AI is Rewriting the Rules of Customer Loyalty
Based on a survey of 1,000 U.S. consumer aged 18-65 conducted with Pollfish in May of this year, the findings of Amperity’s recent report about customer loyalty in the age of AI, reveals just how much services such as ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini are impacting the customer journey.
These LLM’s are not just answering questions, they are influencing where and how consumers spend their money. For example, just as with search engines, AI is used to research products, compare services, and plan travel.
So what’s new?
Amperity’s report found that a majority of consumers have discovered a brand through AI that they hadn’t considered before, while only a small fraction say they bypass AI entirely to go straight to brands online that they already know. But customer loyalty stops there. Most consumers said they’d switch brands for a better offer, even as they continue to value personalization.
To unpack what this shift means for marketers, especially those competing for attention in local and regional markets, Street Fight spoke with Derek Slager, co-founder and co-CEO of Amperity, a customer data cloud, about how AI is reshaping brand discovery and why relevance may carry more weight than personalization.
How should local retailers and multi-location brands rethink their marketing strategies if consumers are now starting their shopping journeys with AI instead of a search engine or brand web site?
Consumers want AI to narrow their options before they ever visit a website or walk into a store. That changes what brands need to optimize for. Instead of competing for clicks, they’re competing to become the recommendation.
AI systems prioritize relevance, consistency, and confidence. That means brands need accurate product information, authentic customer feedback, and experiences that consistently deliver on customer expectations. The objective isn’t to outsmart another algorithm. It’s to create enough value that AI can confidently recommend your brand.
More than half of respondents said AI has led them to discover brands they otherwise wouldn’t have considered. How is this an opportunity for smaller local businesses to compete with national brands?
This is one of the biggest structural shifts digital commerce has experienced. Historically, large brands benefited from marketing budgets and dominance in traditional search. AI changes that dynamic because large language models optimize for relevance and confidence, not brand size.
Our research found that more than half of consumers have already chosen a brand they hadn’t previously considered because of an AI recommendation. That creates a meaningful opportunity for regional retailers, franchises, and local businesses that deliver exceptional products and customer experiences.
Success depends on making it easy for AI to understand and trust your business. That means maintaining accurate product information, consistent business details, strong customer reviews, and demonstrating expertise in your category. AI is increasingly surfacing the brands most likely to solve a customer’s problem, regardless of whether they’re the biggest name in the market.
How should loyalty programs evolve to remain effective in an environment if AI is surfacing competing options?
AI makes transactional loyalty easier to replace. If every assistant can instantly compare prices, promotions, and rewards across competing brands, points alone become much less of a differentiator.
The brands that build customer loyalty will be the ones that consistently make people feel recognized and understood. That requires a trusted, real-time understanding of the customer across every interaction, whether they’re shopping online, visiting a store, opening an email, or using a mobile app.
When brands combine meaningful rewards with relevant experiences that save customers time or reduce friction, they build customer loyalty that’s much harder for competitors to disrupt.
Which channel should marketers invest first, particularly those with limited budgets?
The research reinforces that the fundamentals haven’t changed. Consumers still value brands that recognize them consistently, respect their data, and deliver reliable experiences across every channel.
Marketers shouldn’t rush to adopt every new AI capability before addressing the underlying data. If customer information is fragmented, experiences are inconsistent, or trust is missing, AI simply scales those problems.
The first investment should be building trusted customer context. Once brands have accurate, connected customer data, AI becomes significantly more valuable because it has the context needed to make better decisions and deliver genuinely relevant experiences.
Nearly 58% of respondents said “creepy” personalization makes them less likely to choose a brand. Where should marketers draw the line between relevance and intrusion, and what are the biggest mistakes you see brands making today?
The difference between helpful and creepy isn’t how much data a brand has. It’s whether the personalization matches what the customer reasonably expects in that moment.
Customers are generally willing to share information when it creates a better experience. What they don’t want is personalization that feels disconnected from their relationship with the brand or reveals information in unexpected ways.
The biggest mistake brands make is assuming more personalization automatically creates better experiences. It doesn’t. Effective personalization uses the right information at the right time to remove friction or help someone make a decision.
Trusted customer context allows brands to personalize with precision instead of overwhelming customers with irrelevant or repetitive messages.
How can local retailers and franchises turn privacy and transparency into part of their customer experience rather than simply a compliance exercise?
Nearly the same percentage are more willing to engage with personalized experiences when they trust how their information is being handled.
Retailers can build trust instead of treating privacy as a legal requirement. Be transparent about what data is collected, why it’s collected, and how it benefits the customer. Then honor those preferences consistently across every interaction.
As AI becomes more integrated into commerce, trust becomes a competitive advantage that can drive customer loyalty. Transparency isn’t just about compliance. It’s how brands earn permission to deliver the personalized experiences customers actually want.
