There is something deeply reassuring about market research. It tells us what we want to hear, validates our instincts of the moment, and photographs a world that, precisely as the ink dries, is already mutating. The latest study, commissioned by Chelsea Co. and devoted to consumer behaviour towards artificial intelligence in the alcoholic drinks sector, is no exception to this iron law of forecasting: it measures the present admirably well, only to miss the future entirely.
So I read that 75% of over-55s distrust AI in drinks marketing. That even 18-to-34-year-olds, born with a smartphone practically grafted to their palms, prefer brands with a “human touch” by 60%. That more than 80% of respondents believe they can detect machine-generated content. Fascinating. Absolutely fascinating. And absolutely déjà vu.
Because I have lived this. Word for word. Figure for figure.
In the late 1990s, I was immersed in the buzzing ecosystem of the nascent internet — at Lycos, at Bertelsmann, in boardrooms where we were preparing the stock market listings of technology companies that some still believed would not survive the summer. And circulating at the time, with the same academic authority, were equally serious, equally well-constructed studies that explained to us, evidence in hand, that consumers would never shop online. That trust could only be built in-store, that the feel of merchandise, the glance of a salesperson, the warmth of local commerce were irreducible variables in the act of purchase. That the “human touch” — to borrow the very vocabulary of the study before us — was an absolute prerequisite for any transaction.
Then came Amazon. Then eBay. Then Alibaba. And with them, billions of dematerialised, anonymous, algorithmic transactions — and perfectly willing ones at that.
The very same consumers who declared they would never trust online shopping found themselves, just a few years later, ordering books, clothes, medicines and second-hand cars at three in the morning in their pyjamas, from a sofa. Without a salesperson. Without a smile. Without a “human touch.” And perfectly happy about it, thank you very much.
What studies fail to capture is the power of habits yet to form.
The philosopher Alfred North Whitehead wrote that “civilisation advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.” AI will not win consumers over by asking their opinion. It will weave itself so deeply into the experience — personalised recommendations, fluid interfaces, eerily relevant suggestions — that the question of its origin will become as incidental as wondering whether the search engine that found your favourite restaurant back in 2003 was “human” or not.
And let us be honest with the study’s own figures: 75% of 18-to-34-year-olds accept AI provided brands are transparent about its use. That is not rejection. That is a trust condition currently under negotiation. We are not facing a wall, but a threshold. And thresholds, in the history of technology, are always crossed — and always faster than anyone expects.
Market research has a paradoxical virtue: it reassures those who wish to slow down, and galvanises those who have understood that the time to accelerate is now.
In 1999, while some were brandishing surveys proving that e-commerce was a pipe dream, Jeff Bezos was building his warehouses. Today, while Chelsea Co. publishes, with genuine good intentions, a study on consumer distrust of AI, engineers in San Francisco, London and Seoul are training models capable of writing, composing, recommending and personalising at a scale and speed that no human marketing team will ever be able to match.
I am not saying that the human disappears. I am saying that the human repositions — as it always has in the face of great technological waves. The bookseller did not vanish with Amazon, but the bookselling industry was radically transformed.
So yes, let us conduct fine studies. Let us listen to consumers. Let us respect their reservations of the moment. But let us always keep in mind the lesson I learned from the wild adventure of the internet pioneers: it is never the studies that make history. It is the entrepreneurs who decide not to believe them.
Contact Guillaume Jourdan via LinkedIn
