What you need to know:

• Six months ago conversational commerce wasn’t really on the radar of Deloitte Digital’s National Lead Partner, Leon Doyle. Now Doyle is reorganising his entire content team around it – and believes it’s coming at the $200bn content industry like a freight train.
• AI-powered chatbots and the speed at which all major platforms are developing and deploying, particularly on messaging apps, are accelerating – ultimately they’re heading to full-funnel capabilities where in travel, for example, discovery to purchase is completed in a single conversational thread. 
• Doyle says brands must prepare for far more content governance to clear “content debt” fast. I.e. start writing not only for humans, but commerce-enabling AI applications which will ingest forgotten, incorrect, outdated or even misleading corporate information and content lurking in digital corners that the bots will otherwise scrape to build their customer responses from.
• That means content marketing is now risk management and will require restructuring content architecture and taxonomies and focusing on “conversation design, not just content design”, says Doyle. “This is what my team are doing.”
• That also sounds like an opportunity for a cyclical reinvention for consulting practices and business models.
• While Doyle cites a handful of brands including CommBank and Qantas aiming for early mover advantage locally, Deloitte Digital's Global Marketing and Commerce Lead, Nick Garrett, says conversational commerce is “exploding in every market”.
• “If $200 billion is moving into play,” says Garrett, “no client, no organisation, could not be looking at this at a forensic level.”
• What does it mean for the broader content supply chain? Disruption for all but absolute tier one providers, per Garrett – who’s also joined the ranks of those underwhelmed by the vanilla results of an industry-wide push to personalisation-powered transformation.
• There's more detail and nuance in the podcast. Get the full download here.

CX machina

Machine-to-machine CX and an explosion of conversational commerce is set to bring $200bn of brand content contracts into play, forcing a total rethink of how brands and their suppliers structure and deliver content – and maybe driving the next classic re-invention of consulting services and advisory practices.

Deloitte Digital’s National Lead Partner, Leon Doyle and Global Marketing and Commerce Lead, Nick Garrett are going all-in to get ahead of what they see as the next commerce curve: conversational bots acting as the interface for pretty much everything. (Philip K Dick called it in 1954. It just came a little earlier than he anticipated.)

Doyle thinks chatbots will be able to replicate his recent in-store Mecca face cream buying experience “within a matter of months”. Much of the action, he says, will take place in messaging apps. “Whether it's Instagram or Facebook or WhatsApp, etcetera, all of these platforms are creating these capabilities so that they can enable retailers to have these conversations.” Humans may be brought into the loop at times, “but the machines are picking up the bulk of communications up the front – and for the full customer experience (CX) lifecycle,” says Doyle.

“I'm browsing, exploring, learning, trying and transacting, I'm purchasing, I'm re-contracting. I've got an issue I need help with. It's end-to-end, which is what is really, really cool about this.” All via voice recognition-driven conversations, where the speed of development is “mind boggling”.

Hence Doyle reprogramming Deloitte Digital’s content teams. It’s no longer about writing purely for humans. It’s about writing for bots in an age of machine-to-machine commerce ­– and machine-to-machine CX.

“On one side of the spectrum the machines are crawling the digital platforms, data sources, learning about products, services, information, content and bringing that together to then provide services, answer questions, help with transactions,” he says.

“On the other side, you have machine agents working for you … not asking another human, but interrogating another machine … and these agents get smarter the more they learn about us … and they deal with the plethora of machines in the cloud to get what they need. That's machine-to-machine [customer experience].”

For brands, the supply chain, and pretty much everyone else, that has some deep implications. Not just rethinking how content is written, organised and delivered, but also hunting down and rooting-out brand content that may have languished forgotten in some digital recess – but which the bots may well pick up and present to customers. Content marketing is therefore morphing into a risk management exercise and governance issue, per Doyle.

Close encounters

Locally Doyle cites CommBank’s Ceba chatbot as one of “three cool examples” of brands getting ahead of the curve, along with Qantas’ Concierge bot (the firm is starting to ramp up other AI use cases, including hooking dry chicken from in-flight menus). The third is an international chatbot that powers Metador Network’s GuideGeek for travellers.

“Metador is one of the biggest independent travel content producers in the world, and what they're doing is they're leveraging all of their travel content to inform GuideGeek, which is a conversational AI, so you can go to WhatsApp or Instagram right now and add GuideGeek and have a chat,” says Doyle, who tried it recently via WhatsApp. “It was like speaking to the most informed, friendly travel agent I’ve ever had in the world.” Suffice to say he’s a fan. “Could you tell it wasn’t a human? Absolutely. But it’s getting closer and closer.”

Salesforce is saying pretty much the same thing, enabling brands to create autonomous agents within weeks that can solve problems – and cross-sell – end-to-end simply by being connected to and trained on existing company data. As Doyle says, the promise is humans talking to machines and then machines all talking to each other in milliseconds and taking the required actions, prompting next best actions, follow-ups and so on ad infinitum.

Total retool

For Deloitte Digital’s content team, that means a total retool.

“For the last 15-20, years organisations, our clients, have been working really hard to put all of their content – or as much as was meaningful and helpful for their customers – online, and curating it. So of course, our content team did that. They were content strategists, content architects, information architects, all of the specialisations – and they did that to optimise content for human consumption. That was a big part of what we did,” says Doyle.

“Now, as the machines come online, the machines are accessing that content to teach themselves. So what my content team are now doing is saying, ‘okay that information architecture, for example, that taxonomy, might have been good for a human, but it's actually not that great for a machine’. So now we have to rethink content, content strategy, content structure, for an era of humans and for machine consumption. And that means actually approaching content quite differently.”

Which is what his content team is now doing.

“They're thinking about AI conversation strategy, not just content strategy. They're thinking about conversation design, not just content design. And rather than design just for one platform, they're actually thinking about how they structure content in modules for conversations across multiple modes – website, app, chat.”

Doyle thinks the broader market – brands and supply chain – will likely reach a similar conclusion.

“If your organisation isn't looking at your content and how you structure it for this new era, I would have a look at that … The more mission critical the content is, absolutely the more urgent it is.”

Deep impact

Nick Garrett reckons conversational commerce is “exploding in every market”, though some are further out from the epicentre. He says the US and Asia markets are earliest – but globally the application of AI-driven content runs deeper than marketing. “It doesn't have to be just marketing assets, it's my own assets. It's educational, it's internal communications to employee bases. So it's the whole EX, CX, BX spectrum [i.e. employee experience, customer experience, brand experience].”

Which is why Garrett thinks that at least $200bn worth of content contracts, or “marketing asset creation” deals, are now up for grabs – or soon will be. That is a conservative figure, “because it's 70 per cent of what an agency would get paid for – and everything that existed pre Gen AI [becomes] obsolete”, suggests Garrett.

Either way, “If $200 billion is moving in play, whether you're a holding company, a consultancy, any other new age tech company … no one, no client, no organisation, could not be looking at this at a forensic level”. Deloitte’s own client conversations indicate that many are.

“This is a 10 to 20x conversation in the last 12 months, if not 18 months,” says Garrett. “And we can't be alone.”

Debt collector

With a content tsunami unleashed by generative AI, controlling what gets published becomes more critical.

“All we're doing is taking the bottleneck from marketing into the legal and governance team,” says Garrett. “So it's really understanding the complete supply chain of how all of those things flow through an organisation. And whatever way you look at from a marketing asset perspective, it's probably the same type of volume, if not more, from an owned asset perspective.”

Likewise how brands deal with “content debt,” per Leon Doyle, or risk it coming back to bite them.

“We have a term in tech transformation: ‘tech debt’. As you keep putting in the newest platforms, you create tech debt that at some point you have to clean up. We're now talking about ‘content debt’ because in the rush to update, modernise, simplify, streamline content, inevitably you create content that was okay, or wasn't disastrous. It might be in some dark corner of a website that you ignore. The problem is, the machines are here and they are learning from all of the content and all of the links,” says Doyle.

“So the question for organisations is, how are you fixing your content debt? The reality is that organisations must be aware that when any of their customers/members/citizens/residents, ask a conversational agent a question, the expectation is that they get the right answer. That’s a risk,” he adds.

“Then the questions they should be asking themselves are what are the processes, measures, production models, governance models they're putting in place to ensure that as much as possible, the answer that is pumped out the other end is correct? Of course, the more critical or regulated the service or product, the more pressure there will be for accuracy of content,” adds Doyle.

The upshot is that some of “some of [Mi3’s] listeners might realise that maybe they're not in a content business, they're in a risk management business”. Doyle thinks that gives CMOs another shot at a seat at the board table.

“There is not there is not a single board in this country that is not really worried about risk, that is not really worried about cybersecurity, that is not really thinking deeply about what Gen AI does to the business, the broader industry. The quicker that marketers can form a really strong view on this, the better … This is your way into the topic, because there is a strong connection between the content that you're creating and a potential risk to the organisation.”

Vanilla sky

Content risk management aside, the rise of generative AI brings another risk: More bland customer experiences heaped on top of already pretty average results, given the collective dollars spent on CX and personalisation at scale in recent years.

Doyle says it’s already happening.

“I'm seeing more and more content that I feel is generated with the help of machines and … it’s missing that natural human spark.

Garrett puts it more bluntly. As a result of believing the hype on tech and putting too little effort into strategy, “in every single category, and particularly Australia, there is a lot of sameness, ubiquity, very little true differentiation”, he says.

“The conversation that we're hearing a lot of – it's global, and we're certainly getting a lot of in Australia – is ‘how do you help me differentiate my customer experiences, and how do you differentiate my business?’”

Garrett says the answer to that question revolves around three core planks: Trust, efficiency and ‘enjoyability’.

“The magic is actually doing all three in equal measure … but we've lost that magic, the enjoyability piece.”

Transformers

Some would argue that the big consulting firms have been central to the wave of CX-led digital transformation in recent years, simultaneously selling a promise of high calibre creativity to avoid the kind of vanilla experiences that the industry is seemingly struggling to solve. Bar Accenture Song, the rest of the consulting majors appear to have cooled to varying degrees on trying to blend agency services with integration/transformation.

Locally Deloitte recently offloaded its advertising business, though Garrett and Doyle state that its commitment to creativity – it still has a significant UX/UI design-led creative studio – is anything but diminished.

“There's a lot of conceptual thinkers in that broader [creative] unit. So I don't think people have not doubled down on creativity,” says Garrett.

“I would say that the classic agency services – where you're dealing with communication and marketing, asset and delivery, and let's call it advertising – those capabilities are probably better partnered with the consultancy in some form ... versus being within [Deloitte Digital],” he adds.

“One of our biggest competitors has a very different model, very different structure, and they may be looking for broader end-to-end marketing services that replicate a holding company. That would be the antithesis of what we would want to do.

“So if we're going upstream from a customer growth and commercial strategy and we are really driving on that customer transformation technology side, and building the two bridges and having world class delivery, then there's an ability to collaborate with the creative industries in that side. But it's also having a different shape of creative thinker within our own organisation that complements it.”

Doyle underlines that view.

“We don't need to be everything to everyone strategically, so that is a big part of why we made that move.”

The big consulting firms are clearly mulling how to get ahead of the disruption coming for them as much as everyone else as the likes of Salesforce enable customers to spin up their own commerce and service assistants and add-ons, and a wave of others create customisable templates for customers to use AI to do the work that has to date made up much billable bulk.

Garrett thinks that on the creative and content services side, only the very best "tier one" providers will remain relatively unscathed.

“If your bread and butter was making [content at] scale and you’re dependent on bums and seats, a little bit of automation and a bit of offshore, you’re probably staring into a pretty uncomfortable place right now.” 

There's more detail and nuance in the podcast. Get the full download here.