Insight
All insights
From AI to Emotion
Can Artificial Intelligence tug at our heartstrings?
Reading Time 4 m
From evaluating RFPs to brainstorming, ideating concepts, generating style frames, animating assets, and even narrating its own case study video. AI now permeates every phase of the creative process. AI has undeniably transformed how we approach experiential design by enhancing efficiency, expanding creative possibilities, and streamlining processes previously limited by our personal capacity or capability. But with every step increasingly influenced by algorithms and automation, we, as creatives, must ask: Are we outsourcing too much to AI?
Bridging Logic and Magic
Experiential marketing aims to create memorable experiences by combining data-driven insights with emotional engagement. Over-reliance on AI risks overshadowing the latter – the element that enables designs to deeply resonate with audiences.
Human intuition brings an emotional depth that algorithms cannot fully grasp. It taps into personal experiences, cultural nuances, and the subtleties of storytelling that connect on a visceral level. While AI excels in pattern recognition and efficiency, it’s the human touch that creates moments of surprise, empathy, and meaning. Elements that transform an experience from functional to unforgettable.
AI does indeed recognize patterns of emotions. Learning from vast datasets to identify typical structures, symbols, and metaphors, it simulates the language of emotion, not the emotion itself. A recent study tested the extent to which people “feel heard” when interacting with AI versus fellow humans. While AI excelled at detecting emotional cues, participants felt less heard when aware they were communicating with a machine.
Artificial Intelligence faces an empathy gap: it can only simulate emotions. Humans feel, empathize, and break out of predictable patterns. We tell stories with authenticity and nuance. The question then is: How can Artificial Intelligence complement our Emotional Intelligence to help us craft truly emotional experiences?
Putting AI to Work: Industry Examples
The first AI-enabled experiences have already made the news. Leveraging the strengths of AI, they connect creativity and strategy, reach and personalization, rational knowledge with emotional impact.
Telling a bigger story with AI
With its vast knowledge base built from big data, AI is uniquely equipped to deliver information in real time. Whether functioning as the conversational assistant on your phone or as an interactive guide in museums, AI makes even the most niche information instantly accessible. However, engaging people emotionally requires more than just delivering facts. It demands storytelling that resonates with individual experiences and sparks imagination. For example, the National Library of Singapore worked with LePub to create “Playbrary”, an AI tool that turns books into interactive experiences for children, inspiring them to dive deeper into the original stories.
Playbrary.ai, NLB-National Library Board Singapore
Hyperpersonalizing the Experience with AI
To truly resonate with people, we must inject emotion into stories, ensuring that the experience becomes relevant on a personal level. This is where hyper-personalization becomes essential: analyzing user input in real time and generating content based on it, transforms data and statistics into meaningful interactions. At UN Climate Change Conference COP28, the immersive installation “Dinner in 2050” by Tellart did this by using AI to analyze visitors favorite dishes and offer sustainable substitutions to demonstrate the impact of food choices on our environment.
Dinner in 2050, Salama Bint hamadan Al Nahyan Foundation for Cop28 Tellart
Co-creating with AI
Beyond personalizing data, the generative powers of AI support co-creative interactions. By providing interfaces and defining parameters, designers enable people to co-create unique, personalized content. VAVE Studio’s DreamCo model, used during the 2024 eSports World Cup in Riyadh, allowed visitors to generate avatars based on their chosen characteristics, creating a highly customized experience within the event’s thematic world.
The New Role of the Experience Designer
Rather than solely being the writer of the narrative, the designer becomes the facilitator of a narrative platform, the curator and guide of AI, ensuring the machine-generated content aligns with the creative objectives, such as messaging, brand image, and interactivity. Harnessing the strengths of AI is not only for increasing efficiencies internally. In fact, it can elevate the product to a dynamic experience that presents itself to each visitor differently.
This requires a new way of thinking, moving past the idea of delivering the experience, a one-off product, towards a mode of platform-thinking that enables others to shape their experience. As we integrate AI to do the heavy-lifting, designers need to take care not to sacrifice the emotional depth. The onset of AI in experience design is an opportunity for us to refocus on what truly matters: making people feel.
