AI is transforming CX, but is it masking other failures?
Published on Mon Dec 22 2025
Updated on Fri Jan 02 2026
4 minute read
I have spent the past couple of years exploring the evolution of customer experience globally. In particular, I have focused on how technology is playing a critical role in changing the way that brands engage with their customers. Artificial Intelligence is one of the most important developments of the past few years in this area because it is creating opportunities to improve the customer interface - through very smart chatbots - and is also improving systems inside the customer service team. Quality can be improved and many manual tasks can be automated. It’s a real boost for productivity in the CX team.
It’s clear that an interest in improving CX is becoming more important. Executives who used to see customer service as nothing more than a cost to the business can now see the potential of customer interactions to lead to increased revenue and customer loyalty- but are they being swept up in a hype cycle around CX?
Take generative AI as one example. It was hardly known outside of research labs until 2023. Now it is a hugely important topic that is frequently searched on Google. Analysts, such as Gartner, regularly tell their clients that AI is not just hype. It is critically important to every modern business. A recent publication from Gartner said: “…GenAI still has potential to be a transformational technology with profound business impacts on content discovery, creation, authenticity and regulation, automation of human work, and customer and employee experiences.”
This leads many managers with a customer service responsibility to ask how they can use AI to transform their relationship with customers. Yet, as we have seen with so many different technologies, it is rarely the best approach to ask, “How can we use this technology?” The question should actually be, “What do we want to achieve from our customer experience design, and can AI help us with those objectives?” Often, we are so excited by new developments that we end up placing the cart in front of the horse.
In fact, there are already many examples of failed customer service projects that attempted to use AI. Academics are now finding that immediately offering an experience using AI can reduce trust in the brand. Research in the US suggested that one bad experience with an AI interface is enough to push a customer to a rival brand. This is the danger. Launching a CX transformation with AI sounds great, but if it goes wrong, then it can be extremely damaging. There are already business journals filled with examples of failed CX projects where AI was supposed to be transformative.
Any manager with a responsibility to design the customer experience needs to be open-minded. They need to be watching new developments, especially in technology, and they need to experiment. You need to be curious because the world is changing rapidly. Innovation only happens when you try out new ideas, knowing that most of them will not fly. But you should not go all-in with those AI promises until you have thought carefully about what can be achieved and then tested the ideas with your customers - perhaps using a limited pilot to see what real customers think of the new service.
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Created at Fri Mar 27 2026
5 min read
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