On this episode of the AW360 Podcast, Michael Mayton, EVP of Experience Innovation at Bounteous, takes us inside the evolving world of customer experience and brand engagement. Michael shares how AI is transforming personalization and communication strategies, why co-innovation with clients is key to building impactful solutions, and what brands can learn from blending physical and digital touchpoints. From AR/VR’s real potential to creating loyalty through value-driven interactions, he offers a roadmap for experience leaders navigating an AI-powered future—while reminding us why human creativity and curiosity remain irreplaceable.
Transcript (Download)
Michael, welcome to the AW360 podcast. I’m so pleased to have you on today. Thank you. It’s a pleasure to be here. So you’re EVP of Experience Innovation at Bounteous. That’s an exciting title if ever I’ve heard one. Tell us though, before we get into that, tell us about Bounteous and what you do there for the uninitiated. Yeah, for sure. So Bounteus is a digital consultancy, systems integrator, agency, all three of those things together. So we’re kind of a unique business. We’re a global player and we work for some of the best brands in the world, I like to say. That’s my personal sentiment. And I think if you look through our catalog of partners, many would feel the same. So I can broaden and go into my personal kind of position within the organization. But that’s at the high level what we do. Well, let’s do that. I mean, experience is one of my favorite words right now because it implies everything I see on the consumer side that makes everything, you know, seem cool for lack of a better way of putting it. But tell us about your role. Yeah, for sure. My role is a lot of focus on customer experience, but that is essentially goes beyond customer and into employee experience. Anyone that is using digital tools to enable them to do the tasks that they need to accomplish or, you know, browse websites or use mobile applications effectively. All of those things under the sun are essentially the remit of my team. It’s inclusive of strategy, product, our front-end technology, experience design, which includes visual design and user experience, and all of our marketing capabilities as well. So it’s a rather significant stretch across the entirety of the experience ecosystem that a person could engage with. And that goes into physical experiences also, mainly focused on digital touchpoints within those experiences. But it really extends to every touchpoint a brand could potentially have with an audience, whether that’s internal facing for them or external for their customers. How has your view of customer experience evolved, especially given today’s AI-driven landscape? Well, I think there’s a few different dimensions to that for sure. So first thing I’ll touch on is just the way in which customer experience is developed with digital tools. Never before have we had so many ways to communicate with people in moments in time where traditionally before phones became so prevalent and in the use of our technology, us as human beings in our daily lives. So in these moments, you have brands engaging with you in the middle of the evening where, you know, you’ve never had that experience prior or would it be welcome prior? Now it’s an expectation. So I think that that shift in the mentality of customers, you remember they’re was a point in time where uh brands capturing your data and remarketing to you and communicating with you was something that people are saying was going to be creepy or unwelcome or like they would feel at a particular way about a brand that that’s a negative now we’ve gone beyond that and it’s it’s an expectation versus something that people feel uh awkwardly about Or wouldn’t want a brand to communicate with them. So I think that the shift in that regard is hugely significant. And when you couple that with artificial intelligence, being able to draft the marketing, draft the content, draft the messages, deploy those messages, gather the data, and then bring that back to marketers and tell them what to do next. and discover and outline pathways for communication strategies and ways to engage customers. That’s a huge shift because now we have taken out the ingredient of even needing a human being to facilitate the insight gathering, understand what we’re gonna do with those insights, take time to brainstorm ideas around what the potential opportunity spaces could look like to tap into potential audiences. And now, you know, AI is doing it for you. And so that’s… a major change. Personalization is often cited as the holy grail of customer experience. And everybody’s talking about personalization. Now, how are these emerging technologies, maybe, you know, obviously AI at the forefront of it, but even, you know, ones that we don’t hear about as much lately, but are still around, like, you know, AR and VR, how are those technologies enabling brands to create truly individualized and emotionally resonant experiences? Yeah, I think for brands that can leverage those tools in meaningful ways that are unique and welcome and deliver some value on the other side of it for those individuals, those are the ones that are really catapulting ahead in that space. I think, you know, with VR experiences, that has been a little bit more of like a tangentially on the outside of the commonplace experiences that people have every day. But for brands that can tap into that and highlight some level of value for the customer there or the employee or whatever it is the user. those ones are the ones that are actually making a meaningful difference. And that value exchange, the mutual value exchange, whether that’s entertainment purposes, whether that’s a job that needs to be done, The ones that find the space that make meaningful change happen are those that are successful. Where we have like AR experiences that just don’t really pan out, don’t deliver value, are very niche. I think that those things are high points for a moment in time, maybe a PR activity, and then just kind of fall off the map. And how do you ensure that the digital touchpoints that you’re working with don’t feel transactional, but instead build an emotional brand loyalty or connection? Yeah, I mean, this goes back to communication strategy and the way in which we engage and speak with individuals and then allowing us to understand. And some of this can be propelled forward with artificial intelligence is how we continue that line of communication and the moments that matter most to the individuals that we’re talking to. And so when we have a transactional experience, we can either dead-end that experience and say, thank you, here’s your receipt, or we could open up new lines of communication and create cycles of re-engagement, which is, for all intents and purposes, the concept of gamification. So we have a triggering event where… We have engaged with a customer in some way. They’ve gotten a value out of us as a business. And then we’ve created an opportunity space for them to come back to us or us to reach out to them to re-engage those customers. And as long as that moment of re-engagement delivers value on the other side of it, and that value is recognized as being a very positive thing for the customer or the employee or whoever that person is, then we have an opportunity to continue that relationship moving forward. When we do that, then we create this sense of loyalty. We have great experiences. We have loyal customers. They like our products. They continue to come back. We have communication with them. It’s welcome communication. We build a relationship and a bond, and that results in an emotional connection and a sense of loyalty to the brand. I want to dive into the idea of co-innovation for a moment. Sure. Design is a big part of co-innovation. Can you share how Bounteous uses co-innovation to co-create solutions alongside customers rather than just simply creating something for them? Absolutely. And so co-innovation also takes different shapes and forms depending upon the level of effort that our partners want to put into it. Some partners want to be very deeply co-creative where we’re having daily stand-ups to review work. We’re having brainstorming sessions together as one unified team. We’re actually pulling up Figma projects. on screen sharing assets and moving around designs in real time with our partners. And that is essentially the purest form, in my opinion, of that co-creative philosophy. Co-innovation is the idea that our partners and us are working hand in hand to sculpt experiences through design thinking methodologies. And we like to term it as being continuous, connected, and collaborative. where we’re always on a mission to push forward innovative new ideas and thinking, improve experiences that are in the market, have those experiences connected to the greater digital ecosystem of all touchpoints that a customer could potentially tap into. And then that collaboration is continuous as well, that we’re on a mission together. And so that also goes back to shared risk and reward in these arrangements and relationships. where we will have a hypothesis that we believe firmly within, that we can deliver success and results for that business, and that we put some of our fees at risk because we have a very deep understanding of how we can achieve success together. So that relationship, knowing that we both have a bit of risk and a shared reward at the end of it, also attributes to a deeply… loyal relationship and engagement and longstanding relationships as well. Can you share an example of co-creation that has surprised you? So it could be anything in terms of creativity or, you know, just the idea or brief from the partner itself, anything. Yeah, for sure. There’s a few different examples that I can touch on. One of them is with a brand that we do a really significant level of customer experience touchpoint work with. So that extends into in-store experiences and physical locations. It’s all the digital touchpoints in social media and community building. So working with this team, we’re deeply collaborative. We’re working together hand in hand on site at our location on a weekly basis. Our team had a hypothesis with their team that we could create experiences that were more dynamic. deeply tethered to customer needs and their values and desires around the concept of convenience. And so we drafted this entire model of how, together, collaboratively together, entire model of how a customer should engage in a physical location and giving them prompts on how we feel the optimal experience journey would work out as they navigate that that convenience store, whether they’re buying food, they’re grabbing something off of a shelf, how to make payments more seamless and easy and optimized, how we can put things in different locations to enable them to do it friction-free, the idea that we can get somebody into a store and out of a store in 30 seconds or less, uh, to accomplish their needs and deliver it with a smile, um, from an associate was really kind of the ethos of, of the idea there. Um, another one that I could just go on a little bit of a brief tangent was, uh, some time ago, but I think I, I, I love this example because, uh, I think for the moment in time that it was, it will resonate with some folks. So when COVID kind of happened, uh, there was this, um, idea that trick or treating would not actually manifest in the traditional form that year. So we had an idea to take that to a digital platform and allow people to trick or treat across the nation through a digital experience and have a candy economy and scale this engagement with households across the nation. And so we did that working with their team. The brand was with Mars and working with their team to establish that experience and how we were going to engage with those customers and deliver that candy at the end of the Halloween season. Yeah. It was hugely successful, a major PR event for them, and something that I can still feel is very memorable as one of the programs that resonated with me longstanding. That’s very cool. I always appreciate… everything that people did during that time period to, you know, just kind of lend a certain amount of normalcy to what was the most abnormal situation I think any of us have ever been through. What do you see as the next big frontier in the integration of physical and digital experiences? This is a question that I’m always curious about because I feel like lines are blurring, but in ways I couldn’t possibly have ever imagined. Yeah, I think the integration… And so one thing that I think is interesting to see is the progression of technology into things that typically you wouldn’t think the technology would exist within. So like, you know… Watches was kind of like a no-brainer thing. It would be a technological advancement. Of course, phones and having the processing power of a computer in your phone is an incredible advancement. But glasses and eyewear and seeing that those are things that people are starting to adopt, although it’s like the, I would say, on the fringes of adoption. Yeah. But as those technologies become lower price and more accessible to larger portions of audience, I think that we’re going to see more adoption in those devices. So that is… opportunity space for brands to figure out how they want to occupy a position within those devices. And I go back to this statement I made earlier, like what is going to be welcome or unwelcome, I think that that’s like a moment in time where you either get the adoption, you get like the customer sentiment of getting over the hurdle or the obstacle of whether or not this is going to be something they want to engage with. And once you get there, then these things start to really propagate across humanity. And then we see that this is not like a niche thing anymore. It’s that five out of every 10 people are walking around with AI-powered eyewear. And that will be a whole new frontier because then what we’re actually putting in front of people has a huge range of options. Again, do we want to be advertising at every moment within that experience? Would a person find that to be something palatable? Is it a distraction? We don’t know. We’re not quite there yet, but that is definitely on the horizon and a frontier we need to be cognizant of. You know, further to that, a lot of companies struggle to balance these new innovations with the practical needs of their customers. How do you advise brands to test and scale new technologies? I mean, you mentioned eyewear, which I think is a great example. I mean, it’s something that I’m using now, but just per your point just a moment ago, would I want ads coming through it as I’m wearing them all day? No, probably not. And then, you know, I immediately think when you’re saying that of, you know, imagine a webpage full, you know, a webpage’s worth of banner ads, for example. in audio form in my smart glasses. Not a great experience, but, you know, obviously it’s going to be ad-powered at some point. How do you advise them to test and scale these technologies without losing sight of the core customer needs and, you know, sort of customer acceptance? Yeah, I think that starting off with a small hypothesis and then working through a test-based audience is the best way to just start working ahead to try and get some results. We can also look at synthetic means of research and telling AI we have a particular type of persona, we have a hypothesis. Can we validate that some of these opportunities exist? against that persona are going to have some success metrics behind them. And then that’s a rather low-risk way to get back some initial data sets before you actually move into generating a full-bore prototype, putting it on a device, trying to find human beings to test out the experience that you want them to have. But again, I think looking at these things through the lowest risk opportunities and the lowest levels of investment to just try and get started to get some validation. And then once you find something that is material, then you can amplify your research. You can come up with higher fidelity prototypes and try and get to get to something that will deliver you more successful results. And pure, I think, is the word I’m looking for responses from from customers or test audiences. Looking ahead, what skills or mindsets will the next generation of experienced leaders need or just leaders in general need in our industry to thrive in this rapidly evolving AI powered world? Great question. I think that more so than ever, our curiosity and our creativity and the sense of imagination that human beings have had is a key characteristic of our evolution and our power to be inventors and innovators. has to be maintained. I know that artificial intelligence can always jumpstart and come up with ideas for you. It can come back to you with high fidelity output and create videos and content. And you can feel like your work is done. You could have AI do everything? But at what point do you start to move away from this incredibly powerful capability that we have as human beings? And I think our pressure is to continuously evolve and move forward with human intelligence with a tool that is AI versus using AI so prevalently that we start to lose the sense of sense of accomplishment and value in the work that we do and you know why do we do what we do I think we get a sense of accomplishment out of it we genuinely enjoy it it’s problems that we like solving for that’s the desire to be in this craft in this field. Uh, and I think if you start to, to remove all of the, uh, kind of the hurdles and you don’t have to solve problems anymore because something else is doing everything for you, then that sense of accomplishment is removed. Uh, and, or we have to figure out what is going to be the, the thing that’s a valuable for us as creatives, as, as an innovators, uh, inventors, um, because, um, I think that that is something that is deeply motivating for us now. My fear is that if we become so reliant on something else doing everything for you, that you diminish that. Absolutely. Michael, this has been fascinating. If one wanted to find out more about you or Bounteous, where should they go? Yeah, you can go to bountys.com is our website. And if you look me up on LinkedIn, I’m happy to accept an invitation for a connection or spark up a conversation. Excellent. Well, thanks so much for taking part in the podcast today. This was really good stuff. I loved a lot of your insights and answers and a lot of it isn’t things I’ve heard before. So I always like the fresh perspective. Wonderful. Glad to hear it. Pleasure being here.
