This is the second in a series on the consumer trends to look out for in 2023. Today’s column focuses on creating luxury experiences and navigating the tension between online and in-person shopping with the aid of artificial intelligence.  

The growth of hybrid shopping

An obvious downside of online shopping is the lack of tactile experience. Touching and trying items before buying does wonders for increasing consumer confidence, which is especially important for clothing and large purchases like furniture. As it stands, online shopping asks us to rely on product descriptions, still images, videos and reviews, all of which can be inaccurate or misleading.

I believe this will be the year that consumers will be given a number of solutions to help them overcome such issues.

One of those solutions is a hybrid of e-commerce and “just enough” brick-and-mortar locations to let consumers touch and experience products in person. Sound familiar? To the design industry it will: Showroom models will become ubiquitous across industries.

This won’t take much adjustment. It’s a natural segue for online shoppers, who value the convenience of online shopping but still want an immersive, real-world experience every now and then. The general public will become more familiar with hybrid shopping model, which I think is good for design clients. There will be more trust in designers’ processes and how they use brand showrooms because clients will be more familiar with the showroom concept.

Multimodal AI refers to the use of multiple types of data inputs (text, images, audio, video, etc.) that can be used in machine learning models to understand and respond to different types of information.

For example, the way consumers can search for a “blue sofa” will be taken a step further: They’ll be able to search for items of similar “feel” that go beyond the descriptor of the cushion fill or fabric name. Think of this type of communication as something in between a Google search and talking to a sales representative. With time, those interactions will more closely resemble the latter. 

This has great implications for customer service. The idea is to replace the frustration often felt when interacting with a chatbot (“Please get me a human!”). A multimodal AI chat bot will know more than a human and will feel like talking to one, too.