AI will automate tasks — not bedside empathy
A Gartner survey found half of U.S. consumers want brands to avoid generative AI in marketing, even as AI tools handle routing and basic queries; industry guides argue AI frees associates for high‑value, human interactions. That split means stores will lean on AI for speed while keeping humans for trust‑heavy work — a structural change, not a wholesale replacement.
Gartner surveyed) 1,539 U.S. consumers in October 2025. Sixty‑one percent of respondents) said they frequently question whether information they use for everyday decisions is reliable, and 68% said) they frequently wonder whether content they see online is real. Gartner advised) marketers to "make GenAI optional, start with clearly assistive use cases and label AI‑driven experiences," a trust‑first prescription from Senior Principal Analyst Emily Weiss. Alhena’s November 21, 2025 blog outlines) agent‑assist capabilities such as instant query summaries, sentiment analysis, smart knowledge‑base search and AI‑drafted response suggestions for human review. Alhena’s product pages claim) its Customer Support Assistant can auto‑resolve over 80% of incoming queries and advertises an 80% automation rate for voice interactions. Gartner’s push for labeled, assistive AI pairs) with vendor playbooks that emphasize workload shifting rather than replacement, illustrated by an Alhena case study reporting an 11.4% revenue contribution and a 38% average‑order‑value uplift for Tatcha.
