Take a look around your workspace. What do you see?
A stack of half-read books? Maybe a branded coffee mug, some tangled chargers, a marketing award you forgot to dust off or a resistance band from that fitness phase you went through.
Now imagine this: without saying a word, your shelf just revealed your personality, your professional habits, your values—even what kind of products or services might resonate with you.
That’s AI-enabled visual intelligence (VI), and it’s changing the way we gather information on consumer behavior.
What Is Visual Intelligence?
Visual intelligence is the ability of generative AI to extract and infer deep, contextual insights from images or video.
VI doesn’t simply recognize objects. It can interpret possible customer actions and infer psychographics and intent—all based on visual data.
This isn’t just about identifying a ‘hat’ or a ‘coffee cup’. It’s about what a branded hat from a tech company might imply:
- The owner likely attends marketing events.
- They’re open to new tools and industry partnerships.
- They might even be a content creator or industry expert.
Multiply that kind of inference across every image or video a person shares, and you can begin to see a new dimension of customer insight.
A Picture Tells 1,000 Behaviors
For instance, a chatbot like ChatGPT or XAI’s Grok can zoom in on a photo or video. It can focus or crop the visual based on what it feels are the most relevant parts. And then explain why they’re salient.
It can sharpen parts of the image that might be blurry to get a clearer insight on what it sees.
The AI can semantically understand text, whether typed or hand-written, and incorporate words into its visual analysis.
And it uses pattern recognition to ‘outpaint’ or extrapolate what might lie beyond the borders of a picture and add that to its interpretation.
In that way, AI gets a much clearer picture of your personality, values and likes.
The Marketing Mind Behind the Photo
Recently, we ran an experiment where David took a picture of his office shelf.
For this image, David asked ChatGPT to act like a marketer and tell us what the images says about the person whose office it is, including:
- What can you deduce about this person’s work style?
- What do their objects reveal about their preferences or aspirations?
- What products or services might fit naturally into their lives?
- What is this person’s psychographic profile?
ChatGPT identified a set of marketing analytics books, a Garmin cycling pedal box, a branded cap from a social media tool, some disinfecting wipes and masks and presented us with a complete buyer persona:
🧠 Data-driven, health-conscious, brand-partner-friendly, and likely to host webinars or student talks.
Implications for Marketers
If you examine the psychographic profile created by ChatGPT, based on the single image we uploaded, you’ll identify many marketing opportunities.
Why This Matters to Marketers
Let’s get practical. As a marketer, you can start using visual intelligence in real-world scenarios right now.
People post pictures in their social feeds all the time, and visual intelligence provides an opportunity to gather and synthesize rich, consumer insights.
You no longer need surveys to identify psychographic attributes.
A single picture or video can tell you everything a marketer needs to know.
However, conducting this type of context-based analysis and targeting people using visual cues raises privacy and ethical issues.
As a consumer, would you let a social media platform infer your personality and behaviors based on the visuals you share? Would you be upset if that data were then sold to other companies?
This post was written by FMI Executive Director and Professor David Rice and Associate Director and Professor Martin Waxman.
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