond to situations. Advanced AI can learn human empathy and intent and build that into personalization engines, as these AI agents learn consumers’ motivations, expectations and future needs. While AI agents don’t “feel” empathy, they use signals to monitor a customer’s emotional state, context, and current and past preferences to build a behavioral analysis. For example, if a customer expresses frustration in a chat session, the AI agent can adjust its response accordingly. Now imagine this happening across hundreds of individual conversations and dozens of channels simultaneously.
Seamless experiences: The imperative of cross-channel coordination
True cross-channel coordination extends beyond connecting multiple communication platforms — it ensures seamless continuity across the customer’s lifecycle: within a conversation, across channels, and from one brand moment to the next. This means, automatically keeping track of a customer’s conversation history and context across channels so customers experience consistent, personalized interactions and never need to repeat themselves, even when switching between automated systems and live support.
Customers benefit by saving time and avoiding frustration, while businesses gain efficiency and improved loyalty. Advanced AI can synchronize data in real time to build a dynamic customer profile that’s instantly accessible and always contains the most recent relevant information. Reducing these major customer frustrations leads to better brand experiences and increased loyalty. Our research reveals that a majority of consumers react negatively to this repetition, with a small but significant portion of 15% of customers even losing trust in the business as a result.
Security and compliance: Building trust matters now more than ever
Granting AI autonomous control over customer interactions and cross-channel data sharing inherently necessitates robust security and compliance measures. Businesses need strong security and compliance measures that must include governance, verification protocols and dynamic oversight mechanisms that evolve in lockstep with the AI agents. The primary concern with implementing AI in digital customer communications is data privacy & security, as unveiled in Sinch’s recent State of Digital Customer Communications report.
Businesses must ensure AI offers unparalleled personalization but does so without going “off brand” or putting customer data at risk. It requires a balancing act between providing the AI agents with independence to correlate data and make decisions and adhering to internal frameworks and regulatory requirements that will help the organization build and maintain trust. This is why a human-led strategy remains paramount, allowing businesses to maintain control and set the right guardrails. Our data shows that nearly half of consumers are more likely to trust a message when it includes an official logo and checkmark, a sentiment even stronger among younger demographics, with over two-thirds of Gen Z placing more trust in such verified messages. Moreover, almost half of consumers feel safer when additional security measures such as two-factor authentication are used to protect online accounts. It is crucial that businesses focus on gaining their customers’ trust, as 77% admit they ignore messages they find untrustworthy, even from known brands.
AI Adoption Landscape: navigation generational and situational nuances
AI adoption is accelerating across the board, with a staggering 97% of businesses planning to incorporate AI into their customer communications strategies this year. This includes significant investments in AI-powered voice agents, chatbots, predictive outreach tools, and more. However, the path to widespread AI adoption is not uniform. While younger generations are highly receptive to AI-powered experiences, older generations remain cautious, underscoring the need for trust, transparency, and accuracy. For instance, 71% of Gen Z would engage with AI chatbots in contrast to only 20% of Baby Boomers. While AI adoption is accelerating, businesses must still proactively address concerns around trust, transparency, and responsible use to ensure equitable and effective communication across all demographics. Additionally, businesses cannot forget the need to adjust their communication strategies to channel preferences.
While the applications for AI are limitless, we are seeing situational differences in adoption and customer readiness.
In healthcare, AI enables healthcare providers to offer medication reminders or preventive care alerts that are based on patient history and risk factors. With AI tools, patients could receive these coordinated and personalized notifications through secure texts, emails, or patient portals without any duplication or contradictory messages. AI adoption is both generational and situational today. While patients are still wary about describing deeply personal health issues to a chatbot, there is broader willingness to reschedule appointments or get medication refills, especially if it saves time. In fact, two-thirds of healthcare companies Sinch spoke to are planning on adopting AI voice agents in 2025.
Retail environments are leveraging these capabilities to create dynamic shopping experiences. AI-driven personalization can adapt product displays, pricing, and inventory recommendations in real-time based on customer behavior, seasonal trends, and local preferences, ultimately driving both in-store and online sales while optimizing supply chain efficiency. AI tools analyze browsing and purchasing patterns to help brands create highly context-aware recommendations and promotions. This includes understanding the optimal time to present these promotions, creating a hyper-personalized experience across SMS, RCS, WhatsApp, email, voice, and more for higher engagement and conversion rates. Our data shows that AI adoption and receptiveness is higher for retail – typically a lower risk environment. Over two-thirds of consumers are willing to interact with AI-powered shopping assistants, and this figure only increases when considering younger generations such as Gen Z and Millennials.
In financial services, AI enhances both security and customer support. The critical need for timely information is clear: nearly three-quarters of customers view fraud alerts as “very important,” expecting these alerts either immediately or within five minutes of detection putting operational pressure on businesses to deliver. For more complex financial matters requiring expert advice, over 40% still prefer a voice or video call, illustrating the continued importance of human interaction alongside automated solutions.
It’s time to change: Communication channels become key trust-building channels
AI-powered personalization is no longer an experiment; it’s an essential strategy for modern businesses. As AI agents become more empathetic, intelligent and autonomous, they’re transforming every aspect of the customer journey across every channel. The brands that will lead are those that create personalized interactions at scale and anticipate their customers’ needs, including when to leverage AI and when to rely on your employees to build those lasting relationships, one interaction at a time.
