AI is changing the rules of consumer engagement. Many formerly dependable tactics for building consumer tech products are changing.

Operators will need to “re-learn” how build consumer tech in the world of AI.

Across our consumer portfolio companies and externally, here’s a snapshot of where I’m seeing key areas of change:

🔹 **Acquisition**
– Who the gatekeepers to distribution are > new ad platforms are being created by new gatekeepers owning eyeballs and content rights, at a time when old ones are struggling with privacy changes
– How you acquire customers > with gatekeepers changing, a return to marketing basics (community building) and adopting new methods: new agent driven marketing recs
– How consumers search > from keyword based search, to amazon or social media search, to consultative agent search

🔹 **Consideration/Trust**
– How consumers gain trust > did ai write that review? Did I just speak with a human or a bot? Was that a real video? Comments were the new product reviews in era of social media shopping. How AI surfaces “reviews” is changing
– How customers express needs and intent > conversational intent iterates toward true needs versus assuming the user knows what they want now

🔹 **Branding**
How you brand mascots > from firm-wide level mascots (Geico, Duo) with personalities to live characters with customer service capability

🔹 **Retention**
– How you retain initial users + break cold start / chicken & egg problem > ai agents provide more chances at user engagement
– How you measure retention > human user organically retained or retained with the aid of an ai agent?

🔹 **Engagement + Customer Service**
– How you measure MAU + MTU – if agents are interacting with agents to purchase goods and services, and I as a human have multiple agents buying from the same site, how do end products measure me?
– How you structure CX teams > AI and automated CX tools mean customer services issues only escalated for most serious issues
– How you think about fraud > ai agents that transact have KYC, identity

🔹 **Monetization**
– How you monetize > usage based models tied to LLM calls
– How we pay for one-time versus recurring purchases > agents will need special permissions to pay for one-off purchases while recurring subscriptions will continue to look similar (paid with card on file at that merchant)

🔹 **Building Product + Content**
– How you prototype and build products > coding copilots and generative design software make for rapid, low-code or no-code prototyping
– How you conduct user research > Utilizing ai voice tools to call, conduct, and synthesize research
– The role of user generated content > AI can make amazing content so human content becomes more scarce, but harder to discover (sea of noise)