Will personal AI make traditional websites obsolete?

Disclaimer: This article was authored by Chris Clegg and ChatGPT

The digital landscape is evolving rapidly. In the past, websites were the primary means for discovering services, accessing detailed information, and conducting transactions. Today, however, personal AI technologies, including voice assistants, AI-driven chatbots, and browser-enabled digital assistants, are redefining the way we interact with digital services. 

Several real-world examples across diverse sectors illustrate how these AI innovations have begun to replace traditional websites, offering more intuitive, conversational, and personalised user experiences.

Local government and public services

Example: Barking & Dagenham Council AI assistant

Barking & Dagenham Council has introduced an AI-powered chatbot, transforming the way residents access city services. Instead of navigating a labyrinth of web pages, residents can now ask natural-language questions like, “How do I report a broken streetlight?” or “What are the opening hours for the local recycling center?”. The AI assistant responds with precise, real-time information, streamlining service requests and reducing the need for extensive website exploration. 

The Council initially signed up for an AI assistant to tackle an overwhelming number of enquiries about missed bins and waste collection.

• Pressure on their contact team to meet demand was constant

• Handling calls about missed bins became a repetitive, unfulfilling task

• A backlog of enquiries extended beyond routine calls about waste

It has cut 10,000 calls and grew customer satisfaction by 67% in 6 months.

AI can also be used to improve cities and services for example from improving traffic systems to enhancing public safety to reporting potholes. 

B&D Council AI assistant website chatbot.

Banking and financial services

Example: Bank of America’s Erica

Bank of America’s digital assistant, Erica, exemplifies how personal AI can revolutionise customer interactions. Instead of navigating a traditional online banking portal, customers can simply ask Erica to check their account balances, transfer funds, or schedule bill payments. This conversational interface not only simplifies routine tasks but also provides financial insights and personalised recommendations, making banking more accessible and engaging.

Bank of America AI assistant mobile app.

Retail and food ordering

Example: Domino’s AnyWare

Domino’s Pizza has been a pioneer in integrating personal AI into its customer service. With the AnyWare ordering system, customers can place orders using voice commands or text messages. Whether it’s through a smart speaker or a mobile chat interface, the ordering process becomes a seamless conversation—eliminating the need to navigate a traditional, multi-page website and providing a quick, personalised ordering experience.

Dominos can be ordered from multiple AI driven touch points including Alexa voice AI.

Healthcare and patient engagement

Example: Google AI for healthcare

AI has the potential to help save lives by transforming healthcare and medicine through the creation of more personalised, accessible and effective solutions. This is particularly true in more resource challenged communities where there is often a shortage of healthcare workers. 

Google AI have delivered multiple AI driven solutions for the medical industry.

What this means for the future of service delivery

These examples demonstrate that personal AI is not just an enhancement to traditional websites, it’s a transformative force that is redefining customer journeys across sectors. Here’s how these innovations are reshaping service delivery:

• Discovering services:
  Instead of sifting through static menus, users now interact with AI assistants that can instantly locate and recommend services based on their needs and location.

• Understanding service offerings:
  AI tools break down complex information into clear, conversational responses, making it easier for users to grasp what’s available without getting bogged down by dense website content.

• Interacting with services:
  Whether it's reporting an issue, updating personal details, or seeking advice, AI-driven interfaces provide guided, step-by-step support that reduces friction and enhances user satisfaction.

• Form filling and transactions:
  AI assistants can pre-populate forms, validate inputs in real time, and even process payments securely, all through a natural, conversational interaction, significantly streamlining these processes.

The future is integration, not obsolescence

While AI is transforming how users interact with digital services, traditional websites remain essential. They provide comprehensive information and secure platforms for transactions, ensuring reliability and trust.

The future of digital service delivery lies in blending robust websites with AI-driven interfaces. This hybrid approach enables organizations to create seamless, multi-channel experiences that cater to diverse user needs.

Technology adoption, however, evolves gradually, often over generations. Our grandparents are only now shifting toward digital services, still favoring face-to-face interactions. Our parents have mastered website navigation through structured menus and keyword searches.

Meanwhile, our generation embraces omni-channel experiences, seamlessly interacting across multiple platforms and devices. The next generation, deeply embedded in mobile culture, will likely rely on conversational AI, using text and voice, to solve problems effortlessly.

How digital does the insurance market need to be?

Digitalisation has become a driving force behind the transformation of the UK insurance industry. Insurers are leveraging digital technologies, such as automation, AI, and APIs, to enhance efficiency, streamline operations, foster innovation, and improve the broker experience. Companies at the forefront of digital transformation are reaping the benefits of increased agility, customer-centricity, and competitive advantage. As digitalisation continues to evolve, insurers must embrace emerging trends, overcome challenges, and adapt to the changing landscape to thrive in the digital era.

What digital means for an insurer in today's market and how technological innovation can help to make the traditional insurance model more efficient.

Why the need to be ‘more digital’?

Digitalisation offers several advantages to insurers, including improved operational efficiency, enhanced customer experience, increased market agility, and cost savings. By leveraging digital technologies, insurers can streamline their operations, automate processes, access real-time data, and gain actionable insights, ultimately leading to better decision-making and improved business outcomes.

Digitalisation offers numerous benefits to any insurer, such as:

• Enhanced efficiency: Automation of manual tasks and streamlined processes improve operational efficiency, reducing administrative costs and improving overall productivity

• Improved broker/customer experience: Digitalisation enables insurers to provide personalised, seamless, and omni-channel experiences to brokers/customers, fostering loyalty and satisfaction

• Data-driven insights: Advanced analytics and AI-driven tools unlock valuable insights from vast amounts of data, enabling insurers to make data-informed decisions and develop tailored products and services

• Faster claims processing: Digital tools, such as automated claims assessment and digital documentation, expedite the claims settlement process, enhancing customer satisfaction and reducing fraud

• Increased innovation: Insurtech collaborations and digital partnerships facilitate innovation in products, services, and business models, allowing insurers to adapt to changing market dynamics and customer preferences

• More efficient eTrade and risk submissions: online and Cloud based platforms that enable faster and more efficient quote journeys

• Defining digital ecosystems: Combining technologies and touch-points that provide superior, scalable service delivery.

Pain-points found with current back-office processes

• Rekeying from one system to another (often from unstructured and non digital primary sources i.e. a PDF or emails or documentation)

• Time consuming administration and repetition of tasks

• Having multiple back-end systems for different tasks

• Having to make certain checks manually (human interventions)

• Legacy system interfaces are out of date and not intuitive or easy or delightful to use

• No dashboards to help workflow and task management

• Systems not integrated or synced to make information checking or gathering easier - so having to use multiple touch-points for task completion e.g. Having to make the same change or update into multiple systems

• Checking submissions can be extra leg work (when having to look at 3rd party info/websites i.e. Companies House or Google

• Inadequate staffing levels for workload

What does the future look like?

The future of the UK insurance industry lies in continued digitalisation and the adoption of emerging technologies. Key trends include the proliferation of AI and machine learning, leveraging data analytics for proactive risk management, and exploring new distribution models, such as digital ecosystems and partnerships.

Example of emerging and embedded trends are:

• Implement end-to-end automation across operations, for example, leveraging AI and process automation to streamline underwriting, claims processing, and policy administration

• Enhancing broker/customer engagement through digital innovations, for example, providing real-time policy information, claims tracking, and personalised recommendations 

• Offer comprehensive APIs to that improve the brokers experience, for example, enabling seamlessly access quotes, policy information, and claims status through their own systems to enhance efficiency, reduced manual errors, and strengthen relationships with brokers.

These innovations and technologies come with they’re fair share of challenges, for example, legacy system integration, data security and privacy concerns, talent acquisition and upskilling, regulatory compliance, and managing customer expectations. 

Overcoming these challenges requires strategic planning, collaboration, and a customer-centric approach.

Helping local government facilitate effective service delivery

Most local governments are now digitally-enabled, however public services continually come under pressure to save costs. At the same time people’s expectations of service quality have risen as they compare public services with the experiences they have in the private sector.  Providing a smooth path to buying, managing and delivery of services is the key to customers seeing the value in the products they are consuming. 

So how do we streamline processes, and at the same time rebuild trust, and restart conversations with disengaged citizens? 

Shifting focus from citizens to customers

Effectiveness will be achievable when councils realise it’s not about building a new website; it’s about creating new services that people want to engage with. That requires re-organisation, with new ways of working and a new culture, as much as it requires great user journeys. Experience design helps shift a councils mindset from being not only a service provider, but also a business that is entitled to create revenue from it’s services. 

A successful experience strategy requires concerted efforts across departments, to understand a citizens’ digital behaviour and their needs at different stages.The key is giving internal teams the resources and tools to capture business goals, identify audiences, and write user stories. They can then map out each service offering, enabling them to design new service pages quickly and easily and with minimal technical expertise and knowledge.

Coherent end-to-end services through a single customer view

End-to-end services need to be ‘designed’ from the point the customer starts trying to achieve a goal, to the point when they are finished. This includes website content, transactional interactions, phone, post and face-to-face channels, as well as the digital elements in order to reduce friction and create coherency. 

So a complete omni-channel ecosystem powered by the single customer view and profile enables a seamless customer engagement on any device, at any time, in any place.

Customers should be able to self-serve by booking paying and requesting services, report problems and importantly, be able to track progress of their request via any channel through a Single Customer Portal. This will enable the customer to experience a comparable level of service irrespective of the channel they use to make contact via within the limitations of that channel.

Make the mundane invisible

By and large the services a council offers are a necessity so users don’t really care about the services on offer. So making opting in to, paying, renewing and leaving services as easily as possible is key. The service ‘design’ should identify the right channel at the right time to tell the right story. From start to middle and end, in order to deliver a frictionless and somewhat invisible service delivery, removing traditional barriers.

Get customers to their task quickly,  anticipate their needs and use a channel that’s most convenient. Don’t make your customers log into an account to pay their council tax if a simple text message with a link to a payment gateway on the day of payment is all they need. 

Be proactive not reactive with the touchpoints of the service to help customers use it in a way that suits them by being able to book and pay for services, report problems and request services without having to have an Account. Use coordinated early interventions to avert the escalation of potential issues i.e.  receiving alerts, responses and notifications. Enable customers to think only of their needs, not the structure of the organisations delivering the services and make sure their experience if personalised to them, whether that’s through content, language or just understanding what they know to be the moments of truth about where they are in the service lifecycle. 

A successful local government service delivery is one that recognises that what is important to the council as a business, may be an inconvenient distraction from their customers' day to day lives.

Service experience extends beyond the customer

But it should not stop with the front end delivery of the service. The service enablers, from managers, to suppliers to delivery agents should be able to access a single view of each customer in order to be able to be able to see a live and accurate view of the customer to be able to quickly and easily search for, view and interrogate previous and current customer interactions with the Council. Teams should be able to easily access, track, analyse and report on performance, identify service bottlenecks, customer trends, and ultimately enable proactive rather than reactive delivery.

The golden rule; disgruntled customers question the value of a service. Delighted customers are more likely to buy additional services.

Going beyond personalisation... to deliver truly individualised customer experiences

How do you create a customer experience that really meets the needs of your users beyond just presenting your proposition, products or service and hoping customers will engage? Make it personal. Make it individual.

Individualisation, unlike personalisation, is where you deliver a personal experience based on your customers past behaviours and preferences across their journey.

Let’s use buying a coffee as our analogy.

Without personalisation, things are a bit dry...

“Hi there, how can I help you?”

With personalisation - as standard, we get a bit more friendly...

“Hi Joe, the usual? Skinny white?”

If we help to turn decision moments into actions that are likely to transform into revenue…

“Hi Joe, Skinny white?… and cream cheese bagel again?”

And if we anticipate Joe's needs before he needs them...

“Hi Joe, Skinny white?… we owe you a refund for your last order - We’ll take that off this bill.”

And using other factors and enable adaptive content, functionality and interaction in real-time… we get individualisation...

“Hi Joe, Skinny white?… It’s raining in your area - we have a fast delivery service!”

Personalisation is no longer a competitive edge – it's now the norm. Data collected through click patterns, transactions, AI and machine learning can all enable getting the right content to the right person at the right time and help tailor content for customers throughout their lifecycle of interactions with the company.

These are just a few ways to individualise your digital offer to help change your customers behaviour and help make repeat visits more useful and reduce choice fatigue:

• By traffic source

• Visitor location

• Purchase history

• Previous browsing behaviour

• Aggregated customer data

 These can be used to predict each customer's needs and target them across your service ecosystem; through emails, a change in content surfaced on repeat visits to your website or app, or assistants like Alexa, or digital physical spaces - all being smarter about the recommendations they make to engage them.

Finding ways to make experiences as individual as the customer and ultimately scale the empathy with which brands understand and tailor the relationships they have with their customers that will increase customer loyalty and in turn revenue.

Unleashing a clients inner service designer

More and more these days you will hear it said that ‘Service Design is everybody’s business’, not only that of formally trained designers. 

We agree. Every project we undertake is a journey where our client will discover the value of service design for both them and their business.  

All our client teams differ. Some might be in-house designers. Some are resurrecting skills they’ve learnt on a previous project. For some it’s a new, exciting and perhaps daunting break from their day to day discipline. But whether they be experts, novices or newbies, managers or support staff - a good Journey Mapping Workshop is the great leveler that encourages the client to step into the world of their customers.

At the end of each journey we will have created more than just an end touchpoint, playbook or customer strategy. We aim to install a real understanding of why a service design led approach is vital for success and longevity of any business. 

This is why we leave behind 4 things:

The tangible, whether a touchpoint or playbook that will define the interactions between the business and it’s customers.

The vision for a customer centred strategy that demonstrates how the business will deliver products and services, the technology it will use and the actors involved.  

The learning curve through first hand experience of using different methodologies to unearth customer insight and develop ideas.

But most importantly, the responsibility and tools to make service design ‘everybody's business’.

We leave behind the core principles that will help to make service design part of how the business operates and makes everyone responsible for designing business processes. These are to be used by everyone in the business who designs or delivers customer products or services, and to be used when taking any action that affects the customer experience – for both products and services. 

1. Deliver value to their customers by learning to

Start (and finish) with customer needs. The better we understand these needs, the better we can meet them and the more useful we will be.

Deliver value as quickly and efficiently as possible.

Exploit the digital channels by offering digital options that are so good they become the customer’s channel of choice.

2. Using data and insight to shape products and services

Ask once. Never ask customers unnecessary questions, which means listening to the answers when we do ask.

Data – not opinions. Apply customer and market insight to improve value for our customers. We won’t guess or assume.

Make it personal by considering the customer’s context to personalise their experience and offer them their next best action(s).

3. Design great experiences

Work for everyone and will be designed explicitly to meet specific channels and customer needs.

No compromise. No excuses. Every decision is a design decision. The complexity of our industry and business is our problem, not the customers.

“Don’t make me think”. We will obsess about making things simple for our customers, delivering a seamless experience across all contact channels.

We aim to help bring stakeholders, service delivery teams and customers together to help co-create a better experience. And to embed this practice within the organisation to adopt a culture of user centred design - and break down the barriers of working in silos.

By the end of the journey we will all agree that ‘Service Design is everybody’s business’.