Everyone Wants AI, Except Your Customers

Forbes

01-07-2025

Marketing products as "AI-powered" can hurt, not boost, sales.
Business leaders are crazy for AI. Many firms are claiming to be 'AI-first' enterprises. In the latest McKinsey Global Survey on AI, 78% of organizations now use AI in at least one business function, up from 72% in early 2024 and 55% a year earlier. The AI bug has infected marketers, too. Every product launch seems to feature "AI-powered" this and "artificial intelligence" that.
But here's the problem: many of your customers hate it.
New research reveals a surprising truth. When Washington State University and Temple University researchers split test participants into two groups, one seeing "AI-powered" products and the other seeing "new technology" products. There was no halo effect for AI. The AI group was consistently less likely to buy.
In that study, published in the Journal of Hospitality Marketing & Management, researchers presented 1,000 respondents with product descriptions. They found that products described as using AI were consistently less popular.
The Psychology Behind the AI Backlash
The reason isn't rational. It's emotional. "The main findings of this study is the use of AI decreases emotional trust," says Mesut Cicek, assistant professor at Washington State University, according to CX Dive. "The consumers have trust issues with AI, and then also it decreases the purchase intention."
Think about what happens in your customer's brain when they see "AI-powered." You hope they're thinking about efficiency or innovation. More likely, they're thinking about job losses, hallucinations, pizza glue, privacy breaches, and machines making decisions they don't understand. Maybe even the terminator robots of a dystopian future.
"When we were thinking about this project, we thought that AI will improve [consumers' willingness to buy] because everyone is promoting AI in their products," says Dogan Gursoy, a regents professor at Washington State and study co-author, according to the Wall Street Journal. "But apparently it has a negative effect, not a positive one."
The effect gets worse with risk. The difference was smaller for items researchers called low risk, like a television, but more pronounced for offerings perceived to be riskier buys, such as a car or a medical-diagnostic service.
Older Customers Are More AI-Averse
A separate study described in the WSJ article, conducted by Parks Associates, confirms this trend. Of roughly 4,000 Americans surveyed, 18% said AI would make them more likely to buy, 24% said less likely, and 58% said it made no difference.
Among younger respondents (age 18 to 44), 24% to 27% said they would likely buy a product advertised as including AI. But among respondents age 65 and older, 32% said they would be less likely to buy a product advertised with AI.
The most affluent customer segment, older adults with disposable income, is the group most often rejecting AI marketing.
What Marketers Should Do About AI Claims
Famed Harvard Business School professor Theodore Levitt offered this insightful quote: 'People don't want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole!' In other words, don't boast about your tungsten carbide, diamond-enhanced, ultra-durable drill bits. Your customers just want faster holes, cleaner holes, and more holes.
So, don't abandon AI enhancements to your products. Just stop bragging about it, at least until consumer attitudes change. Focus on benefits, not buzzwords.
Ask people if they want to talk to an AI chatbot, and they'll say no. (To be fair, until recently most chatbots have been useless friction to keep customers from bothering actual humans.) But, ask if they want instant, reliable problem resolution and they'll be all-in.
I expect attitudes to change over time, probably sooner rather than later. Some markets are already eager to embrace AI. With business leaders clamoring for more rapid AI adoption, B2B sales pitches will usually benefit from AI messaging.
Marketers always do better when they focus on customer needs than product details. Until your customers feel they really must have AI in their products, don't go out of your way to talk about it—even if AI is making the product better.