Brands are deploying AI in customer experience with a fundamental misalignment: they're optimising for operational efficiency rather than customer value. Ali Fazal's analysis reveals that most AI implementations have been designed around internal convenience—cost reduction, speed, and expediency—rather than solving genuine customer problems. This approach has backfired. Customers already operate in a low-trust environment where authenticity is questioned, and when they perceive AI being used visibly to serve the brand's interests first, it erodes confidence further. The issue isn't the technology itself; it's the strategic choice to automate existing sparse touchpoints instead of reimagining what service could look like when personalisation and proactive communication are no longer constrained by cost. This creates a critical question for CX leaders already invested in platforms like Zendesk or Salesforce: are you using AI to reduce friction for customers, or are you simply automating away the human elements that built trust in the first place?
The opportunity lies in a deliberate inversion of current practice. Rather than asking "how can we automate this interaction," teams should ask "how can we make their lives easier?" This means using AI to help customers find products faster, understand delivery timelines with confidence, access return information more intuitively, and receive support through their preferred channels—not the brand's preferred channel. Fazal is explicit that this doesn't mean removing humans from CX entirely; the strongest brands will distinguish between moments where automation removes genuine friction and moments where emotional intelligence, sensitivity, or high consideration demand a human response. For support team leads and CX consultants, this represents a significant strategic shift: the competitive advantage no longer comes from deploying AI broadly, but from deploying it precisely, with clear evidence that customers receive something materially better than what preceded it.
The broader implication is that generic AI deployment is becoming a liability rather than an asset. As enterprise AI organisations struggle with reality alignment, the gap between what brands claim their AI does and what customers actually experience widens. Teams that continue to treat AI as a cost-reduction tool will find themselves competing on price and speed—territories where customer loyalty is weakest. Those that treat AI as a capability to expand what human agents can accomplish, and to deliver proactive value customers didn't previously have access to, will differentiate. The challenge for CX professionals is not adoption speed but strategic clarity: understanding which customer moments genuinely benefit from automation and which ones demand the irreplaceable qualities of human judgment.
As AI becomes a bigger part of customer experience, the real issue for many consumers may not be the technology itself, but the way brands are choosing to use it. Francesca Roche sits down with Ali Fazal, Chief Marketing Officer at Gladly, to discuss why AI in customer experience fails when brands p