Your Customers Don’t Need More Choices. They Need A Guide
Plus: AI is reshaping discovery, service, and the rules of customer effort
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📅 March 16, 2026 | ⏱️ 6 min read
Good Morning!
A lot of AI personalization still feels like a fancy way to throw more options at people. That is not better CX. It is just more stuff to sort through. Today’s edition is about a better use of AI: helping customers make sense of choices, smoothing out voice experiences, and building journeys that feel easier instead of smarter-looking. Let’s get into what actually helps people move forward.
The Executive Hook:
Here’s the shift that matters: AI should not just answer faster. It should help customers get unstuck. That is why Hilton’s planner caught my eye. It points to a better kind of personalization, one that helps people learn as they go instead of drowning them in more options. For your team, that changes the job. This is not just about automation anymore. It is about designing guidance, building trust, and knowing exactly where the human steps in when the AI starts to wobble.
🧠 THE DEEP DIVE: Hilton Uses AI To Make Trip Planning Feel Less Like Work
Hilton’s new AI Planner is interesting for one simple reason: it is trying to help people figure things out, not just search faster. That is a big deal. Most personalization still acts like the job is to recommend something quickly. But in real life, customers are often stuck earlier than that. They are still trying to understand the options, compare what matters, and decide what fits.
That is where this gets useful.
Hilton says the planner helps guests discover destinations, compare properties, look at amenities, and get curated recommendations during the shopping journey. In plain English, it is trying to reduce the mental work before the booking ever happens.
Here’s the part I’d pay attention to:
1. The best personalization helps people learn.
Most travel sites still make customers do the hard part themselves. Open ten tabs. Compare rooms. Guess which location is better. Back up and start over. Hilton is aiming at that mess. This is less about “here’s your answer” and more about “here’s how to think through the choice.” That is a much better CX use case.
2. The real value is the guidance, not the recommendation.
Anybody can generate a list. That is easy now. What matters is whether the experience helps the customer narrow the field with confidence. Hilton is putting AI earlier in the journey, right where uncertainty is highest. Smart move. That is where confusion turns into abandonment.
3. They are rolling it out the right way.
This is a beta. Small traffic slice. Test and learn. Good. That is how you do personalization without blowing up the experience. Too many teams go wide too early, then act surprised when the AI gets weird and customers lose trust.
4. The bigger play is memory across the journey.
This is the part that matters long term. If Hilton learns what a guest cares about during discovery, that context can show up later in booking, service, upsell, and loyalty. That is when personalization starts to feel useful. The customer stops having to start from scratch every time.
My take:
I like this because it starts with customer effort. It is not trying to sound magical. It is trying to be useful. That is the bar. The catch is that this kind of experience only works if the guidance is actually good. If it gives generic suggestions, hides tradeoffs, or guesses wrong in a way that feels pushy, the whole thing turns into a shinier version of bad search. So do not obsess over engagement here. Watch whether people understand faster, decide faster, and book with more confidence.
Here’s what I’d do this week:
Find one journey where your customers are clearly doing too much figuring out on their own. Then redesign that step as a guided decision. What does the customer need to understand? What signals can help tailor that guidance? And where does the human or rules-based fallback step in when the AI misses?
Source: Hilton Introduces the Hilton AI Planner, Advancing the Future of Curated Travel Discovery
📊 CX BY THE NUMBERS: The Default AI Era Is Already Cracking
Data Source: Similarweb traffic share update
ChatGPT dropped from 75.7% of GenAI web traffic share a year ago to 61.7% in February 2026. Still huge. Just not untouchable.
Gemini jumped from 5.7% to 24.4%. Distribution is doing a lot of heavy lifting.
Claude hit 3.3% and Grok reached 3.4%, both ahead of DeepSeek at 3.2%. The market is getting fragmented fast.
The Insight:
This matters because your customers and employees are not going to live in one AI tool. They are already spreading out. So your job gets clearer: keep the experience consistent even when the engines change. Policies, knowledge, and journey logic need to travel well. If your setup only works with one model, it is more fragile than it looks.
🧰 THE AI TOOLBOX: Scribe V2 Realtime
The Tool: ElevenLabs’ Scribe v2 Realtime is a speech-to-text model built for live transcription in under 150 ms.
Problem:
Voice experiences fall apart fast when the system cannot hear well. Slow transcription creates awkward pauses. Bad transcription creates bad routing, weak summaries, and lousy QA.
Solution:
Picture a voice flow that can actually keep up with a customer. Scribe v2 Realtime turns speech into text in near real time, supports 90 languages, and is built for live use cases like voice agents and meeting assistants. That gives your team a stronger listening layer for routing, summarization, QA, and agent assist.
Benefits:
Time: Faster turn-taking and less dead air
Quality: Better transcripts for QA, coaching, and automation
Experience: Smoother voice conversations across languages
Where it sits: Side stage.
Best Fit:
Works best when you need real-time transcription for voice bots, live assist, or multilingual QA
Not a great fit when you need the full service workflow, policy logic, or case resolution wrapped into one tool
Key Takeaway:
Use it to make the voice layer sharper. Do not expect it to run the whole customer experience for you.
More: ElevenLabs
⚡ SPEED ROUND: Quick Hits
ElevenLabs And Deloitte Partner To Transform Customer Experience — The interesting part is not the partner logo parade. It is the push toward packaged service blueprints, integration patterns, and governance for customer service and collections.
Introducing 11ai: The Voice-First AI Assistant That Takes Action — This is where self-service is heading: voice interfaces that do not just answer questions, but actually do the work through connected systems.
📡 THE SIGNAL: Stop Personalizing The Noise
Too much personalization still creates more work for the customer. More options. More recommendations. More things to compare. That is not progress. The better move is simpler: help people understand what matters, cut down the decision load, and carry context forward so they do not have to repeat themselves at every step.
This week, pick one journey where customers are doing too much figuring out on their own. Then ask your team a tougher question: are we actually helping people decide, or are we just making the screen look smarter?
See you tomorrow.
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📬 I have some bad news…
The other day, I got a question about my eCourse, 30 Days to Greater Influence:
“Hey, this sounds like the right move. I’m just wondering if I should jump in now… or wait a few months until things calm down.”