When is Personalization Not Personalization?
Many times, I read articles that claim to help retailers personalise their promotions, customer service responses, etc. My wife and I use at least two supermarkets’ loyalty apps, and they give us personalised offers. Except that quite a lot of them are for things we never buy. And they keep repeating offers on the same products. Many times, when you see statements about personalisation, what they really refer to is personalisation to everyone in a particular lifestyle segment. Which is good to a point but it’s not personal to an individual. The company marketeers keep their fingers crossed that then shoppers will like enough of the offers to avoid being offended.
In most cases personalisation to an individual is hard. The volume of data you need is huge and the number of work hours of data scientists who can do something useful with it is very expensive too, and there aren’t enough of them for all the companies that might benefit from them.
But the answer is AI, isn’t it? Let’s build an AI app to take care of it. Realistically, though, I don’t think we’re quite there yet – certainly not this year or next. Eventually, perhaps.
If the AI industry is still working towards building chatbots that can handle customer queries and solve customer problems as effectively as a human, it seems a little ambitious to expect AI to reliably create the promotions and related offers that customers would genuinely value, or to provide meaningful assistance throughout the online shopping experience.
There’s undoubtedly huge potential, but I think we need to be realistic about what AI can deliver today, and what may still take a little more time.
If you think I am wrong search “Vinted on the BBC” or go to www.sadvintedfaces.com.-
Posted by Brian Hume
2nd September 2026
