While writing this article, I did my best to really concentrate my effort to make it as sharp and as impactful as I could. But I kept getting distracted — checking work messengers and swiping away endless push notifications. These days, it is nearly impossible to focus one’s mind on any activity without getting bombarded by countless notifications every minute.
I am sure you’ll get several notifications while reading this article, too.
Our attention spans are shrinking while content is flooding in from all directions. Brands must work hard to get the audience to engage with their content, download their whitepaper, or choose their podcast for the evening.
Attention has become the currency.
On average, people check their phones 144 times a day, but each interaction often lasts less than a minute.
Innovations like AI help businesses engage customers beyond these fleeting moments. In this article, I would like to dive into how you can achieve that based on my experience as a CTO in a global MarTech company. But first, let’s explore how we reached the point where each second of attention became as precious as gold.
Let’s Go Back to Where We Started
As a tech specialist, I witnessed and took part in this continuing revolution of customer engagement we’ve been going through for almost two decades now.
Remember how in the mid-2000s the social media and messaging apps took off, opening new promotion routes for brands and allowing people to choose how they engaged with those brands. By the late 2010s, the number of communication channels increased even further, and demand for content skyrocketed, forcing businesses to keep up with the demand. Keeping up often meant streamlining content production, creating more of the one-size-fits-all faceless content that appealed to everybody and nobody at the same time. By the mid-2020s, consumers had grown immune to in-your-face promotions, craving personalized experiences delivered only when and how they wanted them.
Even 15 years ago, I was asking: How can we make messaging more engaging and dynamic while also driving efficiency? Now, in 2025, I think I have the answer. Thanks to AI, we can understand our audience like never before, deliver personalized messaging, and reach new levels of efficiency at the same time.
Customers want real value and have no patience for brands that just throw marketing spaghetti at the wall, hoping something sticks. In fact:
76% of consumers expect personalized experiences — and they get frustrated when they don’t.
Using AI Where It Works Best
In an era where AI dominates the conversation, it is important to stay grounded and not idealize it. AI excels at speeding up content production and analyzing vast amounts of data to better understand customer needs. Yet, it falls short when it comes to generating creative ideas, crafting meaningful stories, or fostering genuine connections with an audience.
While AI may not be able to generate truly human content, it can optimize your workflow and save you precious time. Content creators can use this extra time to craft messages that land with the audience, tell stories that evoke empathy, and build lasting connections that foster loyalty.
So, how exactly can we use AI to carve out some extra time to hold customer attention? Here’s what works:
Arranging Your Immense Data
AI can help you organize sheer volumes of your existing content, reports, or relevant information for decision-making. This can help your teams retrieve, reuse, and repurpose assets in future campaigns. What’s more, thanks to accurate tagging, you can analyze what content piece resonates and what falls flat to better understand your customers’ needs and behaviors.
In life sciences in particular, auto-tagging helps with the adoption of a modular content approach. Content experience platforms, like eWizard, automatically tag modules (design-free, message-driven content blocks), so users can easily retrieve them and combine them like Lego pieces to create new materials at scale. This is especially valuable in highly regulated environments, where content reuse means no need to restart the lengthy regulatory approval processes.
Creating Content on the Fly
You’ve done the segmentation and tailored the messaging — but the response? Silence. One possible reason is that customer expectations are shifting:
66% of customers say they’ll leave a brand that doesn’t offer personalized experience.
65% of customers want companies to keep up with their changing needs.
One possible solution is to leverage real-time content that reacts to what your customers do (also known as real-time triggers). Let’s say you’re a pharma company reaching out to a healthcare provider (HCP). You send an email linking to a site tailored to their needs using initial segmentation. From there, the experience evolves. Based on their interactions with the site, the user immediately receives follow-up messages that feel tailored to their specific needs and concerns. All this syncs with your CRM, giving your medical reps the insights they need to take the next best action.
Localizing Content at Scale
AI-driven translation tools are nothing new. But here is the thing — you do not need just another tool. You need one that actually eases the burden on your local teams. It should speak your industry’s language, get the nuances of local markets, and even know the local regulations.
The most exciting part is that some advanced tools can also learn from your knowledge base, meaning teams no longer need to correct typos in product names or mix-ups with internal terms. If your provider offers a separate memory server, the tool can learn from your edits and get better over time, making localization faster, more accurate, and way less painful.
Leveraging Human-Like AI Avatars
Now you might be thinking — how can AI avatars possibly help build more human connections? The answer is simple: the avatar is just the face. The words, the tone, the message — that’s all you. So instead of spending hours in front of a camera and editing, you can focus more on creating stories that make a stronger impact.
Video leads the way in holding customer attention — just think of how addictive TikTok, Instagram Reels, or YouTube Shorts can be. They outperform static images and text when it comes to capturing interest. Some content authoring solutions now offer built-in customization for video creation. For example, eWizard provides a wide selection of human-like avatars with various appearances, ethnicities, and genders, along with voice samples in over 40 languages.
AI Sets the Stage, You Tell the Story
Companies looking to adopt AI should see it as a support tool, something that facilitates processes and operations. The real problem begins when leaders start handing off tasks that call for creativity, critical thinking, intuition, or personal experience.
People want connection. They want to know what others are thinking, what keeps them up at night, how they approach challenges or respond to disruptions. No matter how advanced it gets, technology cannot replace that.
That’s why it is crucial to use AI where it adds real value — speeding up content workflows like localization or data structuring, not doing the creative thinking for us. When we use AI this way, it frees up time to reflect on strategy, explore different messaging angles, and craft persuasive stories. It helps companies move faster with their ideas, communicate more authentically, and stand out in the race for customer attention.
©2025 DK New Media, LLC, All rights reserved | Disclosure
Originally Published on Martech Zone: How Is AI Redefining Content in the Attention Economy?