The Experience Loop

For decades, brands have focused on customer conversions as the ultimate goal, treating each interaction as a step toward a single transaction. But this linear journey never reflected reality. It was a device marketers used to bring order to the chaos of human decision-making.

Today, the most successful brands aren’t optimizing for one-time purchases. They are building continuous, immersive experiences that foster long-term relationships.

This is the key to differentiation, higher profits and greater market share. It’s leveraging AI to design experiences that accurately reflect the reality of human decision-making, not by predicting the perfect path but by enabling a continuous loop of engagement.

Instead of treating customer interactions as a sequence of touchpoints leading to conversion, AI empowers brands to create an Experience Loop — a dynamic, self-reinforcing relationship where every interaction refines and enhances the next.

This is the future of CX. It’s about building systems that understand, enhance and innovate in real time, strengthening customer connections at every touchpoint.

From preset options to real-time understanding

Customers expect experiences that adapt to them, not the other way around. AI makes this possible by recognizing intent, responding in real time and evolving interactions as the relationship deepens.

"It’s not about a single, perfect path — it’s about growing relationships through AI-driven, iterative engagement," says Paul Carysforth, Experience Analytics Director at Valtech.

This shift is particularly important when it comes to personalization.

Too often, brands still treat it as a one-time optimization focused on making better recommendations.

But personalization should be much more than that. "All we want is to be seen as individuals. AI has the potential to finally make that happen — not by pushing products, but by designing experiences that actually reflect who we are and what we care about," says Helle Jensen, Nordic Executive Director, Experience Design at Valtech.

Lexus has embraced this shift by applying the philosophy of Omotenashi, the Japanese art of hospitality, to digital experiences. Known for anticipating customer needs and delivering seamless, deeply personal service, Lexus is now extending that same approach into its strategy with agentic AI.

We are obsessed with the customer. We try to treat them as if they are guests in our own home, anticipating their needs and answering exactly what they are looking for. And there is no better way to achieve this than having an AI agent search our entire database of Lexus information to craft responses and serve a personalized page that precisely meets their needs.

- Loïc Charlon, Senior Manager, Lexus & Kinto Digital Experience at Toyota Motor Europe 

By deploying agentic AI, Lexus ensures that every interaction refines and enhances the next — just like a conversation with a trusted advisor.

"Our vision is to make luxury personal," Charlon explains. "We wanted to offer a more personalized experience on the website. Unlike a standard page, where everything is predefined and customers must find their own way to the information they need, our AI agents guide the customer more intuitively, creating less friction."

This is the experience loop in action. Lexus is using AI to ensure every moment of engagement strengthens the long-term connection with customers.

From borrowed spaces to owned experiences

While AI-powered personalization has traditionally focused on improving efficiency, real differentiation comes from building ecosystems that sustain long-term engagement. Brands that fail to take control of this shift risk becoming interchangeable, losing customer relationships to AI-powered aggregators and search engines.

"The way these technologies are built is to provide the most pleasing response to the largest number of people. But if you’re tailoring for the masses, you end up with a perfectly average experience — which is ironic, because customer experience is supposed to feel highly personal," says Joe Sutherland, Director of the Emory University Center for AI Learning.

That’s why leading brands are shifting their focus from transactional optimization to AI-driven experience loops that they own.

Brands have an opportunity to craft specialized AI-driven experiences that set them apart from AI search engines like Perplexity or ChatGPT. The ones that don’t will get disintermediated out of relevance.

- Karl Hampson, Valtech’s Data & AI CTO 

Not On The High Street (NOTHS), a curated online marketplace featuring over 5,500 small creative UK businesses, is doing just that. Faced with the challenge of surfacing more than 350,000 unique products without overwhelming or underwhelming their audience, NOTHS implemented Google Cloud’s Vertex AI Search for retail.

The results were transformative. Within just 12 weeks, a production-ready AI search tool was live. Search conversion rates increased by 10% year-over-year, and revenue per user rose by 2.2%

But what makes the NOTHS transformation especially powerful is the strategic intent behind it: Rather than relying on borrowed digital spaces to grow, NOTHS built an owned experience loop, one that turns every search query into a smarter, more personalized discovery, and strengthens the bond between the customer and the brand with each interaction.

From omnichannel ubiquity to multimodal immersion

Omnichannel has been the gold standard for digital experience for years. But today’s customers expect more than just compatibility across devices. They want a connection across every mode of interaction.

AI plays a critical role in helping businesses meet that expectation. Gartner predicts that by 2027 40% of generative AI solutions will be multimodal, encompassing text, image, audio and video. Google’s Project Astra and GPT-4o's latest advancements illustrate how AI is now capable of interpreting and responding to multimodal inputs in real time. They understand images, video and voice all at once. This shift transforms how brands communicate, moving from static interactions to fully immersive, adaptive engagement.

Multimodal is replacing omnichannel. An omnichannel experience was about making sure you had a desktop and mobile-friendly experience. Multimodal is about how all your devices, all your senses, and all your contexts interact in a seamless way.

- Helle Jensen, Nordic Executive Director, Experience Design at Valtech

Wayfair is applying multimodal AI to improve how its customers search and shop. By blending text, image and preference-based inputs, the company is making it easier to navigate categories in which products are often unbranded or hard to describe. This approach enables more visual and intuitive discovery than basic keyword search, which is especially helpful in home décor and furniture, where style and context matter as much as specifications.

Closing the loop

Winning brands build systems for continuous connection. The Experience Loop is how they do it: a self-reinforcing cycle where every interaction feeds intelligence back into the ecosystem, improving the next touchpoint automatically.

Creating that kind of loop doesn’t require a massive overhaul from day one. It starts with a few key moves:

• Start small and iterate. Launch focused AI pilots. Test, learn and scale what delivers real value.

• Invest in your data foundation. But not at the cost of productivity. Deliver just enough data foundations to support each use case whilst incrementally following a strategic approach.

• Design for feedback. Make every interaction (internal or external) an opportunity to learn and improve.

• Stay flexible. Choose tools and platforms that allow your systems to evolve as customer expectations and business needs shift.

The result? A smarter, more responsive brand that deepens trust, sharpens personalization and strengthens customer relationships over time.

The brands that win will build loyalty and growth through continuous connection, powered by AI and fueled by every meaningful interaction across the experience ecosystem.