Brands Put AI Personality Front And Center In Customer Experience
PLUS: Agentic marketing deployment guide + Quick customer personalization audit
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🗓️ September 16, 2025 ⏱️ Read Time: ~5 minutes
The Psychology of CX 101: Master the Hidden Drivers of Customer Behavior is officially live on Amazon—and I couldn’t be more excited to finally get this book into your hands.
🎯 Today's Big Takeaway
I'm seeing a shift where companies aren't just deploying AI anymore—they're actually giving it personality. From Shaq helping you buy a car to digital workers that look and sound human, brands are getting comfortable letting AI represent who they are.
📊 Today's Hot Takes
Stories That Matter:
• Simon AI launches agentic marketing platform for contextual personalization
• Soul Machines brings human-like AI workers to ServiceNow workflows
• Pinkfish delivers retail-ready AI agents for commerce automation
• EverCommerce acquires ZyraTalk to expand AI capabilities across SaaS
• Carvana partners with Shaquille O'Neal to launch AI-powered Shaqbot
Prompts & Tools:
• 🎯 Agentic marketing deployment readiness assessment
• ⚡ Quick customer personalization opportunity audit
📡 Signal in the Noise
What connects all these stories is that nobody's building generic chatbots anymore. Every AI launch today has some kind of personality, specialized skill, or brand voice baked in.
🎯 Executive Lens
The interesting thing isn't how smart these AI systems are getting—it's that companies trust them enough to be the face of their brand. That's a pretty big leap from the "please hold while I transfer you to a human" days.
Stories That Matter
🎯 Simon AI launches agentic marketing platform for contextual personalization
Simon AI just launched something they're calling an Agentic Marketing Platform, which basically lets AI create thousands of personalized campaigns automatically. Instead of marketers manually building segments and campaigns, you tell the AI your goals and it handles everything—using real-time data like weather, inventory levels, and trending topics to make campaigns that actually feel relevant. The whole point is eliminating that frustrating trade-off between sending lots of campaigns and making them personal.
Customer Reality: Think about how much better this could be for customers. Instead of getting random promotional emails, they'd get messages that actually make sense for what's happening in their world right now.
What CX Leaders Should Do Next:
• Look at where your campaigns currently take weeks to launch when they should take hours
• Map out what external factors (weather, events, inventory) actually influence when your customers want to buy
• Try starting with goals instead of demographics when planning your next campaign
Source: PR Newswire
👥 Soul Machines brings human-like AI workers to ServiceNow workflows
Soul Machines just launched digital workers that actually look human—complete with faces, expressions, and voices—on the ServiceNow platform. These aren't your typical chatbots; they're designed to handle complex business tasks while keeping conversations going three times longer than normal AI interactions. They're betting that if AI is going to handle important customer conversations, maybe it should look and feel more human instead of hiding behind text boxes.
Strategic Angle: This raises an interesting question about what customers actually prefer. Do they want AI that's obviously AI, or do they respond better when it feels more human, even if they know it's not?
What CX Leaders Should Do Next:
• Test whether your customers actually prefer human-like interfaces or if they're fine with clearly non-human AI
• Think about which of your customer interactions would benefit most from emotional connection
• Honestly assess whether your current AI builds trust with customers or if they just put up with it
Source: Business Wire
🛒 Pinkfish delivers retail-ready AI agents for commerce automation
Pinkfish is launching AI agents that are specifically built for retail, which is smart because most AI tools are too generic to be useful out of the box. These agents come pre-configured for common retail workflows—marketing, merchandising, inventory—and integrate with platforms like Shopify and Salesforce without needing a developer. Their approach is "crawl, walk, run," starting with simple automation and building up to complex workflows over time.
The Opportunity: This could be a game-changer for smaller retailers who want enterprise-level automation but don't have the resources to build it themselves.
What CX Leaders Should Do Next:
• Identify your most repetitive workflows that follow predictable patterns—these are perfect candidates for pre-built agents
• Map out how AI agents could fit into your existing tech stack without breaking everything
• Pick one time-consuming workflow and see if AI can handle it as well as your team does
Source: Business Wire
🤝 EverCommerce acquires ZyraTalk to expand AI capabilities across SaaS
EverCommerce just bought ZyraTalk, which makes AI that can handle complete customer workflows—not just answer questions, but actually book appointments, process payments, and manage ongoing conversations. This gives EverCommerce's 725,000+ customers access to AI that can run entire customer interactions without human help. It's also a sign that SaaS companies are buying AI capabilities rather than trying to build them in-house.
Bottom Line: This shows how the build-versus-buy decision is playing out in AI. Sometimes it makes more sense to acquire expertise than develop it internally, especially when you need industry-specific knowledge.
What CX Leaders Should Do Next:
• Consider whether you should build AI capabilities internally or partner with companies that specialize in your industry
• Think about how AI could handle complete workflows, not just individual tasks
• Test whether AI can manage multi-step processes that currently need human oversight
Source: Globe Newswire
🏀 Carvana partners with Shaquille O'Neal to launch AI-powered Shaqbot
This one's fun—Carvana teamed up with Shaq to create an AI assistant that actually sounds like him, using real voice recordings and his personality. The Shaqbot helps people browse cars and ask questions, but with Shaq's humor and style. It's part of a bigger partnership where Shaq curates vehicle selections and has his own microsite. It's a clever way to make car shopping more entertaining and memorable.
CX Impact: This is what brand personality in AI looks like when done well. Instead of a generic assistant, customers get to interact with something that feels distinctly like the brand and its partnerships.
What CX Leaders Should Do Next:
• Think about how your brand's personality could come through in AI interactions instead of using generic voices
• Consider whether adding some entertainment value to routine tasks might improve customer engagement
• Explore how AI could represent what makes your brand unique in customer conversations
Source: Carvana Investor Relations
💰 Quick hits:
• MRM launched AI Relationship Management (ARM) to help companies build strategic relationships with AI systems that influence customer decisions throughout their journey
• Hanwha Life is embedding AI across underwriting, claims, and customer service with specialized contact centers that reduce wait times while keeping service quality consistent
• Centric Software unveiled retail AI innovations that boost margins up to 110% for fashion and retail brands through better demand forecasting and competitive benchmarking
🎯 Prompt of the Day
Title: Agentic marketing deployment readiness assessment
You're helping me evaluate our organization's readiness to deploy agentic AI for marketing personalization. For [YOUR MARKETING OPERATION], analyze and create an action plan covering:
Step 1: Audit current personalization capabilities and identify where campaigns take weeks instead of hours to launch
Step 2: Map external signals that influence customer decisions (weather, events, inventory, trends) that your current systems don't capture
Step 3: Identify high-volume, repetitive marketing tasks that follow predictable patterns suitable for AI automation
Step 4: Evaluate data quality and integration readiness for real-time campaign adaptation
Step 5: Design pilot scenarios starting with goal-based campaigns rather than static segments
Focus on areas where AI agents can eliminate the trade-off between campaign volume and personalization quality.
CX Use: This assessment helps you identify where agentic AI can transform marketing from batch processing to real-time personalization, improving customer relevance while reducing manual effort.
⚡ Try This Prompt
Audit our customer personalization opportunities by evaluating:
Step 1: Which customer touchpoints currently use generic messages when personalized ones would perform better
Step 2: What real-world signals (location, weather, events, inventory) could make our communications more relevant
Step 3: Where customers receive poorly timed messages that feel random rather than contextual
Step 4: Which personalization efforts require manual work that could be automated. Rank opportunities by customer impact and implementation feasibility.
Quick win: This reveals where AI-driven contextual personalization can replace generic messaging, helping you focus on improvements that customers will actually notice and appreciate.
🤔 CX Question of the Day
If you could embed your company's personality into an AI assistant like Carvana did with Shaq, what three characteristics would you want customers to experience in every interaction?
💭 CX Note to Self
The best AI personalities don't try to be human—they try to be authentically your brand.
👋 See You Tomorrow
Today's stories reveal something profound: AI has quietly crossed the line from parlor trick to everyday utility. When fashion brands trust AI with their aesthetic, when commerce giants let AI speak for thousands of products, when retailers hand over their customer conversations—that's not technology adoption, that's technology dependence.
The real shift isn't that AI got smarter; it's that we finally got comfortable letting it make decisions that matter to our customers.
Here's the question that should keep you up tonight: If AI is already making choices your customers trust more than your current processes, what does that say about those processes?
—Mark
💡 P.S. Want more prompts? Grab the FREE 32 Power Prompts That Will Change Your CX Strategy – Forever to start transforming your team, now. 👉 FREE 32 Power Prompts