Since long before the pandemic, “digital-first” has been the direction of travel for ambitious organizations. But closing the gap with big-pocketed U.S. giants like Amazon and Netflix can seem like an impossible task. So how can businesses compete? The answer is to give customers what they want: hyper-personalized experiences delivered directly to their devices. Increasingly, that means adaptive applications capable of adjusting behavior and features in real-time, based on user preferences and other factors.
Yet this kind of dynamic, ultra-responsive, user-centric experience comes at a price. It can only be achieved by first putting in place the right data architecture.
The Promise of Adaptive Applications
As Deloitte explains, businesses aren’t just expected to meet the needs of customers today – increasingly they must “anticipate and exceed them.” This is manifested in a new race for hyper-personalization: services that use real-time data, machine learning and AI analytics to dynamically deliver functionality catered to the user’s specific needs and current context. The business case for doing so is pretty solid: Companies that excel at personalization can generate 40% more revenue than the rest, according to McKinsey.
Sitting at the gateway to the digital world, adaptive applications are absolutely critical to this proposition. They will adjust and readjust based on fast-changing user preferences, environmental conditions, data inputs or changing circumstances. They are context-aware, customizable, situational and adaptable. And they are also intelligent – incorporating predictive machine learning, AI, real-time calculations and generative AI conversations to adapt.
They promise to redefine how brands interact with their customers, even as big-name innovators continue to disrupt and innovate. Consider a streaming service that suggests content to watch based on viewing history and user preferences. An adaptive application would go further: scheduling personalized TV viewing sessions, pausing automatically when the viewer needs a drink and even displaying relevant notifications from other streaming services. In a similar way, while current smart home systems might adjust lighting, temperature and security settings based on occupancy and time of day, an adaptive app would adjust settings based on who is home and in what room they are located.
The Right Data Architecture
Brands aspiring to deliver this kind of experience must first consider their backend data architecture. Data must be made available in flexible formats like JSON in order to create or modify unanticipated data inputs. These could include enhancing account profiles with new personalization attributes, or storing conversation prompts and responses with large language models (LLMs).
Data architecture must also deliver exceptional performance so that apps can react in real time to avoid missing a response opportunity. For that reason, adaptive apps will need to be located at the network edge. And they need to cross-connect account personalization information with other opted-in services to enhance the user experience. In this way, a bank, airline and hotel loyalty program could coordinate to upgrade the user in real time when they pass into platinum status, for example.
Unfortunately, there are many barriers to overcome. Data silos are commonplace across modern enterprises, complicating and slowing access to information and increasing the likelihood that the data is not stored in the right format or language. Database sprawl is another common challenge, with operational, transactional and analytical databases often working in different languages, management methods and processes. This can also be a barrier to real-time analytics and accurate decision making – not to mention increasing costs.
Getting There
To turn the vision of adaptive applications into reality, organizations must address these and other critical challenges simultaneously. App performance has to be lightning fast at scale. JSON is needed to feed AI prompts with trustworthy data. Refined prompt development is required, with multiple variables, including personalization attributes, location, activity and real-time calculations, performed simultaneously alongside the running application.
And it is absolutely critical that analytic results can be written to the operational database and the applications it runs. The truth is that most analytical systems do not write back the derived data values they calculate into operational systems – instead only presenting outputs as dashboards, which is a barrier to taking action rapidly. Being able to execute large-scale, real-time analytic calculations that can be used as new data in applications is a game-changer in the quest for adaptive applications.
For the first time, this is now a reality on a single database platform, which supports interactions on users’ mobile devices. A new era is dawning for hyper-personalized experiences. And organizations ready to embrace these cutting-edge data architectures will be in the driver’s seat in the race for consumer hearts, minds and wallets.
A flexible multipurpose database is foundational to high performance on a global scale – and to building AI-powered adaptive applications that offer premium customer experiences. Learn more about how Couchbase vector search at the edge and real-time analytics with Couchbase columnar can help organizations develop a new class of AI-powered adaptive applications that engage customers in a hyper-personalized, contextualized way.