The trust deficit in AI-powered customer experience is stark: only 29 percent of consumers globally trust organizations to use AI responsibly, yet enterprises are accelerating deployments across service, support, personalization, and engagement channels. This gap emerges not from AI capability itself but from implementation approach. Organizations that treat AI as a tactical tool—simply inserting it into existing workflows without strategic planning, change management, or employee buy-in—create friction that undermines the customer relationships CX teams are trying to strengthen. The damage compounds when deployments feel opaque or designed primarily to extract value rather than serve customers. Dr. Ben Granger's research at Qualtrics identifies a critical distinction: trust is built from the inside out, and it cannot be bypassed through technology alone. Companies succeeding with AI treat it as organizational transformation requiring clear leadership alignment and internal confidence before external rollout. This raises a pressing question for teams already running Agentforce or similar agent platforms: are your support teams genuinely confident in the tool, or are they managing customer frustration whilst masking their own uncertainty?
Transparency and human optionality emerge as operational imperatives, not nice-to-haves. Organizations must be explicit about when customers interact with automation rather than attempting to obscure it, and crucially, they must provide frictionless escalation to human agents. Counterintuitively, offering a clear human exit route builds trust in AI adoption rather than undermining it—customers accept automation when they know they're not trapped within it. Equally important is listening infrastructure that moves beyond surveys to capture behavioral signals from calls, chats, and digital interactions in real time. This reveals not just what customers say they want but how they actually respond in the moment, exposing where AI implementations are creating silent frustration or abandonment. For CX leaders, the implication is uncomfortable: rapid AI rollout without this foundational work—transparent communication, employee alignment, behavioral listening, and human fallback—will erode the trust metrics that justify the investment in the first place.
AI may be moving quickly into customer experience, but customer trust is not keeping pace. That tension sits at the center of this CX Today interview, as Nicole Willing speaks with Dr. Ben Granger, Chief Workplace Psychologist at Qualtrics, about what enterprises need to get right as they bring AI d