What Opportunity Does AI Present to Improve Your Customer Journey Online?

We’re at a pivotal moment in digital. AI presents not just an incremental improvement, but the opportunity to transform how customers discover, engage with and buy from your brand.

It’s more than a trend, it’s a whole mindset shift. And for those willing to embrace the shift, the opportunity to lead, disrupt, and redefine your category is there.

Start With One Simple Truth: AI Lets You Do Things Differently

At its core, AI offers the chance to create new kinds of customer experiences digitally, ones that haven't been possible until now.

That’s why, when clients ask me how to gain an edge, my advice is simple: use AI to do what your competitors haven’t even imagined yet.

This is where innovation begins, not in the tech, but in how you think. The hardest part isn’t building the tool; it’s opening your mind to a different way of serving your audience or customers.

Key takeaway: AI alone isn’t the disruptor, new thinking is. AI just helps you bring that thinking to life.

How to Rethink Your Online Experience With AI

At Show + Tell, we guide clients through this exact process. It typically starts with workshops to map out the existing customer journey, identify friction points, and asking a simple question:

If nothing stood in your way, how could this be better?

No idea is too big, or too small. You might land on a breakthrough concept immediately, or you might get halfway there. That’s okay.

Document everything. Feed your notes into a private AI assistant like CoPilot or ChatGPT. Let it build on your ideas, generate new directions, and help refine what’s possible.

Once the concept takes shape, that’s where we come in; designing the digital product, shaping the user experience, building MVPs, and getting it in front of users.

Key takeaway: Don’t wait for a ‘perfect’ idea. Start exploring, document everything, and let AI expand your creative potential.

What Happens When You Build Something Truly Useful?

There’s a reason AI-powered tools are gaining traction. When done right, they’re more than just tech experiments, they’re customer experience game-changers.

Some of the benefits we see for clients include:

• Being seen as an innovator: AI products communicate leadership and originality.
• Generating leads while you sleep: Smart tools engage customers before your sales team needs to.
• Capturing meaningful data: Get real insights on user behaviour and preferences.
• Adding genuine value: Go beyond selling - offer something useful.
• Creating scalable experiences: AI adapts to individual users without extra resource.
• Making the complex simple: Distill difficult decisions into user-friendly journeys.

Key takeaway: AI tools offer both brand and business impact; from positioning and perception to lead generation and long-term value.

What This Looks Like in Action

Here are two real-world examples of AI tools we’ve designed and built at Show + Tell — both of which radically improved the customer journey.

O&3: Transforming Weeks Into Minutes

Before: A customer would search for a natural ingredient supplier, call to speak to sales, wait for a quote via email, negotiate scope and pricing, fill in forms, then finally place an order. A process that took 7 - 10 days on average.

After: We built a digital sales tool that automated this journey end-to-end. Customers could browse, configure, quote, and place orders directly online.

We put power in the customers’ hands, and in doing so, helped O&3 operate far more efficiently.

Key takeaway: AI automation isn't just efficient, it puts your customer in control, which is what they want.

Design Tonic: Saving Hours With Smarter Moodboarding

Design Tonic help companies fit out commercial spaces. Previously, clients would spend hours on Pinterest, gathering references, then along with a requirements list send them to the fitout firm for quoting.

We thought: what if we could do all that in minutes?

We created an AI moodboarding tool that generates high-quality visual directions based on user input. These can then be tailored to sector, taste, and brand style preferences.

The result? A more intuitive moodoarding tool for clients saving them hours of time, higher quality briefs for the Design Tonic team, and a tool that’s become a standout lead generator.

Key takeaway: AI tools don’t just speed things up they improve quality and give customers more confidence in your expertise.

Sharing These Stories at Future Forum

We recently showcased these examples at our summer Future Forum event in Leeds, an event focused on digital & marketing innovation for senior marketers, and how to use AI meaningfully in business. It was all about practice learnings & takeaways as we felt too many similar AI events are theory based.

Final Thoughts

AI is not just a tool. It’s a creative partner. One that opens new possibilities for how your brand shows up online.

The brands who thrive in this next chapter will be those who think differently and focus on the customer experience above all else.

If you’re ready to explore what AI could do for your brand, let’s talk.

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Charlie Hartley is the founder of Show + Tell — a digital and brand agency that helps ambitious businesses reimagine their customer journey through design, strategy, and emerging tech.