Thanks to AI, the sales representative of tomorrow will be highly skilled and ultra-personalized

Jérôme: We’re moving from segmentation to contextual personalization, and the two are completely different. Between 2015 and 2020, Netflix ran an algorithm overnight to identify someone with a profile similar to yours so it could recommend what your peers had watched but you hadn’t: you were placed in a segment. Today, it takes 200 milliseconds, and you’re no longer pigeonholed into one category among many—the content is fully personalized. When it comes to e-commerce, if you’re browsing trail running shoes and also checking the weather in Chamonix, when you return to the shoe website, you won’t be shown this month’s bestseller; you’ll see exactly the shoes that are right for you. What matters isn’t so much the data or cookies, but your behavior, analyzed in real time.

Marie-Ange and Jérôme: In most cases, yes, supplemented by machine learning. But the real issue isn’t the technology anymore; today, 80% of the value of an AI project is determined before the first line of code is written, during the scoping phase with the user. As for the models themselves, they change every three months—if not even more frequently. Our advice can be summed up in two words: resilience and autonomy. As Deng Xiaoping said, “It doesn’t matter if the cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice”, provided you transform your organization while keeping control of the reins.

Jérôme: AI will take over routine tasks, reporting, and preparation, but not advisory services. The advisor of the future will no longer be someone with just two years of higher education, but a highly qualified professional backed by a network of specialists, much like in wealth management. Clients walking into the branch won’t notice the change: we’ll already have their file on hand, we’ll stop asking them unnecessary questions, and we’ll direct them to the expert who specializes in their specific issue. Here, AI serves to eliminate friction, while the in-person interaction maintains the necessary human connection.

Marie-Ange: By focusing on people where it matters most. AI can handle 60 to 80% of administrative tasks, and for the remaining 20 to 30% (where there may be friction) we assign highly qualified staff who provide service as personalized as that of a private bank. In this way, we’re replacing low-skill, high-volume jobs with high-quality ones. 

Marie-Ange and Jérôme: Definitely not like science fiction. Our imagination has been overun by movies—we’d all love to have a flying car. That’s empty futurism. The agency of tomorrow won’t be a metaverse; we’ll keep the human element and simply reduce friction. Banking will continue as it is, with much less friction and more specialized advisors focused solely on the real issues, who will understand their clients in much greater depth.