2030: a portrait of the new consumer.

Generative AI will change the way we engage with the world. And the expectations we place on our touchpoints with brands and organisations.

may 09, 2025

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AI has been with us longer than we suspect. But the so-called generative artificial intelligence - the kind that paints, writes, composes and dances- has only been around for a couple of years and is rapidly creeping into our lives. Whether we are aware of it or not, it will find its way into our pockets, our TVs, our glasses, watches, household appliances, cars, robots ...

At the beginning of this year, much was written about what awaits us in 2025: reasoning models, agents, video on demand... But what awaits us in the next five years? And above all, how will this new technology - which is getting closer and closer to superhuman intelligence - change the way we relate to the world?

When Google finally gave us a truly useful search engine, the way we access information changed forever. And out of that change in habits, a form of advertising was born that is predominant today: contextual advertising. Social networks and mobile phones gave way to influencer marketing. We still use 20th century concepts: branding, positioning, market research, conversion funnel... But the marketing discipline has been profoundly blurred in the last twenty years, giving way to others such as customer experience, which have gained predominance as the points of contact between consumers and brands have become digitalised. And now it looks like the arrival of generative AI in our lives will change everything again in even less time.

I estimate five years.

I have been thinking about this article for weeks, jotting down links, making mindmaps and brainstorming ideas with ChatGPT and Claude to imagine what it is that we cannot yet imagine, but will mark the interaction between consumers and brands in five or ten years' time. What new habits, what gadgets, what relationship interfaces, ... What trends will become more acute and what routines will be eliminated, just as we stopped reading ads for words in newspapers years ago, or removing advertising envelopes from our mailboxes. I am not 100% satisfied with the reflection I am sharing with you today, but I had to expel it from me now in order to turn the page and recover my customary relationships with family and friends.

I propose a journey through the habits and behaviours that we will adopt thanks to the proliferation of AI in our lives. Some of them overlap, others could be secondary... but I have decided not to structure them beyond addressing them from closest to furthest in time according to my understanding of the evolution of the technology, of the systems that condition progress - state regulation, social coordination, the need for standards, business transformation - and of the acceptance of change at an individual level. I don't know if you will find anything concrete in these 15 headings that will help you, as MCX professionals, to make decisions in 2025, but I trust that at the very least, it will provide some thought-provoking reading time.

Here we go.

1.- The future of search is conversational.

The future of search is not about clicking on a link, but about having intelligent dialogues through questions and answers..

We are already living it and it is spectacular. Over the last twenty years, Google has accustomed us to typing into a little box and clicking on links looking for the answer we need with diminishing returns. Perplexity (and now ChatGPT and Google with its AI Overviews) shows us that it is more efficient to access the unknown through a Socratic conversation with language engines that understand us and explain the results they analyse, as if they were human. And we can nuance, ask again... There is no going back, once we connect to knowledge with the intermediation of an LLM, we will not go back to the dumb box.

The use of voice will also underpin our fondness for these new oracles. And having a search assistant memorise our preferences and our context will further enhance the experience.

2.- The future of learning is personalised tutors.

Education will be a Socratic conversation with personal tutors who challenge and guide us in learning..

But the sporadic search for information is different from the sustained effort to learn new knowledge or skills. Formal education and long life learning will be transformed by the advent of virtual AI tutors that adapt to each student. For some students they will use video games, for others riddles. If we understand a concept the first time, our virtual tutor will advance; if we have difficulties, he or she will identify where the confusion lies.

The positive impact of a private tutor on academic results has been widely demonstrated. Educational institutions, distance learning companies: all will provide students with trained and specialised virtual tutors to help them acquire knowledge. In Nigeria, the results are promising. Human teachers will not disappear, but their role will change, focusing on inspiring and developing social skills and critical thinking.

3.- The victory of the influencer over the media. With the intermediation of the algorithm.

In a world saturated with content and mediated by algorithms, the emotional connection with the creator sets the pace..

The glut of content in which we already live will continue to expand, driven by generative AI. Our information and entertainment diet is satisfied through three main actors that can be both creators and distributors of content: the media, influencers and platforms with their algorithms. But the weight of each actor will continue to vary.

What we call classic media (that produce content) will continue to sell the editorial criteria of a collective. A few generalist and many niche media will attract tons of subscribers. But with their editorial restrictions, they will find it harder to retain talent, as the option to become an independent creator consolidates. And so the collective media will continue to lose audience to these freelancers.

Individual creators will win the battle and push the fragmentation of the media ecosystem to the limit. Two forces converge in this victory: our emotional connection to the artist (more on this at the end of the article) will continue to grow over the years. And to add fuel to the fire, AI makes the means of production cheaper and allows the individual creator to generate content of a quality that was previously only available to companies with the capital to do so.

And where audiences migrate, logically, advertising investment follows:

On the other hand, we have technology platforms as content distributors. Be it BlueSkies or Netflixes. Their increasingly fine-tuned algorithms will continue to mediate our ingestion of content and mark the fate of creators. Algorithms that will increasingly anticipate our tastes. Recommendation engines that are now also improving in the face of the scarcity of structured data (that they have about us, or about other users) thanks to the capabilities of generative AI to work with unstructured data.

What is new is not the existence of these three actors, but how we are learning to navigate between them consciously.

4.- And if we don't trust what we see, what do we trust?

When nothing is true, everything can be true.

The boundary between fact and fiction is more porous than ever: a video of a president announcing trade wars, the leaked audio of a CEO or the influencer promoting a product? Nothing will escape scepticism. And in the face of this epistemological crisis, we will see the development of digital technologies and audits based on certifications backed by prestigious regulatory or corporate authorities, which may even be supported by technologies such as blockchain.

Interestingly, this will divide two types of audience: on the one hand, users who seek solid sources in safer, more transparent and controlled environments. On the other, users who give uncritical credibility to certain visible individuals, thus increasing vulnerability to conspiracy theories or unscientific theories that will be exploited by influencers with less scruples or less critical thinking skills, to put it mildly.

5.- Advertising personalisation that just won't cut it.

When AI knows us better than we know ourselves, irrelevance in business communication becomes a gesture of bad taste.

In the 2025-2030 horizon, our expectation of ever deeper personalisation at touchpoints with content and brands will continue to grow. When we launched DiceLaRed in 2003 (2003!!!), those close to us were shocked that brands could listen to what we all wrote on the Internet and that they could process this information without consent. Today, after years of maturity, and several scandals, we all take it for granted that they listen to us. And we are increasingly used to brands understanding our preferences, history and context, and therefore presenting us with relevant products, recommendations or content. We'll talk about privacy later in the article.

No matter how hard the EU tries, communications that are generic or not aligned with these interests will be ignored (and may be perceived negatively). In fact, tests of personalisation show remarkable results. These improvements in relevance, achieved with the help of AI, will accustom consumers to a much higher level of relevance in the advertising and offers they receive..

Marketing that aims to treat each customer as a segment of one will become more viable (by technology and by cost). And yet, curiously, it will still take longer to arrive than it should. Personalisation capabilities (without the need for sophisticated AI behind them) have been with us for years and are still not sufficiently widespread.

6.- Impatience and the expectation of more than perfect care.

The perfect experience exists. And it doesn't wait for tomorrow.

The ‘impatience economy’, as articulated in the Accenture Life Trends 2025 report, is a trend that emphasises consumers' need for immediacy and agile response. A dynamic in which immediacy, speed in decision-making and accelerated consumption become key drivers of behaviour and in which traditional market players (financial, educational or health institutions) are being undermined. With the advent of generative AI, these patterns will be amplified, driving change in consumer habits.

This impatience generates a new paradigm in which the quality of the customer experience is intrinsically linked to speed and efficiency. There will be a growing preference for instant and seamless, often automated, interactions. If in the past decade web self-service and basic chatbots gained some ground, in the coming years consumers will become familiar with conversational assistants powered by multi-modal LLMs and integrated into smart apps and devices.

An assistant powered by a language model can understand complex questions, access customer history and respond accurately in seconds, at any time and in the native language. By 2030, consumers will be accustomed to consulting a virtual assistant on everything from product details to order tracking to technical support, and the expectation will be that the service will be ‘always on’ and virtually immediate.

7.- Video games or films on demand? The horizon of personalised entertainment.

Entertainment will combine hyper-personalised content with community experiences.

Generative AI also promises to change our entertainment consumption habits. We will soon see content generated in real time: video game universes that emerge spontaneously, narratives that branch out with every decision and audiovisual experiences whose scripts evolve according to the reactions of the viewer.

But entertainment is also a social activity: with whom do we share these experiences if we are each going through different stories? We go to the cinema in groups, discuss series and celebrate sporting events as a community. The hyper-personalisation that may work in advertising elements may not be so appealing in entertainment products. What is the point of consuming songs ‘just for one’, when what we seek is to dance to them at a concert surrounded by fans or to feel accompanied when we sing the chorus at a karaoke?

There are already signs of this balance. Like NPCs (non-player characters) in video games, which offer personalised interactions in shared contexts. These could anticipate a hybrid model that integrates social with measured algorithmic personalisation.

8.- Empowerment and consumer activism.

In the age of transparency, citizen audit will be the norm.

While AI delivers unprecedented capabilities to businesses, it also gives a lot of power to the consumer. In a few years, users will demand transparency and audit it in real time. Tools based on generative AI and incorruptible and decentralised (or not) data storage technologies such as blockchain will allow us to verify the provenance of a product or the veracity of a company's sustainability claims, exposing manipulations in corporate discourse with greater accuracy. Coupled with incoming purchasing agents, consumers will for the first time have the ability to check the veracity of sustainability certifications (or anti-wokism, depending on which side of the fence you stand on).

Corporations will face decentralised and relentless surveillance, where contradictions between promise and reality are more visible. Clearly, this scenario requires a lot of coordination between governments, civil action and also some collusion from the private sector. And I anticipate that more sophisticated scenarios will be a long time coming. But in some ways, we are already moving down that road.

9.- More accompaniment in purchasing.

Purchasing agents will discover new products, help us decide and talk to sales agents on our behalf.

The maze of choices facing today's consumer - with myriad brands, customisable products and a multi-channel information bombardment - is overwhelming. Google research reveals that 67% of consumers find that making the right choices requires more effort than ever before, while 56% have abandoned purchases due to too much choice..

And this is where artificial intelligence comes into play, with a value that transcends simple personalised recommendations. It is about establishing conversational, multi-modal relationships that emulate the personalised attention of the best physical salespeople. The advent of shopping agents will change the rules of commerce at all levels.

These agents promise to reduce post-sale frustration as well. Returns in eCommerce, for example, could be minimised by helping consumers to accurately visualise the outcome of their purchases before they make them. At the same time, more routine decisions - policy renewals or service contracts - will be handled by intelligent agents acting on the user's behalf, turning tedious tasks into processes that run in the background.

10.- The rise of the voice: talking to machines will be the everyday thing to do.

At last technology will speak our language instead of forcing us to learn theirs.

In the next few years, talking to our devices will become as commonplace as touching a screen is for us today. A decade ago, the promise of voice interaction that Alexa represented failed to materialise for fundamentally technical reasons. But that is changing. Talking to a machine today is a radically different experience. They understand us, they respond to us, and the naturalness with which the synthetic voice sounds makes it indistinguishable from a real human voice (be sure to try Maya, recently launched by the startup Sesame). Just as a touchscreen device like the Newton did not succeed a decade before the iPhone did, the next 5 years will see the consolidation of voice as the interface for interaction: on the street, at home, in the car. ‘Turn down the air conditioning, find me a parking space in this area. We will have voice assistants in our headsets, in our glasses, in our coffee machines and microwave ovens. It will become normal to see people talking to each other in the street..

But we may not use voice everywhere: perhaps not in open offices or on public transport. And we will continue to use screens, buttons and gestures so as not to disturb others or expose private conversations. And also, because pressing a button is often quicker and easier. Because sometimes, a graphical interface is more useful (to display a menu, to know what I can do with a tool). We will naturally use voice when practical and touch when necessary. And the technology will understand that mix of spoken commands, gestures and the context we are in.

11.- Digital companions: our new confidants.

Digital stewards and companions: solving everyday tasks and providing emotional support.

In five years, AI agents will not be mere tools but extensions of our identity, indispensable companions in our daily lives. Unlike today's tools that wait for our commands, these agents will be attentive, learn from our habits and anticipate our needs. They will become mediators of our human relationships, becoming social filters that will tell us: ‘Of the 50 notifications you have received today, only these three are worth your attention’. This constant filtering will enhance some connections while diluting others that our agent deems less important.

At first, we will ask them for basic tasks: answering emails, organising family photos or finding gaps in our schedule. But soon we will give them more autonomy. Not only will they make a doctor's appointment when we ask them to, but they will suggest it to us by detecting patterns in our health through a smart watch or a smart ring.

We may even allow them to work in the background without direct intervention. They will cancel subscriptions we don't use, negotiate better rates with our suppliers and, during a business call, whisper key facts about the people you talk to. Everyone will have a unique relationship with their agent. We may have different agents for different fields: health, sport, companionship and emotional support,... Some of us will prefer proactive assistants who take the initiative; others will seek them out more discreetly. And to function smoothly, they will know as much, if not more, about us than we know about ourselves.

12.- When your AI assistant knows more about you than you do: regulation, privacy and the invisible price of convenience.

The real luxury may not be having the best AI assistant, but being able to afford to live without one.

To become inseparable companions, AI agents will have access to our passwords, conversations, medical history, daily routines and most intimate preferences. This convenience will come at a price we are only beginning to understand. The more information you give your assistant, the more useful it will be. But that information will not just be ‘on your device’ but on corporate servers and potentially accessible to governments or hackers.

It will also affect our understanding of human relationships. When your assistant reminds you of a friend's birthday or suggests the perfect gift based on their shopping history, will it still be a personal gesture? Your agent will negotiate with your boss's agent about your availability and with your friends' agents to organise get-togethers. Sincerity itself will become ambiguous: should your assistant tell a friend's assistant that you turned down another invitation on the same day on the grounds that you were busy?

Clearly, not everyone will want to leave so much information or put so much control of their lives in the hands of these tools. There will be, as there are today, people who will let go and people who will oppose it. But the enormous advantage that their use will provide will make it difficult for us to stay away from them, just as today it is difficult to live without whatsapp.

13.- The counterpoint: the value of creation and human relationship.

Technology may replicate the art, but not the connection we feel with the person who creates it.

Artistic creation on demand - be it for an advertising campaign or the design of a single-family home - will be driven by artificial intelligence, facilitating more precise and cost-effective responses to specific demands. However, the genuine creative essence, that which embodies the artist's unique and non-transferable ethos, will remain untouched by the technological threat.

Our deep emotional connection to people (known or unknown) will not change with AI. At least not in the next 5 years. AI already writes songs, but people will still want to chant en masse at Taylor Swift concerts. Humans are mythomaniacs because our minds are designed to construct and believe in narratives. Heroes, leaders, individual artists are more memorable and impactful. The media and economic system reinforces this tendency, amplifying the visibility of charismatic figures rather than highlighting collective effort.

Just as a handwritten note has a greater impact on us today, what is perceived as genuinely human will maintain that point of difference. Perhaps ‘AI Free’ labels will become fashionable. As with artisanal production, the human touch could become a mark of exclusivity and trust. There will be premium services that offer personal attention as a differential value, in the face of an increasingly automated world.

Conclusion: expectations and obstacles.

In either case, expectations will not be homogeneous across consumer segments. Younger generations are already more comfortable with and curious about AI and will demand more innovative and interactive experiences. They may quickly adopt AI-powered avatars or personal assistants to manage aspects of their lives (finance, travel, leisure) and expect brands to connect with these new intermediaries. In contrast, some older consumers may prefer hybrid options (AI + human) and need more security guarantees.

I have also overlooked some of the barriers to adoption of these technologies. I always explain that the consumer may be keen to have an agent shop for them in an online supermarket, or order them an Uber, but the company has no intention of letting go of control of the interface experience easily. As an example, today we are faced with roadblocks between Apple and Google that have little to do with the technological capabilities already in place, and prevent a frictionless experience.

But as depicted in the graph we've used at Rebel Intel in the past, we can expect the technology industry to continue to put toys in our hands that we will adopt at a rapid pace, while organisations try to keep up with us with their tongues hanging out.

In short, by 2030, the consumer will have consolidated a deeper relationship with generative AI, we will adopt agents that progressively become extensions of our digital identity. We will demand conversational and personalised experiences, and we will do so through voice. We will be less patient with irrelevant brands and some of us will become auditors of corporate transparency. However, in the face of this ubiquitous automation, genuine human connection will continue to shine as an exclusive luxury.