Lori Schafer in Forbes Technology Council: How Businesses Can Leverage AI To Better Understand Customers

Find the original article in Forbes Technology Council here.

No business—whether it’s a B2B or B2C company, a purveyor of products or services, a large operation or just starting out—can thrive (or survive) without truly understanding its customers. The digital marketplace makes this knowledge even more essential, as today’s consumer has access to plenty of choices and has come to expect highly personalized service tailored to their unique needs.

Fortunately, the high-tech marketplace not only creates customer acquisition, retention and service challenges, but also provides the tools to help companies conquer them—including artificial intelligence. Below, members of Forbes Technology Council offer practical, actionable ways businesses can leverage AI to better understand and serve their customers.

1. Anticipate Customer Needs Through Behavioral Analysis

AI can help businesses uncover hidden intent by analyzing subtle shifts in customer behavior, such as hesitation before a purchase or changes in browsing patterns. By combining this with adaptive learning models, companies can anticipate needs before customers even voice them, creating more meaningful interactions and stronger, long-term relationships. - Rivindu Perera, Onit Inc.

2. Capture Market Share By Exploiting Competitors’ Weaknesses

AI tools can monitor competitors’ platforms, reviews and social media, analyzing sentiment and feedback trends. In this way, a business can identify gaps and capitalize on areas where its competitors are falling short. Here are the steps: Use agentic systems to monitor competitors, forums, reviews and social media. Extract common pain points through large language models to identify product opportunities. Finally, target these communities with ads, directing them to your solution. - Stefan Gogoll, aqua cloud

3. Predict Patients’ Risk For Disease And Suggest Treatments

In the healthcare industry, AI can help organizations understand their patients through its ability to predict chronic disease risk, enabling early intervention or prevention. AI can identify appropriate treatments based on the patient’s health history, age, behaviors and other factors and recommend preventive care, and it can outline actionable steps based on risk factors (social determinants of health) to improve both access to high-quality care and health outcomes. - David Snow, Jr., Cedar Gate Technologies

4. Unlock Audience Insights With Privacy-First Intelligence

By leveraging advanced data insights from privacy-first clean room technology and AI, our company was able to identify addressable audience preferences and behaviors and develop effective marketing creatives that resonated deeply with these consumer cohorts. This approach demonstrates AI’s ability to drive both an immediate sales lift and longer-term brand consideration shifts. - Ramesh Kollepara, Kellanova

5. Boost Both Retention And Acquisition With Dual AI Systems

A dual approach using agentic AI and generative AI creates a unified customer intelligence framework that transforms retention and acquisition strategies. Agentic AI connects customer data across internal systems, providing comprehensive relationship insights and actionable next steps. GenAI compiles prospect information, giving sales teams current, accurate intelligence for meaningful initial contact. - Suresh Kannan, Model N

6. Define Personas Via ML Clustering

Classic machine learning clustering approaches can deliver fantastic results. It is a robust, mature and explainable family of methods for defining customer personas. Once personas are established, detailed “per persona” analytics can follow, allowing for more detailed customer characterization. - Pawel Rzeszucinski, Webpros

7. Consolidate Diverse Data To Create Detailed Profiles

AI helps businesses gain a deeper understanding of customers by automatically gathering information from multiple sources. It quickly consolidates internal transaction data, public financials and geographic details to create detailed customer profiles that would take humans months to compile. By analyzing unstructured information, AI reveals nuanced and multidimensional customer perspectives. - Alex Saric, Ivalua

8. Equip Sales Teams With Essential Context

Integrating CRM and support data with AI allows for the creation of concise summaries concerning incoming leads, customer install bases, support interactions, and pertinent business and industry events. These summaries provide sales and customer success teams with the essential context needed to effectively manage their customer relationships. - Bihag Karnani, Google

9. Enhance Engagement With Intelligent Customer Segmentation

​Businesses can leverage AI to implement advanced customer segmentation, which involves analyzing customer data to identify distinct groups based on shared characteristics and behaviors. This approach enables companies to tailor marketing strategies and personalize offerings, thereby enhancing customer engagement and satisfaction. - Yi Shi, FlashIntel

10. Analyze Customer Sentiment

Businesses can use AI to analyze customer sentiment by processing reviews, social media and support interactions. The company will uncover trends, preferences and pain points for existing users while predicting potential customers’ needs. This drives personalized marketing and product tweaks, boosting satisfaction and acquisition. - Lori Schafer, Digital Wave Technology

11. Reveal Success Or Failure Predictors

Businesses can harness AI to analyze vast quantities of unstructured data on customer engagement, projects and deliverables. This identifies patterns in scope, team composition, timelines and customer feedback to reveal success or failure predictors. AI-powered insights enable proactive decision-making and help companies refine sales strategies, tailor solutions and mitigate risks to enhance future engagements. - Nick Burling, Nasuni

12. Deliver Hyper-Personalized Online Shopping Experiences

Businesses can leverage AI to analyze various customer shopping data points such as click-through rates, browsing behavior and demographics. They can create dynamic user personas for a hyper-personalized online shopping experience. Personalization can be rendered in the form of targeted deals, product recommendations, pricing and more. This enhanced shopping experience will boost engagement and conversion. - Udit Mehrotra, Amazon

13. Find Ideal New Customers Through Deep Dives Into Data

For a B2B company, finding businesses similar to its existing customers requires a deep dive into governmental and corporate data. Given the sheer number of organizations in the U.S., humans often cannot do this at scale. Yet, AI can crawl through the respective APIs and build customer profiles in seconds. Using customized sales research services can significantly reduce the time needed to find the ideal customer. - Kevin Korte, Univention

14. Break Down Silos To Create A Comprehensive Customer Picture

AI is helping businesses break down silos between data, people and processes, creating a much clearer customer picture. By integrating AI into interactions, whether through predictive analytics or intelligent automation, businesses anticipate needs and deliver real-time personalization. This is especially helpful for customers with unique needs, allowing organizations to meet them where they are. - Ricardo Madan, TEKsystems

15. Craft Impactful Content With AI-Driven Insights

AI tools help businesses analyze vast amounts of data and extract key insights to better inform strategies and enhance digital customer experiences. Specialized solutions can help companies generate content based on these insights, then analyze which message variant(s) prompt customers or segments to engage with certain products during their journey—capturing insights into interests. - Assaf Baciu, Persado

16. Identify Growth Opportunities In Real Time

Soon, you will be able to deploy AI-powered agents that analyze customer interactions and behavior in real time using data pulled from sales, services, customer success, marketing and usage analytics. Agents will summarize adoption challenges, usage spikes or upsell opportunities to reveal which products or services resonate most and where there are signals of churn or expansion potential. - DJ Paoni, Certinia

17. Test GTM Strategies Using Synthetic Personas

Companies can create AI-driven synthetic customer personas based on real behavioral data. These virtual personas simulate how different customer segments might react to new products, pricing changes or marketing campaigns, allowing businesses to test strategies before launching them to real consumers. - Cristian Randieri, Intellisystem Technologies

18. Improve Your Digital UX By Pinpointing Pain Points

Today’s businesses are digital-heavy, making it crucial to identify interaction pain points in mobile and Web apps. A prime example is a complex registration form that turns away new customers. AI can analyze interaction data to uncover these pain points, helping businesses build intuitive, user-friendly interfaces. The future of such analysis lies in creating tailored, personalized experiences. - Anujkumarsinh Donvir, ADP

19. Interview An AI-Generated ‘Customer’

One creative strategy is to set up AI-generated customer interviews. Since AI is trained on all aspects of customer behavior, asking visual AI to “morph” into a potential customer and asking it questions during a live interview can provide a lot of insight. - Lisa Loud, Secret Network Foundation

20. Understand Why Customers Buy With Psychographic AI Clustering

AI-powered psychographic clustering allows you to go beyond plain demographics and use LLMs and behavioral analytics to segment customers based on their values, motivations and decision triggers. Instead of just knowing who they are, you can gain critical understanding into why they buy. Businesses using AI to analyze sentiment, microengagements and emotional cues can predict hidden needs and craft attractive offers. - Raghu Para, Ford Motor Company