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The last couple of months, I have been thinking a lot about a new framework for how businesses and marketers plan Experiences. In part, this thinking was triggered by the AI Agent wave, which will eventually result in agentic enterprises where humans and AI agents work alongside each other delivering (digital) labor. The other part that triggered this is the evolving state of (marketing) technology, where technology is finally starting to live up to its promise of bringing together customer data, signals, triggers, and intents on the one hand, and content, messaging, and actions on the other hand, creating exactly the right experience for prospects and customers at exactly the right time, in the right channel.

A customer case

I had a customer case at hand, where I was thinking about such framework: how can we marry on the one hand the content and messaging this customer has (for example, what does a customer need to know when something important in his or hers life change), with the behaviours, signals and intents from prospects and customers on the other hand (for example, when a customer registers a new addition to it’s family), to almost seamlessly and autonomously deliver those value adding experiences. Today, this can obviously be done, but it is often the task of disparate business functions, and what experiences are possible is often related to the creativity and imagination of the marketeer and business owner responsible. My thoughts were that this should not be manual, that this should not be rule based, and that it should not be locked into business functions and silos.

Then my good friend and mentor Kenneth wrote this excellent piece around segment driven experiences, and the rise of data activation, which immediately triggered the following thought:

One of the many million dollar questions: who / what / how is decided that a prospect / customer is eligible? Is that still the marketeers job, who is then in essence building a sentient experience layer that triggers whenever someone qualifies for the triggers? Or will this increasingly be AI driven (likely)?

The Sentient Experience Layer

And here, it landed for me:

with the advancements in technology and AI today, companies should build a ‘sentient experience layer’: one that can marry a prospects’ or customers’ data, signals, behaviours and intentions, with a companies’ content, messaging, and actions to orchestrate and execute the exact right experience, at exactly the right moment, in exactly the right channel. This sentient experience layer, will contain an ever growing set of experiences, either manually created or AI invoked, ready to ‘deploy’, whenever a prospect or customer is eligible for any of such experiences. Eligibility can be determined through a simple rule based trigger (like a renewal journey) or much more advanced AI modelling, or even autonomous agents.

Now you will probably say, the concept of Sentient Marketing, or Sentient Design is not new. True. Forbes wrote about Sentient Marketing back in 2019 already. But since then, the technology has evolved, and AI has evolved so much now that building and operating a sentient experience layer is quickly becoming a reality. I also firmly believe that this is not about Sentient Marketing alone, it is much broader. So how I see the evolution is that we move:

• From Pre-determined, predefined and pre-orchestrated campaigns, journeys and experiences –> to Real time generated, AI determined, and AI informed moments, actions, and responses
• From Communications and experiences driven by Marketing & Communications teams –> to Experiences delivered across all phases of the customer lifecycle, involving all business functions, including sales, commerce, service and even supply chainSilo-ed
• From departments and goals –> to company goals orchestrated around the prospects and customers goals and objectives

Delivering sentient experiences are about how to deliver what is right for the customer, not the departmental silos

Characteristics of the Sentient Experience Layer

Building and operating a sentient experience layer has profound organisational implications:

• First, it becomes much more important to understand how you – as a company – can show up to your prospective customers in a way that suits them, at a moment and channel that is convenient to them. Again my mentor Kenneth beautifully wrote down that 80% of a buying decisions has already been made before a prospect is coming to your doorstep. Google calls this the zero-moment of truth. This implies that marketing and sales is much more reactionary, and driven by a customers initial appetite or intent to which you need to act. Immediately when a customer shows a demand (I am in the market for new running shoes), you need to be there. A strong brand helps in consideration, but this contextual approach to marketing is largely what drives todays communications and sales.
• Second, Building a sentient experience requires a strong, and powerful Experience organization, being able to – again – understand what prospects and customers needs, and how you can show up. This requires an organization not focused on functions, like sales or service, or even channels. It requires an organization where people where together around customer goals and objectives, and lifecycle needs.
• Third, a sentient experience layer requires much more cross departmental and team alignment and collaboration. We can no longer think about experiences living in isolation, and in channels. With the rise of digital labour, and autonomous agents, situations where an email marketing campaign triggers a conversation with an AI agent, who makes a sale, changes a shipping address for delivery, and generates an accessory upsell in a service channel, who then creates a case follow up for a Sales representative to follow up on a specific inquiry, is now a reality.

Conclusion: Who is owning all this?

When the sentient experience layer is becoming thé layer where technology and AI bring together data, signals, triggers and behaviours, and content, messaging an action cross function, cross department and cross channel, The Chief Experience Officer and it’s experience team are the vocal owner of this piece, marrying business and IT to work together delivering these new sentient experiences.

There is much much more to unpack here, and every topic deserves it’s own deepening. I’ll save those for some follow up posts 🙂