AI is not here to replace traditional marketing—it’s here to enhance it. AI’s real power lies in its ability to process vast amounts of data and surface actionable insights at scale, something traditional methods alone can’t achieve efficiently.

AI can no longer be treated as just another tool in the marketing toolkit, it’s becoming a fundamental capability that transforms how we approach marketing. The most effective strategy isn’t replacing traditional methods with AI but blending them to create something more powerful than either approach alone. At its core, marketing is still about storytelling, empathy, and human connection. What AI brings is speed, scale, and precision.

The future is about human-AI collaboration, where marketers use AI to optimize campaigns, personalize experiences, and measure ROI, while still leveraging the storytelling and relationship-building strengths of traditional marketing. For example, a national TV or print campaign can be fine-tuned by AI-driven analytics: machine learning can identify which audiences respond best to certain messages and suggest timing or placement adjustments. Meanwhile, creative teams use that insight to craft on-brand storytelling and memorable hooks. In practice, Sprinklr’s platform unifies channels – social, advertising, customer service, and even in-store feedback – so that AI can correlate online trends with offline actions.

The real opportunity? AI helps marketers act on real-time sentiment, behaviour, and even intent across channels. Blending AI with the art of marketing to create experiences that are not just efficient, but also deeply human.

Generative AI has been the latest trend to sweep the market, but it is being used and overused not always to most efficient results. How can brands use it while not diluting their image and core tenets?

Generative AI’s rise is undeniable. McKinsey estimates that it could add $4.4 trillion annually to the global economy, with marketing and sales among the top beneficiaries.

Gen AI is a powerful tool, but like any tool, it needs to be used thoughtfully. The risk brands face is losing their unique voice or authenticity by over-relying on AI-generated content without proper oversight.

To avoid diluting brand identity, companies should establish clear brand guidelines for AI use-defining tone, style, and messaging parameters. Human review remains critical to ensure the content aligns with brand values and resonates emotionally with audiences. The most successful brands use AI to augment their creative teams, enabling faster ideation and personalisation, without sacrificing the unique qualities that define their brand.

Research shows that brands combining AI with human creativity see up to 30% faster content production cycles, but those who neglect oversight risk eroding trust. The key is to use generative AI to amplify, not replace, brand storytelling. Brands should leverage AI for efficiency and scale but maintain rigorous quality control and ensure every output reflects their core tenets.

At Sprinklr, we view generative AI as an augmentation of human creativity rather than a replacement. It helps scale content creation and experiment rapidly, but the strategic vision and emotional connection must come from people. Brands that strike this balance will harness AI’s efficiency without compromising their core tenets.

Digital space is now where almost everything gets played. And brands are trying anything and everything just to attract eyeballs. Are there any dos and donts in terms of how brand should act in the digital sphere?

The digital landscape is crowded and competitive, but brands must resist the urge to chase every trend. AI is transforming marketing, but it’s not a silver bullet. Brands must focus on relevance, authenticity, and value. In today’s digital landscape, visibility is cheap, but trust is expensive. The brands that stand out aren’t the loudest, they’re the most consistent, relevant, and human.

Don’t resort to clickbait, intrusive ads, or tactics that compromise user privacy. Research says that AI-driven ad buying is quickly becoming the norm but warns that “brands must maintain transparency and control to avoid reputational risks.” The best brands use AI to deliver personalized, respectful experiences and build long-term relationships, not just short-term attention.

A key “do” is to invest in omnichannel consistency—ensure your brand voice and values are reflected across every digital touchpoint. A key “don’t” is to ignore feedback or automate away the human element. Brands that balance automation with empathy outperform those that don’t.

Smart automation, when used right, doesn’t replace the human element—it enhances it. By offloading repetitive, time-consuming tasks like tagging content, scheduling posts, or handling basic queries, AI allows marketers to spend more time on what matters: storytelling, strategy, and meaningful engagement. AI can also act as a bridge, helping brands scale their presence without losing their personality. Automation tools streamline publishing and engagement across social platforms—freeing teams to focus on creative campaigns and deeper interactions with core customers.

It is often forgotten that, brands, away from the digital element also offer customer experience and this is where loyalty gets built. Any two cents about this?

Digital is just one part of the customer journey. As I shared earlier, true loyalty is built on consistent, positive experiences—both online and offline. Sprinklr’s research shows that 80% of consumers say the experience a company provides is as important as its products or services. AI can help unify these experiences by providing a single view of the customer, enabling brands to anticipate needs and personalise service.

Customer experience isn’t limited to digital platforms. It’s the sum of every interaction a customer has with your brand, whether online, in-store, or after a purchase.

However, technology should never replace genuine human connection. The most beloved brands are those that use digital tools to empower their teams, not distance themselves from customers.

For example, AI can flag at-risk customers or surface upsell opportunities, but it’s the empathetic response from a human agent that cements loyalty.

Brands that blend digital efficiency with human warmth see higher retention and advocacy rates.

As generative AI enters creative spaces like fashion, advertising, and content production, it’s raising new ethical questions—particularly around consent, identity, and transparency. How should brands navigate these challenges as the technology continues to evolve?

Ethics must be at the heart of any AI strategy. As Harvard Business Review and McKinsey emphasize, brands need robust governance frameworks to ensure responsible AI use. This includes transparency about when AI is used, obtaining consent for data usage, and respecting intellectual property. For example, Sprinklr has implemented strict guidelines for AI-generated content to ensure it meets our standards for accuracy, fairness, and brand safety.

McKinsey’s research suggests that companies with strong ethical AI practices are 1.5x more likely to build customer trust. Brands should regularly audit their AI systems for bias, involve diverse teams in AI development, and educate stakeholders about responsible use. Ultimately, as generative AI becomes more pervasive, the brands that lead with integrity and transparency will be the ones that earn lasting loyalty.

At Sprinklr, we believe in Responsible AI — AI that empowers creativity but doesn’t compromise human dignity. We help brands build internal guardrails so they can innovate without losing sight of who they are, or who they’re serving.

How are brands in the Middle East connecting with their consumer today? What is driving them?

We're seeing a growing sense of urgency in this region compared to global markets. The Middle East is a very tightly connected market. Brands here are eager to enhance customer and product experience.

As the region continues to be identified for its creator and influencer economy. How do you suggest brands today leverage that?

The notion of free social media is no longer applicable. This requires a strategic investment in influencers and advocacy programs to effectively utilize the power of social and digital platforms. It's crucial to recognize that there's a cost associated with leveraging these channels. Specifically, embracing a concept we refer to as microambassadorship holds immense potential, though its success hinges on careful execution. Authenticity is paramount in this context – identifying individuals who genuinely resonate with the brand is essential. Unlike traditional celebrities, influencers connect with their audience on a personal level, and therefore, any endorsement must align with their true affinity for the brand.

To navigate this landscape effectively, technology becomes a key ally. Firstly, it aids in understanding the influencer's genuine interests and affinities, ensuring a more authentic partnership. Secondly, technology plays a critical role in monitoring and managing these partnerships. It acts as a vigilant force, patrolling and policing the influencer landscape, keeping a close eye on how influencers engage with the brand as well as their interactions with competitors and other content. This proactive monitoring is vital to avoid potential pitfalls and safeguard the brand image. In essence, the digital era demands a strategic and tech-driven approach to influencer marketing to capitalize on its power while mitigating risks associated with misinformation or damaging content.

With Sprinklr’s expansion into the region, what solutions are you looking to extend to brands and advertisers?

We offer two comprehensive product suites tailored to the needs of marketing buyers. The first is our Marketing and Social Suite, which encompasses a robust campaign framework. This includes strategic planning, briefing, copy creation, workflow management, governance, asset management, and a tagging infrastructure. Moreover, it features a sophisticated reporting infrastructure, allowing users to generate metadata, execute campaigns on preferred channels, and optimize across diverse markets, media types, and products. This all-encompassing suite empowers users with a potent combination of campaign content creation, workflow management, and optimization capabilities.

The second suite is our digital insights module, driven by our advanced digital listening capabilities. Leveraging a repository of publicly available data (relevant to brands), Sprinklr Insights enables users to gain a comprehensive understanding of customer sentiments. Users can explore customer preferences and concerns, analyze the language used when discussing products or competitors, and benchmark their brand against others in terms of product affection, brand perception, executive sentiment, and store preference. These insights serve as a foundation for developing enhanced content and campaign strategies.

Sprinklr's expansion will bring innovative technology closer to companies in the region – offering enhanced customer engagement, personalized shopping experiences, and efficient resolution of customer issues. It also facilitates real-time employee collaboration, AI-driven capabilities, and streamlined operations, benefiting companies and their customers.

This piece was first published in Communicate's inaugural Best Places to Work 2023 issue.

Sprinklr AI+ allows enterprises to combine unstructured, CX data from 30+ digital channels – including social platforms, messaging platforms, and millions of publicly available news, blog, and review sites – with generative AI to create content, improve feedback and assistance, and more quickly identify insights and subsequent actions. Sprinklr AI+ incorporates generative AI powered by an integration with the OpenAI enterprise API.  This bespoke arrangement includes robust security and privacy terms and demonstrates Sprinklr’s commitment to safeguarding our customer’s data.

"We have seen massive demand for generative AI capabilities to improve customer service and employee efficiency. Sprinklr AI+ brings this transformational technology to customer experience at the enterprise level and has the potential to revolutionize the front office for our global customers," said Sprinklr Chief Technology Officer, Pavitar Singh. "For us, this is the next evolution of our AI journey to help our customers work better, faster, and more cost-effectively, while preserving the level of governance, compliance, and data privacy that the most iconic brands in the world require."

Sprinklr is built from the ground up to unify and centralize CX data on one platform. The flexible and modular architecture allows Sprinklr to quickly integrate with the latest and best technology. Sprinklr AI+ is the next evolution of Sprinklr’s AI that leverages more than 1,250 industry-specific AI models, spanning 100+ languages and 150 countries, to process petabytes of unstructured text, audio, video, images, metrics, and time series data and enables our customers to extract structured insights. With generative AI capabilities powered by an enterprise API integration with OpenAI, Sprinklr customers can tap into new features across all four Sprinklr product suites.

• Sprinklr Service: Sprinklr Service is the only unified omnichannel CCaaS offering on the market. With Sprinklr AI+, Sprinklr’s customers can now supercharge agent productivity with generative AI features like “summarization” and “call notes automation.” This allows Sprinklr customer agents to focus completely on their customers, eliminating the need to take notes during the conversation. It also provides other Sprinklr customer agents or supervisors with a quick overview of conversations without reading entire transcripts. Features like “reply assistance” help agents generate or improve content with a single click, and Sprinklr AI+ provides the ability to automatically extract answers from the knowledge base directly within the platform, ensuring accuracy and consistency. Sprinklr AI+ improves quality management capabilities by automating the quality scoring and sentiment analysis of conversations at scale. And finally, Sprinklr AI+ augments existing conversational AI bots, chat platforms, and the knowledge base with generative AI for writing, translation, summarization and more.
• Sprinklr Insights: Sprinklr’s AI-powered research platform increases the speed from data, to insight, to action with generative AI. “Topic and keyword creation” with support from generative AI helps customers find the right information more quickly. “Article paraphraser” and “message summary” capabilities provide at-a-glance overviews of detailed articles and content for quick review and action from Sprinklr customers’ marketing and communications teams.
• Sprinklr Marketing: Sprinklr Marketing is the only unified omnichannel platform for the end-to-end marketing lifecycle. Sprinklr AI+ delivers generative AI-powered suggestions to help our customers build marketing campaigns – including the ability to create tone, voice, and visual style guidelines. Sprinklr customers can also tap generative AI within the platform to assist in brainstorming ideas, personas, CTAs, and USPs. For paid social media campaigns, generative AI helps our customers create and refine social content.
• Sprinklr Social: Sprinklr Social with Sprinklr AI+ includes publishing, engagement, and reporting tools integrated with OpenAI’s generative AI models to help enterprise social media teams create better content, more quickly, with fewer resources.

Sprinklr AI+ gives brands a unified generative AI capability for social media management, customer service, and marketing that is built with enterprise-level governance, security, and data privacy in the design.

Customer experience can make or break a brand. If a customer has one bad experience, a single tweet is all it takes to ruin the brand's reputation. So, brands who plan for it have a power to create positive experiences for the brand on Twitter. Right now, there’s no shortage of advice on how brands can foster positive interactions—but little data on what actually works. Which is why Twitter and CX platform, Sprinklr teamed up to create a report, that examined a full year of Twitter care conversations across more than 1,000 brands in 30 different countries, to understand what works and what doesn't.

Producing economic value

When a customer needs a discount or sale to commit to a purchase, Twitter is often their first stop. It’s a loss of economic value when a purchase goes awry, unless customer care can fix it.

Brands deliver economic value to customers when they own problems and respond to savings-driving inquiries. 64% of people surveyed feel it is important for a brand to take ownership of the issue. It’s also helpful if they can respond publicly to customers. 73% of people surveyed on Twitter find it helpful to see how brands answer questions or solve issues. Businesses create a massive opportunity for themselves when they acknowledge customer service-related tweets. When a person tweets at a business and receives a response, they are willing to spend up to 20% more on an average- priced item from that business in the future.

In the retail industry, only one in five brands take ownership of customer problems, but nearly three in five retail brands excel in this best practice despite high volumes of tweets. Top retail handles get 50% more incoming tweets than top handles in other industries.

What is another sign that brands are delivering economic value through social care on Twitter? When customers reach out in pursuit of deals or discounts. Brands that tweet their best offers are brands that customers turn to when they’re seeking value for their dollar. Clear communication surrounding price changes is another way to ensure satisfaction, so customers aren’t hit with hidden fees, which leads to churn. A strong marketing relationship on Twitter ensures a smoother transition if people are already loyal to the brand and understand the changes ahead of time.

Brands create economic value when they take ownership of customer issues and engage with customers in pursuit of savings. How brands balance these aspects of economic value varies from industry to industry.

Creating functional value

No one wants to spend the day on hold or experience dropped calls with live service agents. Twitter care offers a better path for customers to get the help they need. Creating functional value is all about being responsive, consistent, and reliable. Brands build trust and loyalty when people know they can count on you to resolve their issues quickly and consistently. Responding quickly and providing dedicated care are two great ways you can help customers, but sometimes customers just need you to make it easy for them to help themselves.

It pays to help customers solve problems quickly and easily, because when people have a bad experience, half of them will resort to complaining publicly on social media. If they don’t receive an answer at all, 81% of people surveyed, won’t recommend that company to their friends. Responding swiftly is an important part of Twitter care, and brands that respond quickly score much higher on overall care.

Responding quickly once isn't enough. Brands need to be consistent in this endeavour. Month after month, the top-scoring care handles on Twitter get back to customers quickly and consistently. The steady purple line for top care accounts reflects how top care teams consistently deliver same-day responses to their customers. These brands are ready for anything, because they know how to scale up when they need to.

With most brands, it’s a different story from one month to the next. By March 2020, average response times were not much more than one day; but in the busy holiday season of 2019, customers could wait more than two days for an answer. It’s that lack of predictability, as much as the slower speed of response, that disappoints customers.

Some customer tweets are more urgent than others. So it’s no surprise that the brands that set the pace for Twitter care are in industries where time is of the essence.Airlines, logistics, and telecom companies are fastest: The top-performing care brands in these industries respond to half of incoming tweets in four hours or less.

A dedicated care handle creates functional value. 58% of people surveyed on Twitter prefer brands to have a separate account and 64% of people surveyed feel like they are doing more for customers when they do.Though dedicated Twitter care handles may not be right for every brand. Brands need to take into account industry standards, capacity of care teams, and current brand-customer relations.

By directing customer concerns to a care handle, brands free up their main handles for other kinds of positive interactions—resulting in higher engagement rates on brand posts from main handles.  Brands that embrace this practice tend to excel at overall care and tend to respond faster. Nearly half of the top-scoring accounts in Twitter care are dedicated care handles. Roughly half of restaurant, telecom, and tech brands use separate accounts for care.

Though dedicated Twitter care handles may not be right for every brand. Brands need to take into account industry standards, capacity of care teams, and current brand-customer relations.

Major brands receive thousands of mentions at once and the volume can fluctuate for many reasons due to seasonal business, PR crises, or product malfunctions/recalls. It’s not easy to deliver functional value, so relatively few industries have a large amount of handles that excel at more than one best practice.

Driving experiential value

When Twitter care leads with empathy and compassion, it increases experiential value and builds brand loyalty with customers. 96% of people who turned to Twitter for customer service and had a friendly experience said they would buy from that brand again and 83% of them would recommend it to others.

45% of people surveyed expect human interaction when they engage with brands on Twitter. Using customer names in tweets acknowledges them as real people, and making them laugh will leave lasting impressions. Emojis or GIFs in tweets show that a brand is not taking itself too seriously.

Brands that engage with customers will attract followers and build relationships that can survive the occasional mishap. When your customers are already paying attention to you on Twitter, they’ll be more likely to turn to you for help so that you can address questions and solve problems before they turn into complaints. Research shows that the longer a person stays with a brand, the more valuable they become as a customer. In fact, an annual increase in just 1% in customer retention can equate to a 20% increase in revenue annually.

Care interactions can resolve concerns, but can also be an enjoyable experience for the customer. This builds experiential value. One way to create that kind of value is by humanizing care. When brands make care a great experience for customers, it helps foster an ongoing relationship that builds trust and loyalty.  It’s no coincidence that the industries that excel at humanizing care interactions are also the ones that develop ongoing customer relationships that outlast the latest care interaction. These are two practices that work together.

Building symbolic value

When a brand comes to the rescue or shows unexpected kindness, it helps people feel that they’re being seen and heard. It’s even more true when a brand reaches out first because it’s paying close attention to what customers are saying about its products or services.That’s the kind of platinum care brands can deliver when they use social suites to listen and respond at scale. It’s one thing to solve a problem; it’s another to make your customers feel like a valued part of your brand.

Brands deliver extraordinary, proactive service when they power their Twitter care with enterprise-class social suites. With modern care technology, brands can listen and respond at scale, so they know when to jump in to help and engage with a wider range of customer needs. Brands that use social suites for virtually all of their messages score much higher than brands that use other kinds of tools to manage Twitter care.

One in three people surveyed say that it’s important for brands to take their feedback to drive future innovations. When brands integrate customer feedback into product development and R&D, it not only fuels innovation but it also provides value by creating products and services customers want. While less than 1% of brand replies promise to refer feedback to an R&D team, some industries are more likely to let customers know how their feedback counts.

Airlines, retail, cosmetics, and personal care are most likely to tell customers their suggestions will be shared internally. Brands that embrace this best practice tend to be the brands that are also good at the fundamentals of Twitter care. Brands should tune in before consumers Tweet to request help, and offer them extraordinary care in thoughtful ways. Those are the kinds of care experiences that create deep symbolic value.

Great Twitter care gives companies a way to deliver value to customers across these different value dimensions. These practices have managed to stand the test of time and the best brands are succeeding because of them. So, are you going to apply them for your brand?