New research from Havas reveals a growing disconnect between corporate enthusiasm for AI and consumer concerns about trust, transparency and authenticity, writes Darragh Kelly.
There is something slightly at odds with the AI conversations we are having. Inside businesses, much of it is about what AI can remove: time, cost, effort, inefficiency. All reasonable questions and ambitions. And in many ways, they are the smart conversations to be having.
But customers experience AI from a very different perspective. They don’t experience the productivity gain, they don’t experience the efficiencies that businesses seek. They experience the chatbot. The recommendation. The search result. The piece of content. The customer service interaction. The moment when something that used to involve a person suddenly doesn’t. And that creates a very different question. What does all this AI efficiency feel like from the other side?
That was the question behind Havas’ latest research into AI and the consumer. Globally, the study involved 10,558 people across seven markets and more than 21,000 evaluations of AI-enabled experiences. In Ireland, we asked 1,500 adults the same questions to understand where Irish consumers follow the global story, and where they stand apart from it. For brands, the answer is both encouraging and cautionary.
Using AI is already normal, but that doesn’t mean brands using it is fully trusted.
The first important finding is that AI hasn’t arrived in Ireland with a single dramatic moment. Nobody suddenly turned on a switch as if life is now classified as before or after AI, it has simply gradually seeped into everyday life.
Now, 71% of Irish adults say they use AI regularly, while 66% agree it is now part of everyday life. One in two encounter it frequently on social media platforms.
However, acceptance has not kept pace with adoption. Only 43% of Irish consumers say they feel confident using AI, six percentage points below the global figure. With just 34% saying AI feels relevant to their lives, nine points below the global figure, and 43% say they are uncomfortable with AI appearing on social media platforms.
These distinctions matter. Presence is not permission. People may use AI to search, compare, create, plan itineraries and make decisions, while simultaneously remaining uncertain about how it works, why it is being used and whose interests it is actually serving.
For brands, ubiquity should not be confused with acceptance or an automatic request for the presence of more AI.
The efficiency trap
A real danger for brands and how their audiences and customers interact with them is the fact that businesses and consumers are measuring the success of AI from different perspectives. And they are using two very different scorecards.
Naturally enough, the business case for AI starts with efficiency, with time savings, cost reductions and operational efficiencies among the dominant perceived benefits. Consumers though aren’t sitting back and admiring all those efficiencies. They judge what happens to their experience and what they have possibly lost. Irish consumers are already noticing the trade-off.
Almost half encounter AI through customer service and chatbots, while 63% encounter it in brand-owned and direct environments. When the experience works, the technology can almost disappear. But when it doesn’t, the cost to the brand can be immediate. 71% agree that AI-powered customer service can be frustrating when it leaves them stuck in a loop, while 45% say that when AI fails, they quickly lose confidence in the associated brand. So the removal of frictions with AI which businesses seek can also be the trap which pushes customers away.
Sameness may be a brand’s biggest risk
There is another tension here for marketers. As AI makes creating things faster and easier, it also makes it easier for everybody to create more of the same. More of the same visual cues, more of the same language, more of the same identities, more of the same triggers.
But almost half of Irish consumers believe AI used by brands can make things look, feel or sound ‘the same’. 51%, say it makes brands feel as though they are cutting corners. And just 28% trust brands to use AI responsibly – that’s seven points below the global figure. AI can help everyone become more competent, but that does not mean it automatically makes anyone memorable.
That should concern anyone responsible for building a brand. AI can work perfectly for the organisation and still feel wrong to the person interacting with it. Or to put it another way, what saves the business can cost the brand.
People aren’t rejecting AI. They’re questioning your motives.
Our Irish findings suggest something more nuanced than an AI backlash. People are not simply saying ‘no’. They are asking ‘why?’ Only 22% say brands’ current use of AI feels trustworthy. 61% describe it as misleading. 70% are concerned that brands using AI could expose them to false or misleading information. Perhaps most tellingly, 56% believe that if an AI chat tool recommends a brand, a company has paid for the recommendation, even though that commercial model is not necessarily what sits behind the answer.
That tells us something important about the emerging AI enabled economy. Trust is not just about whether the technology works. It’s about whether people understand why it is doing what it is doing. When they do understand, their attitudes shift. 38% of Irish consumers say they would still buy an AI-recommended product if they understood why it was recommended. And 73% believe brands, traditional media and digital platforms should disclose their use of AI.
In other words, transparency isn’t an unexpected bonus, it is increasingly expected as part of the experience.
The closer AI gets to a human need, the more valuable it becomes
This is where the findings become much more optimistic. Consumers aren’t rejecting AI itself; they often push back on its presence when it doesn’t have a clear purpose. Across our research, the strongest AI experiences consistently share three characteristics: utility, credibility and appeal.
Utility asks whether AI makes something meaningfully easier.
Credibility asks whether people can understand and believe what sits behind it.
Appeal asks whether it makes the experience more worthwhile, rather than simply more novel.
When brands get these dimensions right, the difference is significant. Globally, high-scoring AI experiences are associated with 4.4 times higher engagement, 1.6 times stronger brand desire and 1.5 times stronger growth potential versus low-scoring experiences.
At a category level, the pattern is just as revealing. AI performs particularly well when it helps people with tasks such as understanding something, comparing alternatives, navigating complexity or making decisions. It performs less well when its role becomes primarily promotional or when it attempts to simulate influence. Fundamentally the technology may be starting from the same point, but the needs and outcomes all differ depending on where our audiences are in the customer journey.
Which is why we should start with the experience and then investigate and design for how AI can be beneficial and worthwhile. There is enormous pressure on businesses to have an AI strategy, but a more fruitful starting point may be to start with first looking for the problem behind people’s problem and investigating how – or if – AI can be helpful in that context.
- Where are people struggling and why is that?
- Could AI genuinely make that experience better?
- And what human qualities must be protected while introducing AI to that experience?
That means mapping customer experiences, not with the goal of finding more places to put AI, but to find the places where it can make a meaningful difference.
With every new technology, there is a very real temptation to apply it and demonstrate what’s possible. To add capabilities because we can. To make the technology visible enough that everybody notices how innovative we are. To be at the cutting edge of our fields. But consumers rarely wake up wanting brands to impress them with their new technology. Often that can amount to a brand trying to answer a question nobody has asked.
Really, people want the insurance policy to be easier to understand, for the car choice to be easier to navigate, the shopping trip to involve less hassle and, by some small miracle, for the customer service problem to be actually… solved. AI may be changing almost everything about how these services and experiences can be delivered. But as we all consider these new frontiers, it’s worth remembering…
Help before you impress.
Darragh Kelly is Strategy Director with Havas Dublin
