Is Hyper-
personalization
a White Whale?

Of course, the effectiveness of personalization through digital agents is dependent on the quality of the design and programming behind these agents. They need to be designed with a deep understanding of user needs, behaviors, and preferences to provide truly personalized interactions.

Ultimately, there’s a strong likelihood that individuals will have computer models working on their behalf in a way that is akin to how executive assistants are utilized in RL. Such assistants may make judgement calls for their employer because they have a strong grasp of the executive’s preferences, predilections, and picadilloes. Generally, when humans are given the option of off-loading choice, they will do so. Studies have shown that, not only will too many choices cause potential “choice paralysis,” a wide array of options can curtail people’s satisfaction with their decisions.

One approach to an evolved personalization requires people to own their own data to a greater extent than they do now. Look, the data you have already shared is out of your hands—that proverbial ship has sailed. The current exchange—broad data for targeted data—has worked relatively well, but we may be headed towards a new tipping point. As humans grow more accustomed to having machine learning (ML) models working on their behalf, they may find that generalist models with personal context and personal data perform better. Using Apple as an example, a business could expose a list of products via API (Application Programming Interface) and Siri could comb through that list and pick the products that are worth recommending.

So, where does that leave us? Have all previous efforts been for naught? Not necessarily.

Personalization will, of course, remain an expectation for digital experiences with a brand. However, don’t mistake the fulfillment of expectations for affection. The late Steve Jobs, co-founder and former CEO of Apple, Inc., expressed it like this:

“Your customers don't care about you. They don't care about your product or service. They care about themselves, their dreams, their goals. Now, they will care much more if you help them reach their goals, and to do that, you must understand their goals, as well as their needs and deepest desires.”

It’s easy to understand why companies expend so much effort on recognizing the needs, wants, and desires of their customers. And, for the moment, brands are doing the best they can. Effective hyper-personalization is—for the moment—just out of reach, but its progenitor (i.e., personalization) can still be quite effective. Simply because we can’t seize the future immediately, we shouldn’t stop trying to assist and know our customers in every digital experience.

Which brings us back to the previously posed question: “What if hyper-personalization is a white whale?” Well, it is...and it isn't. As implied at the beginning, accessibility will remain an area where hyper-personalization will be welcome. I don’t believe it terribly controversial to say that the more inclusive we can make our digital experiences, the better. If hyper-personalization can aid in that effort, we should utilize it.

In other areas, brands must continue to do their best. Leverage whatever techniques may be effective – real-time, predictive, contextual, or emotional—because the agent-based future is not yet upon us.

Personalization will remain a powerful tool for one key reason: scalability. Because a human is not required to manually or explicitly curate recommendations that are, instead, generated systematically based on past behavior, inference-based recommendations can still teach us a great deal about preferences in aggregate. This is not so much a call to completely topple the apple cart as it is to encourage brands to expand the dimensions of personalization to incorporate the explicit atop the inferred.