AI news is dominating work-related newsfeeds, replacing contact centre agents, and simplifying customer lives.

Yet hardly anyone talks about the curveballs AI-powered customers are about to throw at brands and vendors, or how these changes will redefine the experiences businesses need to deliver.

Just as you’re outsourcing your marketing and processes to machines, your customers will soon delegate parts of their purchasing decisions to virtual buying clones.

Consider this:

• 82% of fashion consumers want AI to reduce the time they spend researching what to buy (Business of Fashion/McKinsey, December 2024).
• By 2027, 50% of people in advanced economies will have AI personal assistants working for them daily (Gartner, 2023)
• 89% of B2B customers already use genAI in at least one part of their purchasing process (Forrester, November 2024)

And these numbers are only going up. Analysts predict the global AI Agents market will grow at a CAGR of  40.5% from 2024 to 2029 (Global Market Estimate, January 2025).

So I decided to summarise my thoughts in this first post of 2025.

The rise of machine customers isn’t the plot of a distant sci-fi scenario. It’s happening now. Today, printers are already reordering ink. Soon, they’ll be shopping for the best deal—even calling your dealers to negotiate bulk discounts.
They’ll also be interacting with your chatbots and contacting your customer service staff for support requests. If you're curious how this feels, check out www.boardy.ai—it’s both fascinating and unsettling.

​The impact of this development on customer relationships cannot be overstated.

All my career, I’ve helped organisations create and capture customer value through experiences that tap into human needs—rationally, emotionally, aspirationally, and even spiritually. But that bag of tricks goes out the window when computers knock on the door.

So, how do we prepare ?
As a conversation starter, I developed the below Agentic Experience Framework to help clarify the readiness of your business for a world where machine customers do part of your customer’s job.

It’s my first prototype.
So it's a work in progress. But writing it was helpful to me, so I hope it sparks some thoughts on your end. If you have suggestions, improvements, or yes-and comments, I’d love to hear them. We can all learn from each other.

The framework’s design centres on three levels to guide an organisation’s response to the rise of machine customers.

• Establish the foundations: build the technical and organisational groundwork.
• Recalibrate the experience: adapt to serve both machine and human customers.
• Take leadership: be the one that starts the conversation with customers, employees and your market​.

​

​To successfully serve machine customers, you need a solid base. Data, trust, and infrastructure aren’t just buzzwords—they’re table stakes in an agentic economy where algorithms will reward or penalise you for any inconsistency, incompleteness, or complexity.

All the teams in your business now need to talk computer. This means:

👉 Data readiness: Get your data house in order
Machine customers don’t browse or "get a feel" for your brand. They consume data—feeding every manual, review, product spec, and sustainability report into their decision algorithms. If you’re in professional services, they might even read your Glassdoor reviews and call your HR department.

To play the game, your data must be easily accessible, real-time and formatted for easy processing and comparison.

And if your data doesn’t align? The bots will find out—whether from an inconsistent webpage you forgot to delete or conflicting responses from your customer service team.

👉 Trust signals: Ensure the agents believe your statements
Bots are programmed to mistrust the internet, so your data must be authentic and verifiable. Think third-party data verifiers, blockchain-based authentication, ISO-style certifications.

Either way, incomplete or unverified sources will get lower algorithmic weight at best—or be ignored altogether. In regulated industries like healthcare or financial services, the stakes are even higher. Compliance with emerging frameworks on trust, privacy, and algorithmic transparency isn’t optional; it’s non-negotiable.

And yes, this is a two-way street. You also don’t want to fall prey to agent-to-agent fraud.

👉 Infrastructure: be ready to match agentic speeds and volumes
Speed and efficiency are increasingly the name of the game. Machine customers will expect you to make their purchasing life easy with low-latency responses, machine-readable formats and ‘Done-for-them’ analytics (e.g. calculating total cost of ownership).

This requires a digital infrastructure that goes beyond presenting a pretty website for human customers—it must also offer an efficient interface for machines. Today and tomorrow.

Ask yourself: Is my digital (and legal) roadmap up to date? When customer bots come knocking, are we ready to open the door?

Then, move to the second level: recalibrating the experience.

While building your foundations, it’s also important to rethink the customer experience itself.

Let’s face it—all our past CX efforts have focused on humans. Machines, however, are entirely different. They:

• Don’t care about the quality of your coffee or your staff’s personality.
• Aren’t swayed by emotional arguments that justify your premium price.
• Ignore your environmental statements and judge you solely by the data.
• Are annoyingly rational, so unless instructed otherwise by their humans, simply ignore that image video on your website.

This shift means humans will have even fewer reasons to interact with your brand or business. Why would they visit your website, read your documentation, or speak to your salespeople when their bots can do the heavy lifting? Especially for awkward stuff like talking to a contact centre, understanding your product, or negotiating a price.

But if your customers don’t show up for these interactions, how will you convey the aspects that make your proposition or business unique, which cannot be captured as data?

The good news is that both the technology and trust in machines still need to develop, so there’s some time to prepare. But once agents work as advertised and show how to secure better, faster, and cheaper deals, they will spread quickly. This will be especially true in B2B, where stakes are higher, time is tighter, and CEOs know that more rational purchases can shave a few cost percentages.

To prepare for this reality, you need to blend the agent experience and human experience into something entirely new.

👉 Design an Agent Experience (AX−Yes I just wrote that)
When customers instruct their agents, they won’t be thinking about your business. They’ll be thinking about their lives, and the bots’ priorities will reflect that complexity.

For example:

• A grocery bot might coordinate with a meal-planning bot, a health bot, and a CO2 tracker. Together, they recommend their user how much pizza is on the menu and which brand to buy.
• A logistics provider’s RFP bot could look at all the obvious data, like carbon emissions, price, and customer satisfaction. Yet, it could also include in its decision-making weather patterns affecting delivery routes, historical strike activity, or an analysis of vendor diversity practices.

To avoid being surprised, you need to figure out how customers will use AI agents before they do. This means:

1. Adopting a life-centric perspective, considering your customer’s needs beyond your business’s narrow lens. What rational, emotional, aspirational, and even spiritual needs will these bots help customers meet?
2. Hypothesise the algorithms, data, APIs, trust indicators, and other features these custobots will look for.
3. Align your data proactively with their decision-making logic bots in your favour. Yes, nudging and experiences for bots have arrived.

👉Upgrade your Human Experience
Even with bots in the picture, humans still pay the bills and influence the parameters bots use to search, select, negotiate, and buy. To ensure this benefits your business, you need emotional connection. You need to feel right to the human in the background. Be memorable. Especially in B2B.

This means thinking beyond better, faster, cheaper or the other parameters bots will already evaluate.

Instead, you should:

• Focus on key moments: Trying to control every aspect of the customer relationship is impossible. It spreads your resources too thin. Instead, ensure nothing goes wrong on all transactional elements and double down on two or three high-touch moments that are so memorable they keep you at the top of the customer’s mind. ​

When the customer’s AIs decide your offer is merely on par with the competition, it’s the business with the best human experience that wins.

Ask yourself: Do my customer relationship and experience efforts consider machine customers? Are we ready to deliver an agent and human experience for the new reality?

Then, think about becoming a leader in the machine customer market.

While radical transparency and new margin pressures loom, there is still time to get ready. Agentic AI is still being invented, and adoption will take time.

This gives you the chance to be a first—or early—over and helps customers jump into the new reality. It’s a proven strategy that works every time a technology reshapes the market.

Back in the 1960s, American Airlines revolutionised their industry by introducing SABRE, a computerised booking system for airlines. By recognising the market changes ahead and moving first, they could align their internal systems before any competitor, and ensure their airline code, AA, always appeared at the today. More recently, Apple’s App Store, or Amazon AWS, played the same trick, and secured a dominant position through early leadership.

Taking leadership means being the one to start the conversation and start the change with your customers, your employees, and your industry. Today, as agents go live, as well as tomorrow, when they evolve.

👉 Start the conversation with your customers
For the next few years, Forrester, Gartner, McKinsey, and countless software vendors will bombard your customers with the benefits of Agentic AI. Yet while they will talk about industry-level developments at best, YOU can sit down with YOUR customers and discuss how Agentic AI can benefit THEIR business.

How will it save them time? Help negotiate the best rates? Improve operational efficiency? By initiating these conversations, you:
​

• Show proactive concern for their priorities.
• Help shape their perception of the technology.
• Make it harder for competitors to do the same.

Also, by being the first to speak, you’ll learn more about the criteria and algorithms their bots will use—allowing you to align your business just a little better.

👉 Prepare your employees
If you’re reading this article, you’re likely ahead of the curve. But most people have no idea how Agentic AI could reshape—or even threaten—their roles.

Still, in the coming years, your contact centre, commercial, and technical teams will start receiving emails and calls from bots. Their responses will need to be coordinated across teams, consistent with information and data that can be found elsewhere and algorithmically empathetic. Which is newspeak for knowing how to interact with computers, yet retain enough human sense to know what is right for the human customer in the background.

Meanwhile, your senior leaders need to come to terms with additional margin pressure, radical transparency, the dual strategy of being computer efficient while increasing human experience. Not to mention that many of the rules they learned about management are crumbling.

By engaging your people now, you’ll build confidence and competence for the road ahead.

👉 Encourage industry transformation
While you should pursue any tactical benefits you can gain from better data, infrastructure, and AI tools, remember: the changes driven by Agentic AI will affect entire ecosystems.

Any bot you may suggest to or build for your customers must be able to work with all of their vendors. It must also comply with both generic and sector-specific regulations. To be trusted, it will require independent verification, trust mechanisms, clear documentation, and the likes.

This makes interoperability and cross-industry collaboration essential. Think Swift, Visa, 5G Consortium. Only now for margarine or plumbing equipment. So get ready to connect with competitors and ecosystem partners in industry consortia to co-create standards. By aligning your business with these efforts, you’ll be able to shape the direction of your ecosystem.

Because if you don’t take the lead, Google, Amazon or Alibaba will. Making you a tech vassal, rather than a driver of your industry.

Ask yourself: Are we taking a wait-and-see approach to machine customers, or are we getting ready for the shift? How will we position ourselves as customers, bots and tech giants change the rules?
​

Gartner estimates that by 2030, 15–20% of revenue will come from machine customers. While we can debate the timing and the shape of their curve, one thing is clear: machine customers are an inevitable part of both B2B and B2C markets. And they will change how we approach customer experiences and relationships.

There’s still time to get ready.
Change is always slower than pundits predict. Yet it is usually also more profound that most of us envisage.

So the smart leaders will get proactive about the machine customer reality by building solid foundations, recalibrating their experience, and taking leadership.

My recommendation for 2025
Start a machine customer task force. Assemble people from digital, customer service, marketing, and commercial teams to learn about machine customers and their impact on your business:

✅ Digitally.
✅ For your human experience.
✅ For your employees.

Meanwhile, inform your senior leadership about the risks and opportunities ahead, and act with the urgency of a startup. Because if you don’t move, one of your competitors, or Silicon Valley, will.

After 30 years of working on human customer relationships and experiences, I believe the game has fundamentally changed. While I admit the uncertainty is a little unsettling, it’s also exciting to be part of a once-in-a-century opportunity for true transformation.

I’m up for it. How about you? Ready to play?
What do you think? Are you getting ready for the age of AI powered customers? Does the logic in this article resonate? As I mentioned, it’s a first prototype, so I’d love to hear your thoughts, ideas or even challenges. We’re all figuring out how to progress.
​
Onwards and upwards! 🚀
​

Sources

• https://www.forrester.com/blogs/the-future-of-b2b-buying-will-come-slowly-and-then-all-at-once/
• https://www.businessoffashion.com/articles/technology/the-state-of-fashion-2025-report-generative-ai-artificial-intelligence-search-discovery/
• https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2023-03-01-gartner-says-20-percent-of-inbound-customer-service-contact-volume-will-come-from-machine-customers-by-2026
• https://www.sellerscommerce.com/blog/ai-agents-statistics/

Transparency note
AI didn’t write this article, I did. However, in the spirit of transparency, I have used:

• Perplexity for research
• ChatGPT as a developmental editing partner
• ProWritingAid for grammar and syntax refinement
• Midjourney for images

All insights, arguments, and perspectives are entirely my own.

“We have a clear customer strategy, yet it’s so hard to get our people to implement it. To create a customer-centric culture. How do we fix that?”
​
It’s one of the most popular questions I get on customer transformation.

​With most transformation programmes failing to achieve their objective, it’s obvious that the traditional strategy cascade and poster avalanche won’t cut it. It’s not by talking at people that you get them to change their ways. It’s by engaging them in a story that resonates with their values and aspirations.

Which is why I keep repeating my favourite change management quote of all time, from Antoine de Sainte-Exupéry:

"If you want to build a ship, don't drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea."
​
Put differently, if your people really want to focus on the customer in their hearts, the changes you seek will happen organically.

Every second grade teacher knows this. 
Ask kids to learn a chemical formula and they’ll drag their feet. Show them an exploding volcano and ask if they would like to do that too and you’ve got 20 willing volunteers to learn that same formula.

The same applies to business. 
If you tell me I MUST hit a score as it will increase company profits, the chances of me being motivated by this are significantly lower than if you get me excited about making a difference, in which the score is a consequence.

Which triggers a new, more important question: HOW DO YOU MAKE PEOPLE YEARN TO BE CUSTOMER-CENTRIC?

It’s clearly not through journey maps, chatbots and surveys. If that were the case, customer-centricity would be a non-issue by now.

As part of the book I’m writing, The Transformation Code, I have come up with a formula for human yearning. Yet, it’s really complex, so still needs simplification.

So, being pragmatic, in article, I'll dip into three actions which I found to be especially effective:

• Turn your strategy into a story that resonates with the people that need to implement it;
• Develop company-wide empathy for the customer;
• Create a customer movement.

I hope you find them of value too.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. While they may matter to you as a leader, no employee really cares about your KPIs, processes, or strategies. The vast majority come to work to make a living for themselves and their family. They stay to feel competent, autonomous, and valued. To make a difference.

Or to paraphrase HR strategist Dart Lindsley:

"as much as you’re hiring them to do a job, they are hiring you(r) job to achieve their own goals."

The implication is that your customer strategy will only be embraced if it directly connects to these goals. To what gets your people out of bed.

This isn’t about coming up with a grand purpose that looks good on posters. 

It’s about taking the time to really understand what gets your people to come to work beyond a fair salary. And then, reframe your strategy into a story that resonates with their values, aspirations and beliefs.

After all, while they may not care about a better Net Promoter Score, they may get excited about being the hero who helps a client be more successful, a patient get healthier quicker, or a child experience a fun birthday.

Once your strategic goals align with their personal ones, your people will start acting. Not because you tell them, but because they themselves think it’s a good idea.

How to do this?

• STEP 1: Get in the ethnographers to map the values of your people. Or, if that’s too daunting, study up on human values and find out yourself.
• STEP 2: Use storytelling to replace your traditional stick-and-carrot compliance methods with a compelling vision that connects to your people’s values. Iterate until you get resonance.
• STEP 3: Take time to explain to each team member how their actions directly or indirectly make a difference, especially for those employees who are never in contact with the customers. Oh, and if you cannot explain how a person’s job adds value to the customer, there might be something wrong with the job.

2. Develop company-wide empathy for the customer

Every customer oriented leader wants their people care about the customer. Yet, especially in large organisations, most people have never met or spoken to these elusive beings that live somewhere down the supply chain. They may not even know much about them at all.

The implication of this is both simple and brutal.
As humans, we’re not wired to care much about people we don’t know. Who aren’t part of our tribe. So when setting priorities or designing solutions, we will rely on our own opinion and that of those close to us (our boss?). Those of an  unknown stranger are much less important. Even if that stranger is the one ultimately paying our salary.

To create a customer culture, you need to bring the customer into the lives of your people. You could do this literally, by having meet the customer days. Yet, in my experience, this can get awkward for all involved. Much more practical is to use storytelling, smart questions or even immersive customer walks.

Because once your people see your customers as fellow human beings whose lives they influence, they will start empathising and, … care.
​
How to do this?

• PATH 1: Humanise your customer communication by translating your customer data into resonant customer stories. I.e. less 3% of deliveries are late and more Six-year-old Suzie didn’t get her birthday gift on time. And yes, this works in B2B too.
• PATH 2: Bring the customer into the business. Highlight customer needs at every occasion. But also ask in every meeting, at every decision, ask: What does this mean for the customer? What is the customer's benefit? How will it make them think? Feel?
• PATH 3: Experiment with empathy walks. Especially if your employee’s reality is far removed from your customer’s, let them experience life from the latter’s perspective. Understanding breeds empathy, which drives action.

3. Create a customer movement.

Every culture is shaped by movements.
Years ago, we thought it was normal to smoke in restaurants or wear fur coats. Today, this has become unacceptable in many places. This didn’t happen overnight. It started with a few activists who promoted a new idea, which gradually got adopted by ever more people. Until it became the norm.

The same applies to any ‘next level’ customer thinking or culture you want to introduce into your business.
It’s not because you mandate that the customer is our #1 priority, that everyone will change their ways. If only because a lot of the legacy processes, KPIs and established behaviours in your business will tell them to maintain the status quo.

The answer is to create a customer movement. To identify and support the customer activists in your business and help them succeed, so that more people want to want to be part of the new way of thinking. Until it becomes self-propelling.

How do to this?

• STEP 1: Once you have defined what a customer-centric culture looks like, identify those people in the business who already embody these values and behaviours.
• STEP 2: Celebrate their successes, showcasing the benefits of customer-centric action. This will encourage others to join the ones that have taken the customer-centric leap (cf. The law of preferential attraction).
• STEP 3: Create pathways to help more employees join the movement, while making it easy for those how have already joined to succeed. This may require eliminating any stupid rules, systems and metrics your business may have installed (yes, this will hurt).

To conclude: don’t know whether storytelling, empathy and movement creation are part of your current customer transformation programme.

• If they are, I’d love to hear about it. Either comment below or drop me a mail! I’d love to learn from you, and perhaps I have a few suggestions you may find valuable too.
• If not, I recommend you start experimenting. Especially in a world where customer programmes are increasingly reduced to scores, bots and journey maps, a truly human touch is more important than ever to encourage your people to care about and act on customer needs.

You’ve got this 🚀

​When I talk to senior executives behind closed doors, I often hear the same story. 

Life is fine for now, but the rate of change in technology and society is going so fast that it’s getting impossible to keep up.

By the time one transformation programme is halfway into implementation, you need to start on the next one. It’s wearing out the people, and doesn’t get the business result. And frankly, only a few people really seem to know where they are going.

Or as a leader from a company you know said it:

"Today we’re partying on the bus, because we have never made more money. But in our hearts we know that unless we change our ways, the bus will go off the cliff in a few years. Yet no one has a clue where to steer and how to go there."

In the book I’m drafting, The Transformation Code, these thoughts feed into my growing conviction that as we experience a second Renaissance, we need to rethink our approach to leadership and corporate transformation. By doing more of what we did yesterday, we won’t get a different result.

So far, I’ve identified three major mindset shifts to consider. We need to shift our focus from mere adaptation and compliance to creating the future, inspiring transformation, and fostering a culture of flow. I explore them below. 

It's work in progress, so let me know what you think!

Mindset shift #1: From adapting to creating the future.

We've all been fed the management wisdom that “it's not the strongest or the most intelligent of species that survive, but the most adaptable to change”.

This is wrong for two reasons.

First, because Darwin never actually said this (a common hallucination among management experts). 

But more importantly, even if he had, he would tell you that adaptability in nature isn’t a conscious choice. It's not like the bees held a management conference to change the shape of their wings. They developed because of accidental mutations, in which some DNA strands survived, and others perished. There was no deliberate strategy.

Which is why this misquoted Darwinian principle has become counter-productive in a business context. 

By adopting a reactive/adaptive stance, as leaders, we put the locus of control outside of your organisation. We let the gods of Silicon Valley set the agenda and speed of change by putting us on a hamster wheel to keep up with new technologies and narratives. Encouraged by experts who make their money by keeping us focused on the ‘next threat’ and promoting the adrenaline infused narrative that we need to “change or die”

Yet in contrast to bees, hedgehogs or dodo’s, we’re humans. 

We’ve got the power of imagination and agency. Da Vinci, The Wright Brothers or Steve Jobs didn’t ‘adapt’ to the future. They imagined the world as they wanted it to be and worked towards it.

Humans didn’t start flying because of a mutation. We created the airplane. The paperclip. Penicillin. We used vision to shape, instead of merely adapt.

So rather than playing a continuous game of chasing the puck by catching up to the latest trend or technology, we must think about skating to where the puck will be. And taking our time to get ready.

👉 Ask yourself: What should my business look like by 2030, and how can I strategically work backwards from that vision? How can we set our own future than keep running on the hamster wheel of technology? Channel Da Vinci, instead of Darwin?

Mindset shift #2: from compliance to transformation

If we’re brutally honest, we must admit that yesterday’s management wisdom was all about getting people to do as they are told. In a world of mass production, efficiency relied on having a large group of workers executing the same task in the exact same way, hundreds if not thousands of times a day. No freewheeling.

But today, in our digital and knowledge-driven economy, this model is quickly becoming obsolete. 

Change is simply happening too fast. Where yesterday’s mass production relied on standardisation, today’s ultra-personalised approach requires workers to be creative and take initiative. Also, even if we could impose our will as a ‘leaders’, today’s workers don’t respond well to old-school command and control thinking.

So instead of relying on compliance, we need to inspire people to make change happen.

Understand their personal values, and storytell a vision (see 1) that is so compelling they want to turn it into reality. Not just because they are told to, but because they think it is time well spent. Because it connects to their beliefs and personal goals.

It’s like Antoine de Saint-Exupéry wrote: 

"If you want to build a ship, don't drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea."

👉 Ask yourself: How can I turn my vision into a story that resonates so deeply with the team, it makes them yearn for a common future? Inspire them so they want to change our reality. To transform our business, and themselves?

Mindset shift #3: from formalism to flow

Our processes, measurements and models used to make us masters of the predictable world. Lately we’ve been trying to stay in control of an ever less controllable world by adding more complexity to our organisations. To where the average corporate dashboard looks like NASA mission control.

But in a world where adaptability is key, this formalism can often be more of a hindrance than a help. 

It gives us the illusion of control, yet limits our ability to do what is right. We use innovation methodologies, yet fail to come up with great ideas. We chase Net Promoter Scores, yet forget to create customer smiles. We create purpose programmes, yet employees are less engaged than ever. Today’s market requires us to manage with the ability of a speedboat, yet we use the controls of an ocean liner.

While I’m not advocating to get rid of all the corporate machinery, we need a leadership mindset that shifts from this formalism to creating flow. 

Simplify processes, remove hurdles, allow for experimentation and mistakes, nurture organic cooperation. Rather than trying to control our environment and people, we must make it easy and empowering for them to achieve the common vision for the business.

It’s like the Tao of leadership: 

Instead of forcing and dictating, we should allow things to happen naturally and effortlessly. Think pull, instead of push. Light the fire and get out of the way. So our teams can make stuff happen.

👉 Ask yourself: how to I make it easy and empowering for my people to work towards our common vision? How do I encourage them to take initiative, experiment and learn in a bold, yet responsible manner?

I won’t sugarcoat it—none of this is easy.

Adopting a new leadership mindset is hard. Acting on it is even harder. Especially in large organizations with legacy systems, cultures, and habits. But at the risk of sounding like a mindfulness guru, it IS about the journey. Every step is a learning. For yourself, and for your business.

So it’s worth taking.

Think about it. 💭

Technology is a great way to democratise and personalise. Become faster, better and cheaper. It can take eliminate tasks and augment the humans in our business.

But unless your AI integrated data lake is vastly superior to that of the competition, they’re not a sustainable differentiator.

• Every piece of software you can buy is also available to the competition;
• Every digital gizmo you build can be copied by a dedicated me-too;
• Every AI will eventually be overtaken by a stronger one.

Uniqueness will need to come from how your people deal with this technology.
The actions they take. The innovations they come up with. The ways they can blend data and human touch. As they say, it’s no AI that will take your job. It’s someone using AI in the right way.

So while I’ll stay up to date on whatever latest tech Silicon Valley throws our way, I’ll put my real attention elsewhere …
​

I’m going all in on customer transformation.

Because customer experience management has plateaued in its current form.
Sure, by doing more of the same, we will always get a little better. But we won’t make the jumps required to prepare our businesses and customer relationships for the future. We keep chasing the experience puck, rather than skate where it will be.

So in 2024, and probably beyond, I’ll double-down on what I think are the three main priorities for customer leaders. To:

• Create customer cultures rooted in passion and belief, instead of compliance
• Create experiences that are memorable, or even transformative. At scale.
• Expand experience know-how beyond management theory

In which the three overlap, but it helps to keep them separate.

FOCUS #1: Creating customer cultures rooted in passion and belief, instead of compliance

For most of the last decade, corporate conversations about customer experience have focused on scores, chatbots and journey maps. Occasionally, someone laments that mindset, leadership commitment, and ROI lag. To then focus on that ‘EPIC journey which will personalise multichannel communication’.

While this all makes sense within the customer experience universe, for the rest of the business, it makes customer-centricity fuzzy, uninspiring and complicated. Sometimes even stressful.

As a result, acting on customer feedback becomes a chore. Scores get ‘gamed’. Personal initiative dwindles under the weight of checklists. And somehow, IT can never keep up with the endless list of change requests.

The traditional organisational response is usually more metrics, more training, more processes and more pressure. But if there is one thing that I’ve learned when working on experience programmes, is that MORE isn’t always the answer. In fact, trying to control an ever more complex and volatile world only burns you out.
​

Which ever way you look at it, customer success is about leadership.
​
I’ve experienced this firsthand. Whenever working on a business where the CEO or key senior leaders had the customer in their heart, transformation programmes were easy. Budget was available. Goal posts moved. Stuff got done.
​
But, to be fair, it’s not always easy to be a customer-centric leader.

After all, what does it even mean in practice?

If you strip away the beautiful buzzwords and frameworks, what is it that leaders are supposed to DO that will make them a customer champion? How should they behave? Not in generic terms, but in practice? Every single day?

So, I looked at what successful customer-centric leaders do.
I considered the hundreds of leaders I had the privilege of working with over the years and started listing how I had seen them drive a customer-centric agenda in their business. Then, I spent about 50 hours to compile my conclusions into 8 questions which I’ll explore below:​

1. How do I ensure that the experience IS the product?
2. How can I be (even) more explicit about our customer strategy?
3. How can make my people care?
4. How can I make customer focus easy and enjoyable for my people?
5. How can I check my biases and help others do the same?
6. How can I convert positive customer experiences into value?
7. How can I evolve the experience for today and tomorrow?
8. How can I (help my colleagues) step into uncertainty with confidence?

Some of these questions are obvious. Others may make you think.
​
But for both, it's worth asking yourself the question: Am I displaying these behaviours all the time? And if so, are there ways for me to improve?

​Question 1. How do I ensure the experience IS the product?
In many organisations, customer experience is the cherry that goes on top. It’s understandable. Our daily lives are driven by products, politics and profits. We do as we’re told, and race to our next deadline. Only a few of us get to look at the bigger picture.
​
Yet, for customers, the experience IS the product, service or brand they buy.

Every perceptual scientist will tell you we don’t separate different parts of an experience. Our brain considers it all as part of one package. When I take my wife to a gourmet restaurant, I don’t just go for the dishes; I go for a romantic night out. When I buy my next Apple, I don’t buy a computer; I buy a machine that just works when I want it. And my American Express isn’t just a piece of plastic, it’s the card in 20 years of travel has never let me down.

It’s not just me, it’s always been that way.
Gutenberg didn’t make better books than the scribes, but he made knowledge accessible. As the world’s first modern department store, the Parisian Au Bon Marché wasn’t a better store, but it offered the convenience of having everything under one roof. Or more recently, Kodak, Amazon or ChatGPT didn’t win with superior product quality. They disrupted with a unique customer experience. At least Kodak did so until the smartphone experience improvement to fit your photos in a handheld box.

This is even more pronounced in B2B.
While everyone obsesses about price and volume, 66% of global buyers are looking for vendors that ‘inspire’ them beyond the minimum requirements. In fact, when looking at 40 different ways to add value to B2B, only half a dozen are functional. The rest are experiential.
So, in B2B and B2C, one truth is universal: the customer's experience drives it all.

Customer-centric leaders recognise this.
They know that experience excellence is about more than mapping yet another journey. So they ask themselves and their teams how their business can deliver a unique experience proposition. Something that doesn’t just satisfy the customer’s wants or exceed their expectations. But that translates into something that is so authentic, competitors struggle to replicate it.
​

Question 2. How can I be (even) more explicit about our customer strategy?

​There is an old Monty Python sketch I sometimes play at the start of a keynote presentation. It depicts the 100 yard run for people with no sense of direction:
​

It usually gets a chuckle, but in the land of customer excellence it makes a serious point.
Because many organisations still behave like the runners in the video. With the best of intentions, they launch various customer initiatives which somehow don’t really connect, and somehow all go in a different direction.

The reason is that they never defined what a great customer experience looks like in practice.
While they may have lofty brand promises and their teams sweated for days on journey maps, their leaders never translated the company’s customer ambitions into practical experience standards and behaviours every employee can work with.

Quick self-test: Ask 10 random (leadership) colleagues to describe the tangible characteristics of an excellent customer experience. If they all say the same, you’re in good shape. If not, you may have a problem.

Especially in larger businesses, this lack of specificity is problematic.
If we all define a customer experience slightly differently, everyone aims at a different target. Multiplied by thousands of well-intended employees, the only certainty is that different customers will have differing experiences, depending on who manages their touchpoint. Especially as all the digital, sustainable, organisational, agile and other transformations cause priorities to differ by department and touchpoint. The result is inconsistent experience, internal inefficiency, waste and interdepartmental flare-ups. Sound familiar?

To address these challenges, customer focused leaders always ask how to get more explicit.
They seek better ways to clarify what is and isn’t a good customer experience. Who is and who isn’t a target customer? What is and isn’t customer-centric behaviour?

Not by using big words, long PowerPoint presentations and abstract KPIs. But by using real people's language that describes clear customer experience standards. And by inspiring their people with ideas and mantras that help them recognise when they are getting it right. Or catch themselves when they don’t.

And they cascade these standards and mantra into the job of everyone.
So everyone knows EXACTLY how they contribute to the experience. What they must get right. How they need to behave. Not in abstract scores or big concepts, but using very practical guidelines.

Question 3. How can I make my people care?
​
Let’s be blunt.

In all of my years, I’ve never met a regular employee get out of bed to move the KPIs your dashboard cherishes so much. They come to work because they want to make a living. Be social. Learn. Perhaps even do something meaningful ?.

Also, unless they work in the front line, it’s hard for them to care for customers they only encounter as abstract entities in spreadsheets and reports.

So any business that runs their customer experience programme on a platform of scores, journey maps and chatbots, is asking their people to do something they don’t care about, for people they don’t know.

Given the choice between thinking about ‘what is right for the customer’ or ‘what makes it easier to work with their boss, colleagues and existing process’, the latter will always win. It’s not bad will. It’s just how we’re all wired.

For employees to care about the customer experience, two things needs to be present.
First, your people need to relate to customers as fellow human beings. Know their quirks. Their passions. Their emotions. How your company’s actions can contribute to their good days, or bad ones. After all, we can only care about people we know.

Then, they need to feel that the ‘thing the business does for these customers (and the market)’ aligns with their own values and priorities. That it’s something they literally get out of bed for. That makes them proud.

Which is why customer-centric leaders focus on empathy and engagement.
Rather than talk about abstract customer persona and statistics, they look for (emotional) stories about actual experiences with real customers. Bring customers into the business. Even let employees walk in the customer’s shoes.

And, they connect the external customer’s experience to the values and priorities of their teams.

This transforms customer experience from something the people have to focus on because they must improve scores, into something they want to do, because it lets them give fellow humans a better day, at home or at work.

Question 4. How can I make customer focus easy and enjoyable for my people?

Even the most engaged and focused employee will lose their drive to be customer-centric, if the business gets in the way. If they have to fight their way through systems, processes, KPIs and organisational habits that make it complicated, or risky, to prioritise the customer.

So the employee experience needs to match the customer experience.
Not by purchasing more pinball machines or beanbags. But by making it as easy as possible for employees to contribute to the overall customer experience, regardless of where they are in the business. Everyone talks about making life easy for the customer, but at least as much attention should go to making the employee’s job easy, rather than complicated (yes, Microsoft, SAP and others, I’m looking at you).

Moreover, customer focus needs to be enjoyable.
Rather than always hearing customer voice comments on how the business is getting it wrong in the eyes of the customer, employees need to feel that their efforts are leading to improvement. As individuals, and as a team. A winning team is much more likely to take home the next match.

Which is why customer-centric leaders craft a flow.
​They adopt a ‘lean business’ approach by eliminating all activities and priorities that don’t add customer value. This way, putting as much focus on making life easy for their employees as they do for their customers. And then, they use positive stories, daily reminders and social dynamics to ignite an upward spiral, which encourages and celebrates employees to get ever closer and become involved with customer topics, regardless of their job.

Question 5. How can I check my biases and help others do the same?

We all do it.
Even when we think we’re listening to the customer, we contaminate their voice with our own perception. We close information gaps with assumptions that make sense to us, but may not be part of the customer’s reality. Especially if we’re pressed for time or have resource gaps. Our mind takes shortcuts and convinces us we’re right, even if we’re veering off track.

We have all lived with the results.
User interfaces that aren’t as intuitive as the designers thought. Loyalty programmes that don’t connect to what we care about. Contact centres that make us bounce around like a ping-pong ball. Print that is too small to read for anyone over 50.

Which is why customer-centric leaders check and challenge biases.
For every customer statement that is made, they check whether it is a ‘verified fact’ or an ‘assumption’. If the latter is the case, they either label it or attempt to verify it with the customer by observing their behaviour, or walking in their shoes.

They also assume that no customer problem or challenge is what it appears to be on the surface. Instead, they dig for the root cause. The reason, behind the reason, behind the reason. Only when they have a clear picture of what’s going on, they move.

This could initially appear to slow things down.
Especially in our world of agile sprinting and limited resources, there is a constant pressure to move fast and deliver results. But if you based these results on unvalidated assumptions, you may be very right in solving the wrong problem. Speed is often overrated.

Question 6. How to I convert positive customer experiences into value?

We all know that - in principle - happy customers are more profitable. But businesses should put this principle into practice.. Otherwise, the whole customer experience conversation can become a question mark in the most willing boardroom.

At a macro-level, customer-centric leaders report in money, rather than scores.

Through metrics like earned growth or account value at risk, they translate useful, yet abstract numbers like NPS or Customer Effort into language that resonates with heads of finance and sales.

lso ensuring that any analytics focus on what drives the money, rather than the likelihood of someone to recommend the printing on the wrapper around a candy bar.

At a micro-level, they ensure happy customers are profitable customers.
If research tells them that happy customers buy more, more often, or at better prices, they ensure they buy everything they might need (without pushing). If they know customers ‘are willing to recommend’, they provide them with stories or ask for testimonials. If they find one customer profile to be happier than others, they focus their acquisition efforts on ‘more of the same’.

And at a societal level, they understand that value is about more than money.
Because it’s often ignored that the right customer experience can be a massive driver for sustainability, fair trade, employee engagement and even internal diversity. So, they engage with their sustainability, D&I and even procurement colleagues to ensure the business takes every opportunity to create and capture value. Monetary or not.

Question 7. How can I evolve the experience for today and tomorrow?
The Japanese gifted us with the concept of 'Kaizen', a term that embodies the spirit of relentless improvement.

This is highly valuable in the customer world.
Every problem or mistake becomes an opportunity to get it right next time. Not just by fixing the problem for one customer, but by using insights and data to pre-empt it for all customers. I.e. If you know a customer will be unhappy because you’ve made a mistake, you can call them before they call you.

But customer-centric leaders do more than react and improve.
​

They realise that today’s great experiences are tomorrow’s minimum requirements, so they also look beyond their customer’s feedback at what’s happening in other industries. At technologies that aren’t in use, but could revolutionise relationships. At societal trends and developments that may affect their business, or their customers.

They use these to ‘skate where the puck will be.’
Rather than stick to their industry’s habits, which may have developed over decades or centuries, they challenge their company’s current business model and customer relationship with disruptive ideas or technologies. Visionaries even envision 'experiences as they should be' with multidisciplinary teams.

This way, they don’t just improve what exists today, they also build what should exist tomorrow.

In case you’re interested in Japanese quality improvement thinking, next to kaizen, also explore the words kaikaku and kakushin. It’s only when you balance the three that you get actual progress.

Question 8. How can I (help my colleagues) step into uncertainty with confidence?

No matter how much we listen, plan, engage, and empower, the future will differ from what we expect. Things will not go as planned. Customers will not behave as we assumed.

This may create a temptation to double-down on control mechanisms.
More scores. More processes. More data. More omnichannel systems that track every customer, always, everywhere. Frantically trying to cater for every combination and permutation of segment and circumstance.

But we live in a complex world.
We cannot control everything.As stated before, the experience IS the product the customer buys. Which means it’s not just our actions alone that determine whether it’s good or bad. If I just had a heated debate with my wife, I may take it out on your delivery van driver. If Uber just got me a refund in 6 minutes flat (actual story), your hard earned 24 hour response may seem slow.

So, customer-centric leaders go with the flow and encourage others to do the same.
They set clear targets for the experience that ‘must be delivered’. Push decision making to those that are closest to the customer, and coach their teams to do what’s right. Even if it means breaking the rules. Or learn from their mistakes. They explore new directions, experiment with new technologies and step out of their comfort zone.

All knowing that - until further notice - customers and employees are humans. Hard to know. Fickle. Illogical.
But we wouldn’t have them any other way. 
 
Conclusion

In the end, it’s all about your world view.
If you believe that the experience IS the product (service/brand) your customer buys, the other questions and associated behaviours become self-evident.

I your business cannot make this mental jump, it will continue to struggle on customer topics.

Because you’ll be trying to apply a square product- or service-era peg into a round experience hole. With enough pressure, it can fit. But never comfortably, and not for long.

So here’s my real question:
? What's your take on these 8 questions??
? Do they resonate, or am I stating the obvious?
? Did I miss something important?
? And are you asking them yourself?

For nearly a decade, the concept was part of my life. 
While shaping the Lexus Experience, it informed our every move. From the way we welcomed guests in the showroom to how we presented them with their vehicle. Or solved their problems when things didn’t go as planned. With a smile. An unexpected touch. Treating people as if they were a valued guest in our own home.

I thought I understood.
I’d read all I could find about omotenashi and its origins. I’d given presentations about it. Experienced some of it firsthand. Even my Japanese business associates gave me an encouraging nod when they heard me speak. 

Yet, I couldn’t shake the feeling that something essential was eluding me. 

So I embarked on a three-week-long immersive journey in Japan.
The trip had multiple goals, but one of them was to experience omotenashi as closely as possible. To ‘test’ the Japanese customer experience at every commercial interaction. 

To experience the real thing, I veered away from the typical tourist tracks.
Instead, we sipped from smoothies in a serene suburb of Osaka, hunted for antique fabrics in the hills around Takayama, stocked up on groceries in local markets, spent the evening in a cozy 7 seat izakaya and had an unexpected lost-and-found experience at the train stations Jomo-Kogen and Niigata.

My only reaction was an awed... "wow".
It may seem severe, but the meticulousness, unparalleled friendliness, consideration, and genuine enthusiasm that characterizes almost every customer interaction makes western customer experience practices look elementary. At one point, I even described us as 'barbarians'.

My son phrased it more eloquently: “Compared to home, it feels like here staff really care.” 

His words touched upon the core of omotenashi
Like ours, the Japanese work culture has its challenges. Odd processes. Arbitrary rules. Complex workplace relationships. Too many hours.

However, in terms of customer experience, Japanese employers seem to get one thing right. They get their people to truly care about the customer. The focus isn't "what is the minimum I need to do to satisfy this person", but "what else can I do to ensure this person leaves with a smile on their face". 

Which made me realise, more than ever, that omotenashi isn’t about the mechanics.
Sure, the meticulous attention to detail. The personalisation. The gratitude. The pro-activeness, … All these elements matter. 
​
But they all stem from truly caring for your guests and customers

This realisation invigorates me.
It reinforces my belief that customer-centric tools only hold value when we approach our interactions, both human and digital, from a place of empathy and care. To quote Fred Reichheld, we must "treat customers as we would want our loved ones to be treated". 

So here’s my challenge to you.
When your executive team has its next customer meeting, set aside the usual metrics, analytics, and journey maps. Instead, ask yourselves, and whoever is presenting how the plans devise will ignite a deeper level of ‘care’ within your people. Not for customers as walking wallets, but as fellow human beings whose life is to be made a little more enjoyable.

It may spark uncomfortable conversations.
When stripping away the customer, digital and design jargon, you’re talking values, emotions and beliefs. Of truly addressing what’s wrong in your business. Of doing the right thing, rather than the one which is convenient, strokes your ego or makes you look good.

I assure you that the effort is worth it … 

That is, if you care deeply enough yourself.


PS. A very serious suggestion: if you want to truly grasp what I’m talking about, go to Japan yourself. If you need a guide, talk to Jonas Elslander. He’s got the best. If you wish, I’m happy to hook you up.
​

​As despite ice-hockey wisdom, we are too often 'chasing the CX puck'. 
Most of our attention goes to (agilely) improving the service and experience that is offered today. We listen to our customers’ voice. Obsess about metrics. Get closer to the jobs to be done. We fix problems. Seamless-ify with the latest technology. Emulate our competitors as fast as we can. Occasionally even beat them to it. 

While improvement is good, it won’t let us win the match.  
At best, it keeps us ‘in’ the race, as every other competitor is also listening, copying and continuously improving. Often using the same softwares, toolkits, consultants and customer panels. This makes any experience wins marginal and short-lived.

What’s worse, it can make us do the ‘wrong things’ right. 
Customers only tell us about what matters to them today. So when we base our actions on their current expectations, we risk being late to the party. 

Because by the time our wonderful new software, process or people programme has been implemented, customer expectations will have shifted and we need to work with a solution that’s ‘just not there’. 

Note: This is especially the case for large and complex organisations where significant implementations easily take 2-3 years.

Chasing the experience puck is a race we cannot win.
Today’s customer expectations are simply changing too fast.

• A few months ago, Uber processed and paid a claim I had in 6 minutes flat. So today, I’m impatient with anyone taking more than a few hours to respond. 
• Not so long ago, I was happy with Google. Today, I find its interface limiting compared to a (boosted) ChatGPT. I even considered installing Edge on my Mac?! 😱.

Whatever last best experience I have anywhere, becomes my expectation everywhere. And at the current rate of innovation, that's 'a lot' of experiences. 

Which is why I propose a different approach

Let's keep improving what we do today. 
But let's also to envision how we will meet the customer expectations of 2025 or even 2027+. Leverage current and future technologies, trends and insights to shape the future experience that ‘should exist’ rather than improve the legacy one we have.  

This can be the basis for an experience innovation that inspires your people to create a new future for your customers, your industry and, why not even the world? 

Put differently: Stop exhausting yourself by chasing the experience puck. Skate to where it will be next.  ​

#1. Am I speaking a language everyone understands?
I get it. Fancy words make us sound smart. I like them too. 
But when executives start using words like transversal, ecosystem and seamless omnichannel experiences, people will get lost in the management mumbo-jumbo that is unleashed upon them. More than once I’ve sat with leaders admitting they didn’t really understand these words themselves. 

This is, of course, highly problematic, as if your people don’t understand what you are saying, they are unlikely to act on it in the way you intended. 

Suggested action: formulate your calls for a transformation in a language that doesn’t require a management degree or native-level fluency in the language of your headquarters. Being understood is the first step to convincing anyone. Or put differently: Would you speak to your mother like that?

​#2. Do I take my audience’s perspective? 
You have worked hard on your transformation plans and are convinced your organisation must act on it. 

But the rest of your organisation wasn’t in the room when you, your colleagues and consultants came up with these great ideas. They don’t know, or may not even care, about the reasoning that led to your strategic conclusions. So, you just as well might talk about the weather on Mars. 

Leadership teams often live in their own (perception) bubble. The stories they tell reflect this. But any transformation that doesn’t connect to what your people really care about is doomed.

Suggested action: Pitch your transformation to your employees in the same way that you would pitch your products to your customers. Start from their worldview and then work towards what you want to achieve. Show them benefits and personal gains. Remember that resonance is the first step to action.

​#3. How can I nuance my transformation story by audienceI usually like the strategic stories I tell.
I work hard to make them exciting. Make them feel like an adventure.  

But what motivates me, may not apply to everyone. I thrive on autonomy, ambiguity, and exploration. As a result, my stories naturally resonate with those who are like me. But they may turn off those who choose safety over uncertainty. Or care more about belonging. Team spirit. The fulfilment of purpose.

Point is, the story that excites you will not resonate with everyone. To connect to everyone in your business, you need to segment and calibrate. Just like your sales and marketing team would do for your customers.

Suggested action: Tweak the way you tell your transformation story to the (emotional) needs and values of the different employee psychographics in your business. And yes, that means understanding who they are. Or even talking to them 😉.

#4. Can I make the transformation co-creative?
The best strategy is not the one that looks best on PowerPoint. It’s the one that is supported by the organisation. 

By implication, the sooner you can involve the people who need to get hands on in transforming the business, the better this will be. Yes, this will make the creation process more complex and messy than calling your favourite consultancy. But if your people feel like they ‘own’ the strategy, it becomes significantly more powerful. After all, storytelling is a two way street.

Suggested action: Involve your people in the development of your transformation story as early as possible. Present them with the challenges your business faces and encourage them to help you come up with solutions. Buy-in matters.

#5. Can I make it a real transformation?
Most of what strategy consultants call transformation is actually nothing more than enforcing compliance. A senior leadership team comes up with a direction, which they expect the business to implement. In which fundamental criticism is managed by mindset change programmes. (sorry, was that too brutal?).

But while compliance is sometimes the only workable avenue, I always like to ask myself whether there are ways to achieve more. Whether I can offer insights or experiences that make people truly change their perspective and actively work towards a new direction. I don’t always find the answer, but it’s always worth the effort.

Suggested action: Dig for the deeper beliefs (myths) that people hold about the way your business worked historically, and you expect it to work in the future. Then see if you can provide stories or, ideally, experiences that expand these views in the new direction.  

#6. Do I really know what I’m doing?
All the above questions assume that the transformational direction for the business is the right one. That the group of smart people who came up with a smart strategy actually knew what they were doing. 
But every one of us has biases. Works on partial information. Tend to believe in the stories we tell ourselves. However, what seems like a good idea at one point may turn out as a horrible mistake later. Or vice versa.
​
Suggested action: As you go ‘transforming’ your business, pay careful attention to every objection or hurdle. Yes, they may be elements you need to work through. But they can also indicate that you haven’t got your story straight. Or that you may have lost the plot yourself. So park your ego, be ready to listen, and to change your mind. 

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you probably got the memo that AI is going to impact the way we do business. By now, you have probably also played with ChatGTP, Bing, Midjourney or the hundred of tools out there. 
​
But while it’s fun to put the Mona Lisa on a surfboard or rewrite an email in the words of William Shakespeare, AI is above all a tool. And I want to learn how it affects my trade of customer-centricity. 

As the hundreds of ‘how to prompt’ carousels on LinkedIn didn’t really address this question, I started experimenting myself. 

So I summarised 5 easy experiments, which really opened my eyes to AI’s customer-centric potential. 

In themselves, they are simple and are only a proof of concept. But if you think them through, they point at very practical ways to level up the customer experience, using today’s technology.

But rather than describe my findings, I invite you to do these experiments yourself. 

Because nothing beats experiencing something yourself. As they are simple, you may have already done a few. But perhaps there’s still one or two to make you think.

Experiment #1. Feed ChatGPT your customer verbatim
Go into your customer voice system and copy a few hundred pieces of customer feedback. Then ask the software questions about how you can improve the experience, what your happy customers liked, which initiatives you should prioritise based on return/effort,… See what comes up.

If you don’t feel like using your own data, check out this dummy data set compiled by Maurice Fitzgerald for a fictitious restaurant.

Don’t forget to ask what you should do about the clown 😉🤡.

Level up: imagine training an AI on ALL your customer data. Every verbatim, piece of market research, employee voice comment, piece of sales data, etc. And then using natural language to bring your customer’s view to the table in every single meeting. How would that compare to your current decision making?


Experiment #2. Chat with Suki

I’ve always hated chatbots. Even the good ones are way too impersonal and cold for my taste. Until I met Suki, an avatar you can talk to as if you would talk to a human. Beyond words, she recognises your facial expressions, and has quite a few of her own.

So go over the Soul Machines website and ask her about your favourite movie or book. Ask her to recite a happy or sad poem. While her voice still needs more work, and she’s only as good as her GPT-3 training data, pay attention to her facial expressions. And especially to the way talking to her feels compared to a regular chatbot. It’s probably a matter of taste, but I like her 😉.

Level up: imagine training your company’s Suki on every contact centre conversation in your business. Especially the ones that went well. How would that compare to your current digital (self-service) channels? Would it infuse some personality into your digital efforts?

Experiment #3. Outsource your travel to GPT-4
For a client in the travel industry, I recently tried out GPT-4 as a travel agent. I created a 2 paragraph persona of myself and then asked the machine to come up with a 14-day train journey from Copenhagen to Rome, letting me experience the best of Medieval Art along the way. Including hotel and restaurant recommendations. 

I then asked it to create a customer journey for the trip, outlining key stages and what it assumed to be my expectations and how these would be met.

I suggest you try this too. Ask the software to plan a more complex dream trip and see how it performs. If your experience is similar to mine, you’ll see it still needs work, but it is getting close.

Level up: imagine an AI having access to all your available customer options and individual customer preferences. Then generate customised journeys like my train trip, only for your product and service. How does this compare to the level of customisation your offer today? Would your company’s operating model even allow this level of flexibility?
​
Experiment #4. Check your heart-rate

OK, this is not strictly AI, and it’s a little more complex, as you need a smartwatch. But if you have one around, it’s worth heading over to Known to measure your degree of ‘immersion’ in a YouTube video or advert. By looking at your heart rate and other components, the software can tell exactly when you’re paying attention and when you’re zoning out. 

Level up: The tech doesn’t just work for video. With a little creativity, it can also measure a customer’s actual immersion in every stage of every journey. Played right, it can even correlate to purchase intent.

So imagine knowing exactly how your customers react to different experience options. Not based on surveys, but on how they really feel. How does that compare to your current design and prototyping process? 

Experiment #5: Reimagine your product & comms
You’ve undoubtedly seen images where AIs ‘mashup’ different brands into new propositions. Some cool examples include this mix between Jeep and The North Face.

However, instead of playing with imaginary brands, use Midjourney to get creative with your own brand or business. Or if it isn’t that well known to be part of the training data, do it for your category. It may take you a few tries to get something solid. But explore how easy it is to get to new variations on brand visuals or product imagery. 

Level up: Imagine training a generative AI in your company’s design language so your teams get ultra-fast in generating new imagery, or even prototypes for your brand. Then tailor these images to the personality or aesthetic preferences of each individual customer. I.e. If you’re personalising my train trip from Copenhagen to Rome, why can’t all your visual comms reflect my preferences? 

These brief experiments are just to get a feel.
And unfortunately, there are no shortcuts. Moving from these easy proofs of concept to a full-blown next level experience will take time, money and effort.

But everything I described is possible today. This means that if we can think of it, someone is building it. 

So I propose that after the playing, you get serious.
The value of AI is in the data sets. If you have proprietary data that can be leveraged for a competitive advantage, you want to leverage every byte. 

So start a conversation about the impact of AI on the customer practices in your business. Imagine how you create your own proprietary tools to become more customer-centric. To deliver more unique or personalised experiences. To leap ahead. 

The customer centricity game is about to change. 
No one really knows exactly how. But the race to find out is on. 

So what’s your next level experience-tech vision and roadmap? Are you ready to level-up?

In my recent personal newsletter, Thoughts & Tidbits, I made the case that organisations should match their digital transformation investments with a ‘human touch’ for everything they do.

Tactically, because any digital edge will eventually be copied by the competition. Strategically because, until further notice, humans still pay the bills and we like a side serving of humanity. 

Still, we live in a time where nothing is as it was before.

So whenever I say something, I also seek out contrarian views to my own. This time, I asked ChatGPT to provide me with a set of counterarguments to my thesis. Its challenge was to prove that tomorrow’s customer experience does not need a human touch and that computers will meet all of our needs.

I have to admit it did a good job

I’d have to think about refuting the five points it raises. But they also prove my gut feeling that if we digitalise too much, life may get a bit too cold for comfort.

Especially as - so far - AI doesn’t really ‘invent’ anything. It just builds and summarises thoughts and ideas it has found online. Thoughts expressed by humans.
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Have a look at the answers below. What do you think?