Earning Consumer Trust by Using AI
What you're about to read has helped dozens of businesses rethink their approach.
We're offering strategy calls with Adam Bird, Director of Strategy at Highway 29 Creative, to help you put these ideas into action. No pitch, just clear support and direction.
Your customers already know when you're phoning it in.
They can tell when your wine club email was written by someone who's never tasted your wine. They recognize when your tasting room staff is reciting the same notes they give everyone. They feel the difference between a recommendation from someone who understands their palate and a suggestion based on "customers who bought this also bought..."
AI doesn't create this problem. AI just makes it faster to scale mediocrity.
The wineries losing customers aren't losing to artificial intelligence. They're losing because they were already treating customers like transaction records rather than relationships, and now customers can tell at scale. When your "personalized" wine club email reads like it was written by ChatGPT, it's not because AI is soulless. It's because there was not much soul in your customer relationship to begin with.
If an AI tool can replicate your customer communication with 90% accuracy, you never had much of a relationship anyway.
But here's what's interesting. The wineries gaining advantage from AI aren't using it to automate relationships. They're using it to identify which customers are ready for which conversations, then have their actual humans deliver expertise that matters. Pattern recognition at scale, human judgment where it counts.
Marketing’s AI problem isn't robots recommending wine. It's that AI reveals which wineries never built real customer relationships in the first place. And in an industry where a wine club member's lifetime value can exceed $10,000, that revelation matters.
Let me show you what separating the two looks like.
The Pattern Recognition Problem Humans Can't Solve
You have a wine club member, let's call her Sarah. Over three years, Sarah has purchased from you exactly seven times. Each purchase was between November 10th and December 20th. Every bottle was a bold red. Five of the seven purchases included a note that they were gifts.
Now, what does Sarah actually like to drink?
You don't know. The data tells you she buys bold reds in November and December, but it doesn't tell you if she drinks them. Maybe she loves Pinot Noir but knows her brother-in-law only drinks Cabernet. Maybe she's been buying gifts this whole time and has never opened a bottle for herself.
A human looking at Sarah's account might notice the holiday timing. But a human managing 2,000 wine club members can't possibly notice patterns across all of them. They're drowning in data they can't process.
This is where AI creates opportunity.
AI can identify that Sarah (and 47 other customers with similar purchase patterns) buys bold reds only during the holiday window. It can flag that these purchases cluster around gift-giving occasions. It can surface that none of these customers have ever attended a tasting event or responded to food pairing emails.
But here's what AI can't do: it can't figure out whether Sarah is gift-shopping for someone else or stocking up for Thanksgiving. It can't determine whether she'd be interested in a vertical tasting of your Syrah. It can't craft a message that makes her feel seen and valued rather than algorithmically targeted.
That's where your humans come in.
The Force Accelerator
AI doesn't replace human expertise. It accelerates human intent.
If your intent is to build authentic relationships with customers, AI helps you identify exactly which customers are ready for exactly which conversation at exactly which moment. Your winemaker can send Sarah a personal note in early October: "I noticed you've been gifting our bold reds during the holidays. Our new Syrah release has the structure for rich foods like Thanksgiving turkey, and I think whoever you're buying for would love it. But I'm curious, do you drink these wines yourself, or are they all gifts? I'd love to know what you actually enjoy."
That message comes from pattern recognition (AI) combined with human curiosity and relationship building. Sarah experiences personalized expertise. You've used technology to make human attention economically viable at scale.
But if your intent is to do the minimum work possible, AI accelerates that too. It helps you send generic blast emails faster. It helps you churn out product descriptions that sound like every other winery. It helps you create content that's technically correct but completely forgettable.
The tool amplifies whatever you're trying to do. The question is: what are you trying to do?
Defining AI Slop
There's a term emerging in creative industries: AI slop. But here's what people get wrong about it. AI slop isn't work made BY AI. It's work made WITH AI where there's little to no meaningful human participation in the process.
It's the wine club email that sounds like it was written by a robot because it was written by a robot, with a human just hitting send. It's the tasting notes that are technically accurate but utterly generic. It's the social media post that could be about any winery anywhere because nobody injected actual perspective or personality.
Your customers can feel it. They've been trained by years of algorithmic garbage to recognize when they're being processed rather than engaged. They know the difference between "Our Cabernet has notes of black cherry and vanilla" (could be anyone) and "This vintage surprised us, we picked earlier than usual because the heat spike in September pushed the tannins faster than we expected, and it gave us this incredible tension between fruit and structure" (someone who actually made this wine is talking).
The difference isn't whether AI was involved. It's whether a human who gives a damn was involved.
The Standard Has Shifted
There’s been a shift in the marketplace; "good enough" isn't what it was five years ago.
When only professionals had access to design tools, a mediocre website was acceptable because most businesses had mediocre websites. When only trained writers could produce clean copy, clunky product descriptions were normal because everyone's product descriptions were clunky.
Now everyone has access to tools that produce baseline competent work. AI can write grammatically correct copy. It can generate decent images. It can create social media content that's perfectly fine.
Which means "perfectly fine" is now the floor, not the ceiling.
If your wine club emails read like they could have been generated by ChatGPT in 30 seconds, that's how your customers will value them. If your tasting notes sound like they came from a database, customers will treat them like database entries.
The wineries that win are the ones using AI to handle baseline competence so their humans can focus on creating the actually interesting, genuinely personal, distinctly memorable experiences that AI can't produce.
Your winemaker shouldn't be spending time writing "This Chardonnay has notes of apple and butter." That's the baseline anyone can generate. Your winemaker should be telling the story about why this vintage tastes different, what risk you took in the vineyard, what you learned that surprised you. That's the part AI can't do.
What This Means For Your Winery
The strategic question isn't "Should we use AI?" You're already swimming in algorithmic recommendations, automated email tools, and data analytics. The question is: "What are we using these tools to amplify?"
If you're using them to amplify human expertise and relationship building, you're ahead. Your sommelier uses AI to identify which customers are ready for more complex wines based on purchase progression. Then your sommelier calls them personally to talk through a tasting flight. The AI identified the opportunity. The human built the relationship.
If you're using them to automate away human connection, you're in trouble. You're sending automated birthday emails with an AI-generated message and a 15% discount code. Every winery does this now. Your customer gets 47 identical birthday emails in their inbox. Yours isn't special.
The shift is this: AI makes it easier to do mediocre work at scale. It also makes it possible to do genuinely excellent work at scale if you're willing to keep humans in the loop with meaningful participation.
Most businesses (this problem is not unique to wineries) will take the easy path. They'll use AI to produce more content, send more emails, post more social media, all at baseline quality. They'll mistake volume for value.
The wineries that will dominate customer relationships are the ones that use AI to identify opportunities for human expertise to shine. They'll send fewer emails, but each one will matter. They'll create less content, but what they create will be worth reading. They'll recommend fewer wines, but each recommendation will be precisely right for that customer at that moment.
The Practical Test
Here's how you know if you're using AI to earn trust or destroy it:
Could a customer forward your message to a friend with the note "You have to read this"? Or is it obviously mass-produced?
Would your customer rather hear from your actual winemaker/sommelier/wine club manager, or does the AI version feel the same? If the AI version feels the same, you're not adding human value.
When you read what AI produced, can you improve it significantly by adding your expertise, perspective, and personality? If you can't, either the AI is remarkably good or you're not adding enough human judgment.
The magic trick isn't the AI. The magic trick is using AI to make human attention economically viable at scale. To identify the moments where human expertise and connection will matter most, then delivering that expertise precisely when it counts.
Your customers don't want to be processed by an algorithm. But they do want to be understood at a level that would be economically impossible without computational tools helping you see patterns across thousands of interactions.
Give them both. Use machines to see patterns humans can't spot. Use humans to build relationships machines can't create.
That's how you earn trust in an age of AI. Not by avoiding the tools. By using them to amplify the best of what makes your winery worth caring about in the first place.