SALT LAKE CITY — As CX leaders across industries descended on Salt Lake City for Qualtrics’ X4 conference last week, they couldn't help but talk about AI. Sure, other topics were the main focus, but many sessions came back to how AI is changing how companies operate.
Qualtrics XM Institute and McKinsey unveiled data on how many executives remain wary of AI investments even though they recognize their potential. Sam’s Club and Chime discussed how they are implementing AI without removing the people from customer experience.
These are just two examples of the enormous amount of thought companies are putting into their tech rollouts. Here is a look at four more, from using generative AI to send data crunching capabilities to the moon to using the technology to help humans focus on their real jobs.
Verizon goes from data wagon to data rocketship
Verizon likens its pre-AI data capabilities to a little red wagon, according to Deborah Campbell, VP of customer marketplace insights. It was a useful tool they could pull along, but ultimately a very manual process.
The wireless provider has greased the wheels of that wagon with AI. Now, the next step is to turn it into a rocketship, according to Campbell. The upgraded vehicle will enable speed and complexity while smashing down silos.
“We've looked at our entire CX ecosystem, and we are going to now move completely away from channel-based measurement to journey-based measurement, where we will be able to look at the journey by channel, by customer, segment, by activity, by initiative,” Campbell said.
The goal is to ingest call transcripts, chat transcripts and social media conversations and combine them into a single source of insights, according to Campbell.
Qualtrics foresees personalization’s democratization
While AI agents are poised to reimagine customer experience, no one wants to be treated like a cog, according to Manisha Powar, chief product officer of Qualtrics XM for customer experience.
Automation shouldn’t make customers feel “optimized” with interchangeable experiences, Powar said. People want personalization, and AI can help smaller companies close the gap with their larger counterparts.
“All of that was really hard to do,” Powar said. “You had to be a bazillionaire company, a visionary leader, who baked the right QA experience. Only the largest could afford that. Creating a personalized experience isn’t a pipe dream anymore.”
Qualtrics isn’t the only vendor working on democratization, but Powar wants to be on the forefront of creating those personalized experiences. The goal is to have every interaction make customers feel like they matter.
Indeed reduces workers’ cognitive workload
Indeed only gets one shot to make its site experience work, according to Adam Hagerman, director of UX research. If a user feels frustrated, they’re likely to move on to a competitor.
This makes optimizing the job search experience essential, but it can be difficult to create a universally positive experience for a site that operates globally. AI is helping Indeed cut through the noise of its customer listening data so employees can pinpoint the parts that matter.
“What it offers us is an opportunity to remove what I'm hearing people call ‘cognitive overhead,’” Hagerman said. “It's not so much that the AI is doing all the work for you. It’s doing the stuff that prevents you from doing the real job.”
AI is helping the company “deal with all this information coming out of us like a fire hose” and condense it into a single version of the truth that lets all its teams unite around common goals.
ServiceNow puts agentic AI to work for people
AI could have a $20 trillion impact on the global economy, according to Brad McDermott, CEO of ServiceNow. He expects every $1 wisely invested in agentic AI to generate $5 in return.
The greatest potential the technology offers is as a complement, not necessarily a replacement, for people, according to McDermott. ServiceNow now solves 80% of cases that used to route through live agents with agentic AI, but the change didn’t lead to cuts.
“Agentic AI didn't replace a single person, because I'm a growth company,” McDermott said. “So companies are going to be able to grow again. They're going to be able to reinvent business models if they do this as well."
However, McDermott doesn’t expect every company to have the same results. Businesses need to manage their operating expenditures to realize the full value of AI, removing unnecessary costs wherever they appear, and that could include cutting jobs.
The trick is that the changes can’t come at the expense of the experience.
