AI Knows You Better: The Power of Hyper-Personalisation in Marketing

AI TECH TALK at INSEAD Middle East Campus | AI Knows You Better: The Power of Hyper-Personalisation in Marketing

The pursuit of personalisation - delivering the right product and the right service to the right customer at the right time and in the right place - has long been a cornerstone of marketing. With the rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI), this ambition has accelerated dramatically, taking the field far beyond classical segmentation into a world of world of hyper-personalised, predictive experiences.

This was the main focus of the AI TECH TALK moderated by Wolfgang Ulaga, Professor of Management Practice and Co-Director of the INSEAD Marketing & Sales Excellence Initiative. Joined by Marie de Ducla, Ads - Sales Lead at Google, Joe Abi Akl (MBA'11D), Partner and IMEA Retail & Consumer Practice Head at Oliver Wyman and Danil Starobogatov, Vice President, Marketing & Communications at AIQ, he examined how AI is rewriting the marketer’s playbook - shifting from reactive campaigns to predictive, data-driven strategies that strengthen loyalty, enhance value creation and drive sustainable growth.

1.The UAE: The Global Laboratory for Hyper-Personalisation

The panelists underscored that the Middle East, specifically the UAE, is an exceptionally attractive market for rapid innovation and scaling in personalisation, frequently serving as a "lab market" for international companies.

• Favorable Regulatory and Infrastructure Environment
  The UAE is rapidly becoming an "AI-native society". This is enabled by one of the most advanced and robust infrastructures globally. Furthermore, the regulatory environment is growth-focused and adoption-centric, standing for instance in contrast to the more restrictive, compliance-heavy regulations seen in Europe. This proactive stance allows for pilots to be conducted in a live environment quickly - in weeks, compared to potentially months and has resulted in the UAE being a frontrunner in AI adoption.
• Consumer Openness and Ecosystem Loyalty
  Insights from an Oliver Wyman study show that consumers in the region exhibit a high degree of willingness to engage with personalised services:
  Data Sharing: 50% of consumers in the UAE and Saudi Arabia are willing to share their data with trusted brands, provided the data is used for their benefit, a figure much higher than the approximately 10% seen in the US and Europe.
  Ecosystem Trust: Loyalty is shifting from specific products to ecosystems. 80% of regional consumers (versus 60% in Western markets) are interested in integrated, cross-sector services from trusted brands. For example, trusting a platform like Careem can lead customers to use it for adjacent services such as digital banking or grocery shopping.
• The Complexity of the "Melting Pot"
  The market presents unique challenges due to its diversity - the UAE hosts over 200 nationalities and expats report an average stay of around 4 years. These factors mean that customer segments are fluid and rapidly evolving, making personalisation efforts all the more essential - particularly when households may observe cultural events spanning from Ramadan to Diwali to Halloween.

2. The Shift: From Past Pain to Predictive AI

The panelists contrasted ambitious, yet often unsuccessful, personalisation efforts of the past with the powerful predictive capabilities available today.

• The Frustration of the Rear Mirror
  In the past, personalisation attempts were "exciting and extremely painful at the same time". Joe Abi Akl recalled ambitious projects, such as building a conversational voice AI virtual assistant for a super app around 2019. Despite having the vision, these efforts failed to scale as the technology was not accessible or advanced enough, talent was unprepared and system integration was prohibitively costly. As noted, "Sometimes it's not good to be ahead of your time".
• AI as the Game Changer
  Today, AI moves marketing beyond traditional segmentation toward intimate and predictive capabilities. AI can understand customer behavior, sentiment and intent, allowing brands to anticipate customer wants before they are even expressed.
• B2C Personalization
  Google search handles 15% of queries every day that are brand new and have never been seen before. AI dramatically increases the ability to answer these lengthy, specific queries. Tools like AI Max for Search match user intent, creative content, and landing pages instantly, resulting in an average increase of 20% to 23% in conversions for adopting companies. And surprisingly, this hyper-personalised search experience is particularly popular among Gen Z.
• B2B Relevance
  In complex B2B sectors such as energy, broad hyper-personalisation is rarely the goal. Instead, what matters is expert-level personalisation - the kind that builds trust in high-stakes, technical environments. This happens both in face-to-face interactions and through advanced tools such as ENERGYai, an agentic AI solution designed to support decision-making, sustainability initiatives, and operational efficiency across the energy value chain. ENERGYai delivers a highly personalised user experience by acting as a “personal collaborator” for engineers and analysts - learning user behaviour, processing complex technical documents and simulating models to provide context-aware insights precisely when they are needed.

3. Scaling Hyper-Personalisation: The Organisational Imperative

Scaling personalisation successfully requires a "full organisational transformation" that extends far beyond the marketing department.
Joe Abi Akl outlined three critical pillars for successful AI transformation and scaling:

• Architecture: Organisations must build the "house of AI" by integrating governance, data, and people from the start, embedding AI into every decision and process rather than treating it as a side project.
• Alignment: Leadership buy-in (Board and CEO) is crucial. Initiatives must be directly linked to the P&L (Profit & Loss) to secure proper scaling roadmaps, as only 20% of organizations currently have such maps despite widespread executive belief in AI's transformational nature.
• Agility (Talent): In the Thomson Reuters Future of Professionals Report 2025, professionals “predict AI will save them five hours weekly or about 240 hours in the next year." This time must be reinvested into higher value human work, allowing staff to focus on complex situations and building emotional customer connections, rather than repetitive tasks.

Marie de Ducla stressed the importance of starting with the "boring basics": ensuring data is of good quality, ethical, and unbiased, and that appropriate consent has been obtained

4. The Personalisation Paradox and Managing Risk

The discussion explored the inherent paradox of personalisation: consumers expect relevance, but the experience can feel "creepy" or intrusive when personalisation goes too far.

• The Risk of Sameness (Siloing Creativity)
  If personalisation is too efficient, it can confine the consumer to a "silo" or "bubble," removing the element of surprise, discovery and creativity. The major risk lies in losing the human element in the AI-human equation. Differentiation will ultimately rely on combining "machine precision with the human authenticity."
  Marie de Ducla cited Etihad Airways' successful Black Friday campaign, which used personalisation to surprise shoppers by matching purchase interests to relevant travel destinations (e.g., suggesting a trip to Paris to buy a Louis Vuitton bag). This made people "think differently" and resulted in one of the airline's best digital sales days in its history.
• Commoditization and Trust
  Hyper-personalization is becoming a consumer expectation, leading to its eventual commoditisation. To differentiate, brands must:
  Be Transparent: Companies must be transparent about data usage to build trust, allowing customers to feel they are in control and can choose the level of personalization they receive.
  Be Responsible: Especially in sensitive sectors like healthcare, marketers must be aware of regulations and avoid using push media or remarketing for highly personal queries, as this can feel "creepy". The pull media model (like a consumer searching for information and receiving authoritative content, such as verified health information on YouTube) is preferred.
• The Future: Agentic Decision-Making
  A significant emerging challenge is the rise of agentic decision-making, where autonomous AI agents will make purchasing and procurement decisions on behalf of humans. As Danil Starobogatov outlined, companies will need to prepare to market either "human-to-agent" or "agent-to-agent".

5. Advice from the Panelists

• For companies: Focus on multiplication (brand amplification and growth), not just optimisation. Start with the "boring basics" - ensuring data is good quality, ethical, non-biased, and consented. Adopt hybrid models (combining in-house and third-party AI) for increased resilience and likelihood of success
• For professionals: View AI as an augmentation, not a replacement. Stay curious, experiment and lead yourself first to avoid becoming obsolete.
• For consumers: Enjoy the benefits of useful hyper-personalisation (like traffic alerts for a flight), but stay in control of your consent. Occasionally try to remove personalisation from apps to break the silo and encourage new discovery

Watch the full AI TECH TALK panel discussion here

This event was part of the AI TECH TALK Series - a space for real conversations about AI’s impact on business and society. Hosted at INSEAD Middle East Campus and featuring industry experts and INSEAD faculty, these exclusive events deliver meaningful dialogue, valuable connections and practical insights.

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