Brands are speeding up investment in Artificial Intelligence to gain a competitive advantage in delivering personalized customer experiences at scale by 2020 according to Adobe research.

For example, UK brands are adopting Artificial Intelligence (AI) as they race to make sense of customer data and deliver more relevant, personalized experiences while staying on the right side of GDPR.

Adobe research, to be published in a report entitled Context is Everything, reveals an overwhelming majority (91%) of UK businesses view personalization as a priority, although fewer than one third (30%) said they are currently delivering the required level of personalization.

Current levels of personalization are behind key competitor markets (42% in Germany, 35% in Switzerland and France), meaning there is clearly still work to do and more effective data management must be a priority.

More than half (59%) of UK brands surveyed said they cannot process data quickly enough at present, while 52% said that they collect too much data from too many sources. GDPR also adds another layer of complexity to brands’ personalisation strategies.

Over two-fifths of UK businesses (43%) said the EU’s new data protection regulation had held them back to some degree in the drive towards personalization.

AI promises to give brands greater control of their data and a greater capability to analyze it. The research shows UK companies have an aggressive timeline for the implementation of AI for business and customer data analytics. Just under three quarters (70%) of UK respondents plan to have implemented AI for business and customer analytics by 2019, going up to 92% by the end of 2020.

Bridget Perry, Vice President of Marketing, Adobe EMEA at Adobe, said: “UK companies are acutely aware that they need to get closer to their customers and provide more personalized services if they are to stay relevant. The level of analytics required for effective personalization at scale may have seemed impossible just a few years ago, but AI has made it a reality, allowing companies to quickly gain vital customer insights from huge volumes of data.”

I invited Bridget onto my daily tech podcast to find out more about this research.