UK eCommerce companies are investing significant capital in AI to improve the customer experience, however, many businesses are yet to realise significant gains. These are the findings of a new survey of senior executives at 300 large and mid-sized e-commerce companies in Europe and the US by Storyblok.
UK businesses have spent an average of £321,000 in the past year on developing or implementing AI solutions to enhance their digital customer experience, with 21 per cent spending more than £500,000. Yet almost half (44 per cent) state that their AI investment has only made a slight improvement to their customers’ digital experience.
Surprisingly, nearly all of UK business leaders (93 per cent) say that their AI investment has delivered a good Return on Investment (ROI), of which 28 per cent perceive it as a very good ROI. This potentially indicates businesses are taking a longer-term view of AI investment to improve their digital offering.
The research also explores the most popular use cases for AI amongst UK business leaders, which were cited as website content creation (59 per cent), customer service (53 per cent), marketing analysis (51 per cent), translation services (49 per cent), and marketing content creation (48 per cent).
Dominik Angerer, CEO and Co-Founder of Storyblok said: “The transformative potential of AI for the digital experience is enormous, but our research highlights a clear gap between expectation and reality. While UK businesses are seeing some improvements, these remain incremental rather than truly transformative. What’s particularly interesting is that despite this, most business leaders still consider the capital they have committed to AI a good investment. This could suggest that many UK companies do not expect big gains immediately, but are instead taking a longer-term view of AI to transform their digital offering.
“To unlock AI’s full potential, businesses must go beyond surface-level implementations and integrate AI in a way that drives meaningful transformation. Core to this is the flexibility to scale with ease, and that’s where composable architecture comes in, enabling companies to seamlessly integrate AI-driven solutions across multiple channels without the restrictions of legacy systems. From hyper-personalisation to seamless localisation, nearly every possible AI use case could be implemented more effectively, and to a higher standard if businesses raised the digital bar and embraced modern marketing technology.”
Share