’Hello Me’ - AI has flipped Personalisation

Short summary Emma Storbacka, CEO of Avaus, on why martech is a leadership problem, why the button always wins the meeting, and what personal AI agents and AI in schools mean for the rest of us. Description Why do smart companies spend their time on the email editor instead of the decisions that matter? Emma Storbacka, CEO of Avaus and host of the podcast Data Driven Voices, joins Rasmus Houlind and Frans Riemersma to talk about leadership, martech and what AI cannot do for you. Emma argues that the real problem in martech is not the technology, which you can ask ChatGPT about, but leadership. We get into bike-shedding and why the button wins every meeting, a composable shift that nobody resourced for, why the IT team should not own your AI strategy, and the move from “what could we do?” to “what should we do?” She also predicts that large in-house content teams will be outsourced, in a deal that pays 20% less every year and demands far more output. Then the Hello Me questions: who should hold your data and context when personal AI agents like Muse, GrokBot and Dots arrive, why a European home for your preferences that is not owned by big tech might be the best idea nobody has built, what AI in schools could mean at scale, and why we have an abundance of answers but not of insight. This is an open, ongoing series. We don’t know exactly when the next episode drops, or who is in it. If you have a sharp, unusual take on personalisation, AI or the new rules of marketing, especially if you are not already in our usual orbit, we want to hear from you. Chapters 0:00 - Cold open: Hello Me, AI has flipped personalisation 0:30 - Introducing Emma Storbacka, Avaus, and “every company will be driven by algorithms” 2:00 - The premise, and what is changing in martech 2:40 - The “angry Finnish lady”, and where the frustration comes from 4:20 - Ask ChatGPT about tech, not about leadership: the flip 6:30 - The question of questions: “how you do anything is how you do everything” 9:00 - Worst practices: better questions than “what is this button for?” 11:00 - Bike-shedding: why the email editor dominates martech sales 13:45 - Why decisions stall, and what to tell brands 17:40 - Composable, platform or vibe coding? 18:50 - The data layer shift nobody resourced, and consultant lock-in 20:30 - Why the IT team should not own your AI strategy 21:30 - From “what could we do” to “what should we do” 24:10 - Data, content and the clash of two cultures 26:00 - A prediction: outsourcing the AI transformation 28:20 - Selling your own data: the preference agent and borrowed consent 30:35 - Personal AI agents arrive (Muse, GrokBot, Dots): who becomes your extended self? 32:20 - A European home for your context? Blockchain and the privacy paradox 34:00 - AI in schools: 10,000 free teachers, and the homework trap 36:05 - Abundance: plenty of answers, few insights 37:20 - Thank you, Emma, and the host debrief 40:55 - Sign-off: help us find the next guests Sign-off and links This is an open, ongoing series. We don’t know exactly when the next episode drops, or who is in it. If you have a sharp, unusual take on personalisation, AI or the new rules of marketing, especially if you are not already in our usual orbit, tell us which of the seven questions is yours, or who we should talk to next. Rasmus & Frans Links and resources Watch the full video playlist on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJGgw-cJasRw The show, the full concept and all seven questions we are chasing: https://omnichannelinstitute.com/hello-me.html Data Driven Voices, Emma’s own podcast, on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/7FVR2mybW1qsmJxvXIICnq Avaus, the Nordic customer data and AI consultancy Emma leads: https://www.avaus.com Emma Storbacka on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/emmastorbacka/ StJohn Deakins, founder of CitizenMe, an early attempt at a personal data agent for customers, now founder and CEO of DataSapien, mentioned in the episode: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stjohndeakins/ Hello $Firstname, a free written abstract of the book this show builds on: https://agillic.com/free-ebook-hello-firstname/ Hello $Firstname, the audiobook edition with a full cast of narrators, on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2zIvs5pSRNTO3YAeFUWZBL?si=zpeTEW_1RnWNHSwZZEAnWA Personalisation Cards, workshop decks for Commerce, Subscription, Banking and Charity/NGO teams: https://omnichannelinstitute.com/cards.html MartechTribe, Frans Riemersma’s research and consultancy on marketing technology: https://www.martechtribe.com MartechMap.com, Frans Riemersma and Scott Brinker’s joint map of the global martech landscape: https://martechmap.com Omnichannel Institute, Rasmus’s home for frameworks, books and courses on personalisation: https://www.omnichannelinstitute.com

For years, personalisation has been us guessing what the customer wants. Scott Brinker, the "Godfather of Martech" and founder of chiefmartec.com, joins Rasmus Houlind and Frans Riemersma and closes on a different idea: instead of guessing, let the customer tell us what they want, and then deliver it. Along the way we trace the show's origin back to a phrase Scott and Frans coined together, "agents of customers". We get into the three types of AI agents now reshaping marketing, why buyers already hold more power than most sellers have noticed, why raw software capability stopped being a moat, and what can't be prompted: trust, relationships and culture. Scott also makes the case for why a little friction in buying might be worth keeping, what happens to UI design once voice takes over, and why regional and cultural differences might be a genuine advantage rather than a weakness. This is an open, ongoing series. We don't know exactly when the next episode drops, or who is in it. If you have a sharp, unusual take on personalisation, AI or the new rules of marketing, especially if you are not already in our usual orbit, we want to hear from you. Chapters 0:00 - Cold open: Hello Me, AI has flipped personalisation 0:30 - Introducing Scott, and a year on from Hello $Firstname 3:10 - Where Hello Me started: "agents of customers" 4:10 - The three types of agents, explained 6:25 - The power shift: buyers, sellers and the information gap 8:05 - How buyers use AI now: "call us" pricing pages and vendor-selection agents 10:50 - Abundance and the empowered consumer: what do we actually want? 12:30 - Are marketers still marketing to the old consumer? 15:00 - Will customers notice their power? Advertising's value and its dark side 17:25 - Your own agent as a filter: guardrails and filter bubbles 19:10 - Where advertising goes when agents filter it out 21:05 - Sycophantic AI: will your guardrails hold when you are hungry? 22:40 - Is removing all friction from buying actually good? 23:50 - B2B buying committees and the puppet show 26:00 - Could your agent negotiate with mine? 28:00 - Abundance for marketers, and a stack bigger than the landscape 30:50 - The future stack: commercial products plus ambient, homegrown software 31:40 - What can't be prompted: trust, relationships and the real moat 33:25 - Ecosystems and culture: the moats that take time 36:30 - Are organisations fit for abundance? Distinctive versus best practice 38:25 - Can an AI capture culture, or feel anything? 42:40 - Voice as the next interface 43:55 - What happens to UI design? 46:10 - Robotics, teased and parked for another day 46:30 - Regional differences: US, China, EU 49:10 - Closing: personalisation was guessing, so let the customer tell us 50:10 - Sign-off: help us find the next guests Sign-off and links This is an open, ongoing series. We don't know exactly when the next episode drops, or who is in it. If you have a sharp, unusual take on personalisation, AI or the new rules of marketing, especially if you are not already in our usual orbit, tell us which of the seven questions is yours, or who we should talk to next. Rasmus & Frans Links and resources Watch the full video playlist on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJGgw-cJasRw The show, the full concept and all seven questions we are chasing: https://omnichannelinstitute.com/hello-me.html Scott's article on moats, mentioned in the episode: https://newsletter.chiefmartec.com/p/the-death-of-moats-in-marketing-and-martech-is-greatly-exaggerated Scott Brinker's chiefmartec.com: https://chiefmartec.com Hello $Firstname, a free written abstract of the book this show builds on: https://agillic.com/free-ebook-hello-firstname/ Hello $Firstname, the audiobook edition with a full cast of narrators, on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2zIvs5pSRNTO3YAeFUWZBL?si=zpeTEW_1RnWNHSwZZEAnWA Personalisation Cards, workshop decks for Commerce, Subscription, Banking and Charity/NGO teams: https://omnichannelinstitute.com/cards.html MartechTribe, Frans Riemersma's research and consultancy on marketing technology: https://www.martechtribe.com MartechMap.com, Frans Riemersma and Scott Brinker's joint map of the global martech landscape: https://martechmap.com Omnichannel Institute, Rasmus's home for frameworks, books and courses on personalisation: https://www.omnichannelinstitute.com

In the chapters leading up to this point, we've explored how to create meaningful, personalised experiences across channels, campaigns, and touchpoints. We've talked about data, content, and the orchestration that brings it all together. We've introduced the Bowtie of Personalisation, the CX Layers, and the Pyramid of Personalisation to help structure that work. But what happens when the customer never shows up? What happens when they send an agent instead? When this book first went to print, that question was still mostly hypothetical. It no longer is. Every major LLM now ships some form of agent mode, not just one of them. Google answers more questions directly on its results page, without a click. And, more importantly, behaviour has already started to change. Many customers no longer just browse in the traditional sense. They delegate, asking systems to search, compare, and increasingly transact on their behalf. This is already altering the flow of traffic, the role of the website, and the point of contact between brand and consumer. Marketers have responded to one half of that shift already: feeding structured content into the LLMs. Documentation, spec sheets, comparison pages, proof points, reviews, anything that might convince an agent, and the model behind it, that your product deserves to be the one it recommends. Keanu Taylor, reading chapter sixteen for this edition, called the discipline behind this "context engineering": deciding which content is still true, still relevant, and worth surfacing to a system that will act on it without asking you first. It's a new kind of SEO, except the reader you're optimising for has already decided not to read the page. There's another half to this shift, on the seller's side. It's already showing up inside the marketing stack itself, as what we called elsewhere in this book the agentic platform: a layer of semi-autonomous marketing agents sitting on top of your existing systems, coordinating journeys, generating content, and triggering actions across channels. Buyer agents and seller agents are being built at the same time, on both sides of the counter, and both are being trained deliberately to deal with each other. They will get good at it. The real question isn't whether they'll negotiate well together, it's whose interests they'll have been trained to serve when they do. For commoditised products, where the lowest price wins, this model may work well. But for emotionally anchored brands, it will challenge everything we have built around branded experience, loyalty, and long-term value. If your flagship store is replaced by an invisible transaction between agents, where does storytelling go? Where does the moment of delight happen? What becomes of the brand? It's possible that consumers will begin to segment their own behaviour too: relying on agents for utility-driven purchases, but still visiting brand sites when they want to be inspired, still signing up for loyalty programmes, still responding to personalisation, not just of price, but of message, tone, and experience. And it's possible that some will train and deploy agents that reflect their own values: agents that aren't financed by advertising, that factor in long-term preferences and who the person wants to become, not just what they want to buy. That's the hopeful version. Here's the complication. Matthew Niederberger, who read chapter twenty for this edition, pointed out that if an agent is going to remember what a customer told it and act on that next time, the memory has to live somewhere, and somebody has to govern it. Most organisations haven't worked out who that somebody is yet. But there's a bigger version of the same problem sitting one level up. When your customer sends an agent, they tend to assume it's working for them: their preferences, their history, their taste. In practice, that profile mostly doesn't live with the customer, and it doesn't live with you either. It lives with whichever company built the model doing the delegating, OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and a short list of others. The consumer believes they own their own preferences. The brand hopes it owns the relationship. The platform, in the meantime, quietly owns the only complete copy of both. So what's actually changed since these pages were first written? Not quite what you'd expect. Steen Rasmussen, who read chapter seventeen for this edition, put a useful correction on it: agentic commerce hasn't suddenly made personalisation hyper-individual overnight. What's actually moved is the cost of execution, and it's dropped fast, for you and for every one of your competitors at the same time. That's a Red Queen effect. You're not running to get ahead any more, you're running to stay where you already are. Once execution is cheap for everyone, doing more of it stops being an edge and becomes table stakes. The bar didn't move because personalisation got smarter. It moved because the whole field started running at once. So if execution isn't where the advantage lives any more, where does it live? Scott Brinker answered that sharply in his Chief Martec newsletter this month. The things that still differentiate a brand, he argued, are the ones you can't produce with a prompt. He calls them the Big E's: Experience and Ecosystem. An experience your customers have loved, and had again, and again, until it becomes something they trust and expect rather than something you generated in a batch. An ecosystem: the retailers, partners, communities, and customers who choose to keep showing up for you, earned one relationship at a time, over years a competitor can't compress by throwing more agents at the problem. It's the same point Matt Johnson made, reading chapter four, from the other direction: once everyone can hyper-personalise, the differentiator stops being how much you personalise, and becomes how, and how much of your own brand's personality survives the process. A competitor can copy your interface with a prompt. They can't prompt their way into your reputation, or into someone else's community, or into the years it took you to earn either. And behind every agent, still, is a person. Someone who forms emotional connections, decides whether to trust you, and remembers how you made them feel. Kim Motroen, reading chapter one, put it simply: personalisation was never really about how advanced your technology is, it's about how well you turn it into something a customer actually feels the benefit of. Peter Anders Franch, from Matas, reading chapter nine, made the same point from the other side of the till: AI gets you to relevance faster and at greater scale than before, but the judgement, the empathy, the read of what this person needs in this moment, still has to come from a person. That was true before agents existed. It may be truer now, precisely because everything around it just got cheaper and faster. The frameworks in this book still apply. They just extend into a new layer: personalisation is no longer only about orchestrating communication with people, but also about orchestrating the interfaces and the memory of the systems people trust to act on their behalf, and about building the kind of experience and reputation no agent can shortcut its way into. None of this stays still long enough to fit neatly inside a book, generative AI edition or not. That's actually why, not long after finishing this manuscript, I sat down with Frans Riemersma and started a podcast instead. It's called Hello Me, and the premise is the mirror image of everything above. For years, brands personalised for consumers. Now consumers have the power to use personalisation as a tool for becoming a better version of themselves, not just a better-targeted customer. AI is quietly taking away the excuse of never having had the means to do that. If they realise it. As the show's own tagline puts it, we're "marketing to a new breed of consumer wielding the power of personalisation in their favour. Not yours." If you want to keep following this conversation past the last page of this book, that's where I'm having it, one open question at a time. The customer journey is not over. But it may now begin with: 'Hey, agent, get me something good.'   More resources from the Hello $Firstname universe You can buy the physical book here: https://amzn.eu/d/6jV4QZT If the Amazon EU link does not work in your country, please search for Hello $Firstname: Profiting from Personalisation, AI Edition on your local Amazon store. You can download the illustrations and models from the book here: https://www.omnichannelinstitute.com/en/resources You can also learn more about the Personalisation Cards and Canvas, which help teams turn the Bowtie of Personalisation into practical use cases, here: https://www.omnichannelinstitute.com/en/personalizationcards

In Chapter 22 of Hello $Firstname, Arild Horsberg reads ‘Achieving Organisational Maturity for Personalisation’. Arild Horsberg is general manager of Forte Optimize in Oslo, Norway. In this chapter, he reads the final chapter of Part Four, where the book brings people and skills, technology, and governance together and turns the maturity model into action. Knowing the levels of the back end of the Pyramid of Personalisation does not by itself help you move from one level to the next. This short chapter focuses on the actions needed to break through the otherwise invisible glass ceilings between Hack, Pack, and Stack. To break through from Hack to Pack, the chapter recommends stabilising the performance of your core platforms, moving from a simple email service provider to a real marketing automation or customer engagement platform, and establishing clarity around how the data layer should work. It also recommends establishing a brand LLM, transitioning your team of builders into a team of executors, and documenting both your existing and your future marketing processes. As the chapter puts it, building the car and driving it are two different jobs. To break through from Pack to Stack, the chapter recommends deploying complementary personalisation technologies, streamlining the content and data layers, and establishing agile, cross-functional journey teams with agentic support. Finally, it calls for realigning incentives and personalisation accountability around customer centricity, because if you keep measuring the old metrics, you will not get the new results you are after. In his reflection at the end, Arild agrees wholeheartedly and adds one piece of advice: do not let IT have the decisive role in this process. It must be owned by the people responsible for customer communication and the customer journey. And make sure that person has enough empowerment not only to say no to ideas, but to say yes, this is how we are going to do it. More resources from the Hello $Firstname universe You can buy the physical book here: https://amzn.eu/d/6jV4QZT If the Amazon EU link does not work in your country, please search for Hello $Firstname: Profiting from Personalisation, AI Edition on your local Amazon store. You can download the illustrations and models from the book here: https://www.omnichannelinstitute.com/en/resources You can also learn more about the Personalisation Cards and Canvas, which help teams turn the Bowtie of Personalisation into practical use cases, here: https://www.omnichannelinstitute.com/en/personalizationcards

In Chapter 21 of Hello $Firstname, Yogita Wadhwa reads ‘Governance and Processes’. Yogita Wadhwa works in what she calls the messy middle, where strategy, technology, data, and execution have to come together for things to actually work. She has spent more than 25 years working with large enterprises across the US, Australia, and the Middle East. In this chapter, she reads the third deep dive into the back end of the Pyramid of Personalisation. The chapter opens at Matas, the Danish beauty and health retailer, where a customer club of two million members has become the foundation for a profitable retail media business. On any given day, five competing messages might be lined up for the same customers: supplier campaigns, private label offers, helpful advice, and company news. Technology is rarely the bottleneck. Agreeing on the rules for who gets what is. The chapter frames governance around three questions: what is governed, who governs it, and how it is executed. It then works through three categories. Governance imposed by law covers data processing, privacy, and consent, from GDPR and Schrems II to double opt-in in Germany and the growing push for EU-only data storage. Governance imposed by other departments covers IT, procurement, HR, and brand guidelines, including who should own a brand LLM. Finally, governance you should impose yourself covers personalisation accountability, marketing data operations, your marketing operating model, contact and suppression policies, retail media policies, and martech governance. A recurring piece of advice is to involve legal, IT, and procurement sooner rather than later. Another is to take charge of how personalisation is measured before someone else does, using control groups and preparing senior peers for the shift towards journey-centric metrics such as customer lifetime value. In her reflection at the end, Yogita singles out one principle: only what is described can be repeated, whether by a colleague or, increasingly, by an AI agent. Before you automate a process, you need to understand it well enough yourself. Where are the handoffs? Which decisions require judgement? Which exceptions matter? If ownership is vague and knowledge lives in someone’s head, AI does not make that complexity disappear. It simply scales it. That, she argues, is why governance matters more in the AI era, not less. More resources from the Hello $Firstname universe You can buy the physical book here: https://amzn.eu/d/6jV4QZT If the Amazon EU link does not work in your country, please search for Hello $Firstname: Profiting from Personalisation, AI Edition on your local Amazon store. You can download the illustrations and models from the book here: https://www.omnichannelinstitute.com/en/resources You can also learn more about the Personalisation Cards and Canvas, which help teams turn the Bowtie of Personalisation into practical use cases, here: https://www.omnichannelinstitute.com/en/personalizationcards