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A lifelong Manchester City fan stands in front of a 3D virtual avatar of the teams star player, Erling Haaland, at an EA Sports FC prelaunch event. Towering and lifelike, the avatars every grin, gesture, and movement is perfectly synced to Haaland himself. The fan plays, interacts, and even shares a laugh during a spontaneous dance battle with the digital Haaland in real time. For a few electrifying moments, its as if their football hero has come to life in front of their eyes, blurring the line between reality, fandom, and technology. This isnt a far-off sci-fi scenario; it already happened. 3D digital avatars are starting to transform how humans connect in virtual spaces, offering a level of immediacy, responsiveness, and personalization that was once impossible. For brands, this represents a massive opportunity to engage audiences in ways that feel human, scalable, and alive. The shift is already underway According to Gartner, 54% of brands are using some form of chatbot or conversational AI platform for customer-facing interactions. But while 2D avatars and text-based chatbots have paved the way, 3D digital avatars are poised to take this evolution to the next level. With advancements in AI, real-time animation, and emotional modeling, brands can now create avatars that move, react, and even emote like humans, making digital encounters feel as authentic as real ones. And audiences are ready. Gen Z, in particular, is primed for animated interactions. Nearly half (48%) of this generation prefers animation to live-action, and adults aged 18 to 34 are now the biggest fans of animated content. From Roblox to VTubers, the language of animation has become the language of self-expression. For a generation that socializes online and personalizes digital avatars, interacting with 3D animated identities feels naturalan extension of how they already live and connect. The opportunity for brands The challenge for brands has always been how to create meaningful connections at scale. Brand ambassadors are one way, but talent isnt scalable. A celebrity ambassador cant record personal videos for every fan, and a top athlete cant be in three cities at once. 3D digital avatars are changing the equation. With real-time animation tools and AI modeling, brands can create content that feels live-action in quality but is lightning-fast to produce. This allows brands to be reactive, spontaneous, and human, without waiting for a shoot day or a gap in a busy brand ambassadors schedule. Picture Shaquille ONeals digital twin welcoming customers to multiple Home Depot events simultaneously, each interaction tailored to the audience; Lionel Messis 3D avatar hosting a live Q&A with fans after a big game; or Wendys iconic mascot bantering with fans in real time, trained on years of the brands famously sassy tweets. Why just use words on X when you can connect visually in real time? Why 3D digital avatars feel real A common question is, how can a digital avatar feel “real?” The answer lies in expressiveness. The difference between a 3D character and a 3D avatar is emotion. Characters like the M&Ms mascots communicate through jokes and dialogue. Avatars, on the other hand, mirror the subtlety of human interactionan idiosyncratic smirk, a pause, or a glance that creates genuine emotional resonance. Early prototypes already show how users can pose questions to a digital avatar and receive individualized, emotionally attuned responses. This glimpse into avatar-based interaction hints at transformative potential, not just in marketing but in education, customer service, and healthcare. Imagine a child preparing for intensive medical treatment, comforted by a 3D animated character that brings warmth and understanding to the daunting journey ahead. Pediatric personas would be able to respond to the childs questions and concerns in a calm, reassuring manner, reaching them in the familiar environment of their own home. Building empathy into the system To make avatars feel authentic, AI models are trained on everything from a persons interviews to their mannerisms and speech patterns. If someone has a signature laugh, gesture, or way of speaking, the avatar learns it too. This ensures interactions feel personal, not mass-produced. What excites me most is the scalability of empathy. Two people can have completely different, yet equally real, experiences with the same avatar, each interaction tailored to their interests, questions, and emotional tone. This level of personalization is a game changer for brands looking to deepen their connection with audiences. How brands can get ahead now Technically, this ecosystem relies on real-time animation engines like Unreal, AI-driven facial and voice modeling, and cloud-based data storage. The human layer is just as critical. This isnt plug-and-play software; it takes creative producers, animators, and AI engineers to make an avatar feel alive. For brands to truly own this technology, theyll need to find experienced partners or build small internal avatar studios that blend storytelling with tech fluency. Its an investment in people as much as in infrastructure. If youre a brand leader, heres how to prepare for this shift: Identify your expressive assets. Who in your ecosystemmascots, ambassadors, talentbest represents your brands values and story? Start gathering inputs. Video, voice, and movement data are the raw materials that power authenticity. Establish creative guardrails. Set clear boundaries for what your avatar can and cant do, ensuring alignment with your brand values. Build hybrid teams. Youll need a mix of creativity and AI literacy to bring avatars to life. Experiment. Start small. Let an avatar greet fans, appear at an event, or respond to a limited set of questions. The goal is to learn how people connect. The next phase of human connection To understand where this space is headed, consider how far virtual representation has already come. When I played Madden NFL in college, the players were pixels. Today, they look like real athletes. In two years, our digital avatars could look and sound exactly like us, in 3D, and be fully trained to interact on our behalf. The next frontier of digital experience isnt about technology aloneits about emotional presence. Brands that learn to speak this new language of presence have a distinct advantage.
Category:
E-Commerce
If you are reading this from outside the U.S., you may have already seen the videos. Clouds rolling over the Grand Canyon. Kids screaming down roller coasters. Snowboarders gliding through white forests. America’s latest tourism campaign, America the Beautiful, is out, and it is selling the American dream. But will tourists buy it? According to a May 2025 report from the World Travel and Tourism Council, international visitor spending to the U.S. is projected to fall to just under $169 billion in 2025, down from $181 billion in 2024. Even in 2024, 90% of all tourism spending came from domestic travel, while international travel dipped from many of the countrys key source markets, including the U.K, Germany, South Korea, Spain, Ireland, and the Dominican Republic. The country’s national tourism marketing agency, Brand USA, developed “America the Beautiful” to rebuild confidence in these shrinking markets. The campaign glows with idealism and nostalgia for the great outdoors, the great American road trip, and majestic landscapes that pulse with life in spite of their sovereign’s attempts to turn large swaths of it over to fracking. By choosing a title that is associated with an 1890s poem that has become one of America’s most patriotic songs, Brand USA seems to want tourists to forget about the country’s present issues and travel back to a time, or a place, where patriotism didn’t so often manifest as nationalism. [Image: Brand USA] A campaign with high stakes “America the Beautiful,” first announced in June, launched on October 20months after Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” tax and spending law slashed Brand USA’s federal funding by a staggering 80%. (Travel lobbyists are now fighting with Congress to restore the budget.) The agency laid off 15% of its staff in September, and shut down its ad-supported streaming service GoUSATV, which promoted inbound tourism. By undercutting a national tourism marketing agency that promotes the U.S. internationally, Trump ostensibly flipped the finger to global visitors, reflecting, instead, his America-first priorities. But America needs international tourism. International visitors contributed just over $217 billion in revenue in 2019, supporting nearly 18 million jobs nationwide. The tourism sector more broadly is also a reliable driver of federal, state, and local tax revenue, contributing more than $585 billion annually. The stakes for “America the Beautiful” are high. [Image: Brand USA] The fall of the American Brand Next year will be a big year for the United States. Between America’s 250th anniversary, the 2026 World Cup that will take place across 11 U.S. cities, and the Route 66 centennial, the country is poised for celebration on many fronts. “America the Beautiful” was timed to boost tourism ahead of those big events. Brand USA partnered with AI-powered software Mindtrip, which offers interactive maps and custom itineraries. They also created various video spots highlighting “America the Brave” and “America the Big Hearted.” [Image: Brand USA] “We’re not asking people to simply visit America; we’re inviting them to feel it, taste it, and carry home experiences that become core memories, Leah Chandler, Brand USA’s chief marketing officer, said in a recent press release. What if not enough people don’t want what America has to offer? “My view is that advertising campaigns are useless at persuading people to change their minds about countries,” says Simon Anholt, a leading researcher and advisor on nation brands and national image. “You cant talk yourself out of an image that you behaved yourself into.” According to the 2025 Anholt Nation Brands Index, a systematic survey of international perceptions of countries, the United States has dropped out of the top ten for the first time in 19 years. After topping the index in both 2005 and 2016, the U.S. fell from 1st to 7th place following Trump’s election in 2016. After his re-election in 2025, the U.S. has dropped to what Anholt calls an “unprecedented” 14th place. (Japan and Germany remain at the top of the list.) The fall isn’t just about perception. Anholt says there is a “more than 80% correlation” between a countrys score in the Nation Brands Index and the amount of money it makes from tourism, foreign investment and trade. The exact breakdown remains unclear, “but its a certainty that when image declines, visits decline too,” he says. [Image: Brand USA] Politics or pleasure? Whether some tourists are able to separate the political from the pleasurable will depend on who you ask. For Tom Buncle, the former chief executive of the Scottish Tourist Board and a tourism consultant who helps destinations improve their global competitiveness, the U.S. remains an appealing destination despite geopolitical tensions. “Regardless of all the issues, California is still going to have amazing beaches, Arizona is going to have amazing deserts, Florida is going to have amazing surfing, Colorado is going to have great mountains,” he told me. “Politics aren’t going to change that.” Buncle agrees that many challenges are hard to ignore: Some tourists have said they are afraid to visit for fear of being turned away at the border. Others worry about visa restrictions and higher visa fees. “But as I keep saying, our countries, our cultures, our landscape is bigger than all of us,” says Buncle. “It’s been there for centuries, it’s going to outlast all of us.” Anholt is less optimistic. He brings up the “halo effect,” namely when people start to dislike a countrys policies so much that they unconsciously downgrade many other unconnected aspects of the country. If tourists still want to like America, they’ll overlook the bad stuff. If they no longer want to like America, they might pick another travel destination. “Once they’ve flipped, they tend to stay flipped,” he says. And if enough people stay flipped, he adds, it will be “the beginning of payback time for America First.” [Image: Brand USA] Repairing the image Brand USA, which declined an interview, is aware of the challenges. “So what’s our assignment? At this moment, the U.S. travel industry needs a rallying cry,” Leah Chandler told Travel Weekly in July. “We know that international audiences still love many things about the U.S. and are connected to the people through our culture and our stories. And while right now might not feel like it’s the right time for some, there are others who have the means and desire to visit the United States, and those people will prioritize a visit here.” As an American resident (admittedly, not the target demo) I can’t help but cringe at the tone-deafness of the campaign. On the one hand is an agency promoting “connection,” “boundless adventures,” and the kind of open-armed welcome that has made what America is today. On the other hand is a president who has willfully stoked violence, torpedoed America’s global standing, and slashed refugee allotment (unless they’re white). The dissonance is deafening, and it likely won’t be lost to those who get their news abroad. But perhaps there’s room for hope beyond the cynicism. “Yes, the global news is coming out with not a very pretty picture, but [there is value in] reminding people that the real USA is still there for them to visit to enjoy,” says Buncle. Even if reality is dark, shining a light on the brightest spots doesn’t have to be false advertising. It could be an attempt at repair. Americans deserve that.
Category:
E-Commerce
OpenAI is going house hunting. The world-leading AI company is reportedly looking for a massive corporate campus of at least 500,000 square feet to house its ever-growing workforce of insanely well paid engineers and support staff. Whats more important than OpenAIs desire to expand, though, is the companys choice of where to do it. OpenAI is looking not in the trendy, vibrant heart of San Francisco, but deep in the dull, gray corporate expanses of Silicon Valley. That bucks a major trend in the AI spaceand signals a broad and impactful change to the industry. Corporate hermit crabs For generations, Americas most successful tech companies have followed a familiar pattern: start in some tiny, inappropriate space, then expand to a massive office park in Palo Alto or Mountain View. Hewlett Packard famously started in a garage before expanding to ever-larger campuses. Apple did the same, and now controls most of Cupertino from a bizarre, insular spaceship of a building. Google started in a Stanford dorm room before moving to (surprise!) a garage, and later a 3 million square foot compound in Mountain View, the Googleplex. Often, Silicon Valleys tech companies behave like corporate hermit crabs, taking over the campuses of their failed predecessors. When Facebook moved to the former Sun Microsystems campus in Menlo Park, they didnt even bother to invest in a new signthey just flipped the old one around and put a big Facebook logo on it. Even today, the original Sun Microsystems sign still hides on the back of the Facebook one. When Google repurposed the former campus of Silicon Graphics to build the Googleplex, they kept a dinosaur named Stan. Things will be great when youre . . . A new wave of tech companies coming to power in the mid 2010s, though, started to trod a different path. The social network X (née Twitter) had its headquarters in the Civic Center neighborhood of San Francisco until Elon Musk forcibly excised it. Uber and Square were originally down the block. Airbnb, Zynga, and Cloudflare are all in San Franciscos trendy but rough-around-the-edges SoMA district. These newer companies realized that their hip, young engineers didnt want to live in the suburban doldrums of the Valley. They wanted nice food, bars that stay open past 10 pm, and all the other cultural trappings of a major city. After the pandemic, the trend towards downtown tech HQs accelerated. Companies realized it was easier to lure engineers back to the office if it happened to be down the block in a city where theyd love to live, rather than a chartered bus ride away. As todays AI companies started their meteoric growth, then, it was only natural for them to situate themselves downtown. OpenAI started in SoMAs historic Pioneer Building. When they outgrew that space, they moved to a massive, glass-fronted campus in the up and coming Mission Bay neighborhoodall skybridges, living walls, louvered windows to let in the bay breezes, and fancy cafes that serve boba tea in little glass bottles you get to take home. Although a quietly-imposing security guard stares down anyone who approaches the front doors too closely, I love walking around the OpenAI campus and its adjacent urban parks. Anthropic likewise started in a historic building right by San Franciscos Financial District, before moving to something a bit more corporate, but still in the heart of the city. This influx of AI talentand the buckets of money that go with ithas been fantastic for San Francisco. As a professional photographer, I visit the city at least once a week to take photos. Union Square, which struggled mightily during the pandemic and became a symbol of San Franciscos failings, is now home to a new Nintendo store, a bar from basketball star Steph Curry, and an eyeball-scanning hub for Sam Altmans crypto startup World. SF was just rated one of the safest cities in the world. Back to the burbs Now, though, that trend seems to be reaching its limits. Its one thing to locate your headquarters in an energetic, happening part of the city when youre a scrappy startup pursuing the impossible dream of AGI. But when youre planning a trillion-dollar IPO and have a headcount in the thousands, even the biggest downtown office will struggle to hod you. And so, the AI worlds inexorable march to the Valley begins! OpenAI is the first big AI company to plan an exodus from San Francisco. But as the flood of money continues to flow in, its unlikely to be the last. To me, its indicative of the fact that the AI sector is slowly growing up. Much as many young engineers start out living downtown, only to answer the siren song of the burbs as they have kids, cars, and schools to consider, so too has the rapidly maturing OpenAI decided to live somewhere with easier access to neighbors, more room to spread out, and virtually unlimited oceans of parking. The startups serving the AI sector will surely continue to choose downtown digs. And OpenAI and its ilk will likewise keep satellite offices in the city, much as Google does today. But as companies like OpenAI increasingly pursue a path toward serving corporate customers and worrying about such petty things as profitability, theyre moving back in line with the path taken by the tech giants who came before them. And that means moving to Valley HQs. Ill admit, Im a little sad to see the locus of AI starting to move so predictably to the burbs. But it’s also strangely comforting. People are terrified of OpenAI and its friends for their ability to rapidly disrupt industries and otherwise remake the world. But people felt the same way about Google back in the day. And Fairchild Semiconductor before it. OpenAIs all-too-predictable march to the Valley is a reminder that AI companies feel powerful and all-encompassing today, but ultimately stand on the same ever-shifting tech sands as their predecessors. Give it a few decades, and another hermit crab will come along to flip their signs around, move in their own generations of talented young engineers, and get to work building whatever comes next.
Category:
E-Commerce
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