‘GenAI does not change individual touchpoints, but has a holistic effect’

When ChatGPT was launched three years ago, many asked: hype or paradigm shift? Today, three years later, the answer is clear. The service now records 29,000 queries per second and has more than 800 million weekly users. Both companies and customers use language models (LLMs) for research, comparisons and decision-making. LLMs have thus become a key player in the market, shaping customer behaviour, business practices and market mechanisms in the long term.

GenAI's ability to understand and generate human language opens up completely new avenues for companies along the customer journey, in their processes and services. For customers, the groundbreaking power of the technology lies in particular in how they access information, evaluate it and use it for decisions, for example in purchasing processes or contract comparisons.

In concrete terms, this means that product research becomes dialogue-based and more individualised than any internet search before. With LLMs, contract and offer comparisons now take seconds instead of hours. AI agents go one step further: these autonomously operating AI programmes filter, evaluate and make preliminary selections for customers, thereby influencing which options they even see. In other words, which companies are still in the ‘relevant set’.

This creates a new complexity for innovation units:

GenAI does not change individual touchpoints, but has a holistic effect: New players, such as agents, are establishing themselves, new mechanisms are emerging, and the entire playing field is being rearranged. However, many companies still interpret this paradigm shift as a simple trend and overlook the long-term consequences. They therefore still make their decisions based on yesterday's logic – rather than tomorrow's.

To prevent this from happening to companies, there are now three key tasks for them:

Recognise, measure, prioritise …

Recognising involves identifying systemic market shifts. Where are new market players, such as LLMs or agents, emerging that are changing existing structures? Where are previous mechanisms being replaced by fundamentally different ones, such as dialogue-based search instead of clicks, automated comparisons instead of manual research, pre-selection by agents instead of own research?

Measuring involves recognising the new standards set by GenAI, for example in terms of convenience, clarity and speed. If an AI agent can handle purchases in the background, a multi-step purchasing process quickly becomes obsolete. So what is the new benchmark? This needs to be measured and implemented in order to remain relevant.

And finally, prioritisation: companies must first innovate where the gap between expectation and reality is greatest. Customer expectations have changed fundamentally with the advent of large language models. Customers are better informed when they engage in conversation, compare complex offers in seconds and expect answers without waiting times. These shifts in customer behaviour must be anticipated in order to manage resources accordingly.

One thing is certain: with GenAI, the world has taken a leap forward – join us.

Text: Ingo Schenk