The rise of AI isn't just a revolution in productivity; it’s a brutal quality filter for your brand's digital experience. If your website, app, or platform isn't worth a human's time, AI agents will soon gladly step in and automate the entire interaction away.
We often discuss AI in terms of automating away jobs or tasks, but the real impact is on user behavior: attention scarcity. Users will only give their finite attention to experiences that truly earn it.
The Fanatics paradox: fixing fun, not just fixing code
The recent example of Fanatics Betting & Gaming using Fullstory's AI to quickly diagnose and fix user errors perfectly illustrates this shift.
At first glance, this appears to be a technical optimization: using AI to automate the process of finding a bug. But consider the use case: gaming and gambling. People aren't using these platforms because they need to; they are there for enjoyment and engagement. An unexpected error doesn't just block a transaction; it kills the fun.
The AI’s highest value isn't automating the user’s journey—it's automating the fix to quickly preserve the enjoyment.
When should AI automate the digital experience?
If your digital experience is purely a utility—an endpoint for completing a mandatory task—it is ripe for automation.
What ecommerce brands can learn from Best Buy’s reverse showroom strategy
The Best Buy model taught us a physical lesson: they converted their stores from being the end-point of a purchase journey into a destination for exploration. They created the “reverse showroom."
People don't just go to ecommerce sites to purchase; they go to browse, compare, and get inspired. Your digital experience is the modern flagship store.
AI will automate away the sites that act merely as anonymous checkout counters. The experiences that capture the feeling of exploration and discovery are the ones that retain human engagement. Online retailers and digital experiences need to discover how to create a "reverse showroom” of their own.
User attention is the revenue driver in digital experience design
This all boils down to brand loyalty and revenue. If your digital experience is the last thing on your optimization list, people's eyeballs will inevitably be drawn to more engaging alternatives. Their relationship with your brand will remain purely transactional—they only use you when they absolutely have to.
Conversely, a high-quality, engaging digital experience—one that quickly corrects frustrations and offers genuine discovery—earns attention, which converts into dollars.
One brand that does a remarkably good job of this is Rhone. Take a look at their website and recognize how they use visual storytelling to pull you into the experience, even if you're not there to buy. Sure, buying is right there if you want to fill a cart, but this site was built for the digital window shopper. And that’s why more than one item from Rhone is on my Christmas list this year!
The AI challenge for leaders
AI is not just coming for your budget; it's coming for the time users spend with your brand. The question every executive must answer is: Is our digital experience so good, so valuable, and so engaging that a user would actively choose to spend time there, or is it merely efficient enough to be automated? Because the only digital experiences that survive the age of AI will be the ones worth a human’s attention.
If you're ready to create digital experiences that delight your customers, request a demo to see how Fullstory can help.
