The pressure to deploy AI in customer service is real and I understand it completely. But so is the risk of moving fast on shaky foundations. Time and again, AI gets layered on top of fragmented workflows and poorly designed processes, and the result isn't transformation. It's frustration at scale.
The challenge I keep coming back to is this: It's not that AI doesn't work. It's that most organizations aren't ready for it. Governance is an afterthought. Traceability is missing. And the end-to-end journey, the one your customer actually experiences, was never fixed in the first place.
So, what's the right way? Fix the journey before you automate it. Ensure AI operates with full context, can explain its decisions, and is genuinely connected to every step of the process – not bolted on top as a shortcut. In regulated industries especially, that level of accountability isn't optional. It's the difference between AI that scales your service, and AI that scales your problems.
In my conversation with CX Today, I share what I believe every leader navigating the gap between AI ambition and operational reality needs to hear.