As artificial intelligence continues integrating into our daily lives, the way consumers interact with AI is rapidly evolving. From voice assistants to AI-powered tools, how people use and perceive this technology reveals valuable insights for businesses — especially in retail and mobile carrier industries. One of the most important takeaways is this: A combination of human and AI expertise is essential for delivering superior consumer experiences.

How Are Consumers Using AI?

Our latest survey sheds light on how consumers are engaging with AI:*

47% of respondents use AI voice assistants like Siri or Alexa, making it the most commonly adopted AI tool.
38% have interacted with AI chatbots, such as ChatGPT or Microsoft Copilot, underscoring a growing comfort with conversational AI.
Only 10% of individuals use AI for work or school, while nearly 40% engage with AI for personal tasks, indicating that consumer-focused AI is outpacing enterprise applications in popularity.
70% of respondents notice AI-generated content on social media, with 16% reporting significant exposure.

These statistics highlight a fascinating trend: While consumers are exploring AI’s capabilities, there’s a clear preference for personal, casual interactions over professional reliance. Why is that?

Trust and AI: the Human Factor

Despite AI’s growing popularity, trust remains a barrier, especially in the workplace. While 42% of respondents believe AI can streamline daily tasks,* concerns linger about its reliability and ethical implications. And skepticism around AI’s impact on jobs persists, with 57% predicting job elimination will outpace job creation.* But, to have the biggest impact, enterprise AI works best when it’s designed, tested, and deployed using human intelligence, emotion, and insight.

To deliver impactful, personalized experiences that resonate with consumers, AI needs to be guided by real people. While AI can perform tasks efficiently, it’s humans who build trust, solve complex issues, and provide emotional reassurance. By combining AI efficiency with empathetic human interaction, businesses can alleviate consumer concerns and foster long-term loyalty.

Using AI to Create Better Consumer Experiences

A collaborative approach that brings together the strengths of both AI and human expertise can significantly enhance the overall customer experience while unlocking remarkable potential for innovation and growth.

At Assurant, we’re leveraging the invaluable insights and knowledge of our human team members to guide and refine our AI models. This synergy enhances consumer interactions in four distinct and impactful ways.

1. Personalized Service at Scale

Our Dynamic Fulfillment platform leverages machine learning and AI algorithms to quickly analyze customer data and provide hyper-personalized claims resolution recommendations. Through the human expertise of our technology and service delivery teams, we’re applying these recommendations in meaningful, relevant ways.

When a customer approaches us with a device problem, Assurant’s Dynamic Fulfillment platform evaluates several factors, such as the device’s make and model, the customer’s location, and their protection plan details. Based on this analysis, we recommend the best solution tailored to their specific issue.

Whether it’s through same-day, come-to-you repair technicians or 24-hour device or part replacement, we’re able to provide real-time solutions that meet our customers’ unique needs.

2. Efficient and Empathetic Customer Support

In our contact centers, we’re blending AI’s efficiency with human empathy to create a seamless support experience for our customers.

By training our AI engine on existing use cases and real human interactions, and testing it against our most common customer inquiries, we’ve ensured that human empathy is built directly into its responses. When assisting customers, Assurant’s customer care representatives have the option to use these AI-generated responses or modify them as needed to resolve unique or complicated claims issues.

80% of the time, our Assurant customer care representatives choose to use the generated response as-is, allowing them to resolve customer issues more quickly. This close collaboration between our employees and AI technology has led to a nine-point increase in customer satisfaction scores.

3. Responsible AI Governance and Oversight

At Assurant, we’ve established guidelines for our AI model creation and usage across the business, especially in areas that directly impact consumers. We recommend businesses take similar action to:

Define how and where to use AI and align its governance with your business goals.
Ensure transparency in your AI decision-making processes.
Train your AI models and reduce bias by using high-quality representative data.
Implement measures to protect sensitive consumer data and prevent breaches.
Test and validate your AI models to ensure accuracy and reliability.
Stay up to date on AI regulations and data protection laws.

4. Seamless Predictive Experiences

As AI continues to evolve, we’re constantly looking for new ways to harness its capabilities and create unrivaled customer experiences. At Assurant, we want to do more than meet customer needs after a problem has occurred. We want to use AI to predict and resolve issues before they happen.

What if our Assurant AI algorithms could recognize when a customer’s device was almost out of storage? Then, we could offer them an upgrade before they run into a problem. Or what if it could detect increased power usage in a smart appliance? We could recommend they book a repair technician, potentially preventing damage to their appliance and home.

By working together with AI, we can create unique, impactful support solutions that help real people solve — or even prevent — real issues, improving their daily lives and engendering long-term loyalty and success.

The Path Forward: Innovation and Empathy

The numbers don’t lie. While AI is a powerful tool, retailers and mobile carriers shouldn’t underestimate the importance of the human element, especially when it comes to building trust. Consumers’ growing interaction with AI presents an opportunity to enhance experiences, but success depends on balancing technology’s capabilities with human expertise.

This collaborative approach not only addresses consumer expectations, but also positions your business as a leader in innovation and empathy. By combining the best of AI and human ingenuity, you’ll deliver experiences that resonate — and create a future where technology serves humanity, not the other way around.

*Assurant Connected Consumer Trend Report, 2024

Building Trust in Enterprise AI: a Human-Centric Approach

Biju Nair

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