As we look toward 2025, I believe we will see customer experience (CX) undergo a profound transformation, which will for a big part be driven by advancements in artificial intelligence (AI). This presents an unseen number of fresh possibilities but can also lead to several new challenges. In fact, depending on how companies react or adapt, AI could be either an enhancer or a disruptor of customer relationships.

I truly believe that those companies that are paying attention and understand that a “Big Reset” – of customer care, of trust, of authenticity, of leadership, access to humans, etc. – is on the way could be entering a golden age of CX. And to inspire them I want to offer my 5 CX predictions for 2025:

1. The age of AI agents

Never in my life have I experienced a technological acceleration as exponential as that of AI, and more specifically of Generative AI (GenAI), over these past 2 years. If we can believe Sam Altman, we are just a few thousand days removed from Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), which he defines as intelligence that is comparable to a median human co-worker, capable of learning and excelling in diverse fields.

This is how Altman sees GenAI evolving:

1. Stage Level 1: Chatbots, AI with conversational language
2. Stage Level 2: Reasoners, human-level problem solving
3. Stage Level 3: Agents, systems that can take actions
4. Stage Level 4: Innovators, AI that can aid in invention
5. Stage Level 5: Organizations: AI that can do the work of an organization

We are currently firmly rooted in level 1, though we are moving towards level 2 with reasoning models (which are good at science, coding, and mathematics) like OpenAI’s o1 which is learning to perform complex reasoning. It always strikes me how most of us seem to have become pretty used to the skills of these conversational chatbots, which just goes to show how fast they are evolving and how quickly they became normal to us.

Indistinguishable from humans

Not so long ago, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff claimed that AI has advanced to a point where it is indistinguishable from humans in customer service roles. That will of course have (and sometimes already has) a huge effect on customer service. Over the past year, for instance, payment provider fintech Klarna has been very vocal about its use of GenAI in customer environments. After one month of using its OpenAI-powered customer support agent, the latter was handling two thirds of customer chats, the equivalent of 700 human agents, with the same accuracy but a lot faster.

But conversational chatbots are only one part of the equation. If AI keeps evolving as fast as it is now, AI agents might not take long to mature. Agentic AI will not only have a huge impact on our customer interactions, it will also force us to revisit our websites, our marketing or our interactions with employees.

For those who aren’t so familiar with artificial intelligence (AI) agents: they are a system or program that is capable of autonomously performing tasks on behalf of a user or another system. An AI chatbot answers questions, but an AI agent acts on your behalf.

If you think that these agent systems will only manifest in a far of future, realize that over the past weeks and months, several of the big AI companies made announcements in the matter:

• Anthropic launched a model that can control your screen to do tasks in your apps
• Asana launched a no-code tool for designing AI agents
• Microsoft has added a layer of ‘autonomous agents’ to some of its enterprise tools
• Google is planning to launch an AI agentic tool codenamed Project Jarvis (which it mistakenly briefly released but then retracted)
• Salesforce announced the general availability of its AI agent development platform called Agentforce.
• Apple filed several patents around AI agents
• Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, envisions his company having 100 million AI agents.

The ultimate friction removing tool

Though this is just the beginning and agentic AI still needs to mature, when it comes to CX, there are 2 ways that companies need to start thinking about it:

1. What will agents mean for their customer relations and interactions
2. What will they mean for their marketing

When it comes to CX, I believe that AI agents will be the ultimate friction removing tool, taking away a huge number of hurdles.

Let’s say you want to organize a road trip in Australia. Today, you must do research about interesting places and people to visit (possible in ChatGPT and consorts), then go to a website or app to book a flight, then to another one to book your different hotels, then to another one to book a car, a restaurant, a museum… Soon, you will ask your agent and they will manage that entire journey for you in a highly personalized manner, requiring zero-click interaction from you. In fact, agents may become proactive at one point, calling your hotel that you will be later because you are still 150 km away, while you were scheduled to arrive in 15 minutes.

Agent-to-Agent Interaction

These agents may trigger an intense paradigm shift when it comes to your customer interactions. At first, they will interact directly with customers over your website, social media channels or call centres. But we might get to a point where customer agents interact with organizational agents.

On a deeper level, this also means that companies should redesign their websites, apps, and other digital platforms to be accessible and usable by AI agents, if those will become primary “visitors” to their websites. They might even need to develop dual interfaces: one optimized for human customers and another for AI agents that prioritizes structured data and programmatic interactions. This may, according to my friend Jeremiah Owyang, result in a new type of economy, with new social norms. Where AI agents will interact autonomously, (trading, buying and selling) and evolve (learning, governing, and reproducing) with minimal human intervention.

This is truly an exciting area. The advantages of advanced chatbots and, later, AI agents seem (and will be) tremendous for companies when it comes to employee augmentation (especially in tedious and repetitive tasks), 24/7 accessibility, productivity, speed, personalization and friction removal. It’s a tremendous opportunity, but also a challenge. Those companies that view chatbots and agents purely as efficiency and productivity enhancers – and that will happen, mark my words – will lose out on customers. What they should be doing is thinking one thought alone: “How will this make my customers happier?”. All the rest is noise.

2. Authenticity is overrated

I often experience hesitation among my keynote audiences when it comes to AI. “What about authenticity?”, they ask. “AI could never be as authentic as a human”. In those cases, I give an answer that seems to surprise many: “authenticity is overrated”. And what I mean by that is this: it’s not because something is authentic, that it is automatically good. I’ll give a highly controversial example: Joseph Stalin could be conceived as authentic. But it’s safe that we can all agree that that did NOT make him a good example.

On top of that, positive authenticity is very hard to scale. Let’s say that 1 employee in a hundred has the personality, kindness, coherence, enthusiasm, originality, credibility and sincerity to be called truly authentic. That’s not much, right? That’s why I believe that artificially created CX should and can create real wonder, or other feelings too.

Disney world is not real. It’s inhabited by actors who pretend. It is an artificially created experience. A Coldplay concert is amazing, but it is not authentic. It is an artificially created experience. People don’t realize it, but they love artificially created experiences. It’s essential to ensure that while the experience may be crafted, it stays true to the brand’s core identity.

Coldplay concerts are orchestrated from A to Z and very little spontaneous, but they are Coldplay-ish, reflecting the vision and identity of the band.

The Authenticity Paradox

I’ve always been intrigued by Herminia Ibarra’s concept of the “authenticity paradox”. The paradox highlights the tension leaders face between staying true to their established self-concept on the one hand and adapting to new roles or challenges on the other. Ibarra believes that a rigid adherence to one’s perceived “true self” or authentic self can hinder personal growth and leadership effectiveness. Instead, she advocates for an “adaptively authentic” approach, where leaders experiment with different styles and behaviors to meet evolving demands, even if these feel unfamiliar or uncomfortable at first.

In fact, the general concept of authenticity IS adapting these days. Its boundaries are evolving as we speak. A recent survey by Sprout Social uncovered that, when it comes to influencers, only 35% of GenZ respondents cared about authenticity. They cared more about follower count (47% of them) and posting frequency.  46% of Gen Z respondents said they would be more interested in a brand that worked with an influencer that was generated with AI.

This evolution makes sense. GenX, the Boomers and even the early Millennials grew (partly) up in a pre-digital world.

3. The Big Reset of Customer Care and Trust

AI has the potential to induce a complete reset of customer relations. If the new generation of chatbots and AI agents as described above matures up to the point that they will take over most touchpoints of customer care, what then will remain of the “old” CX approach?

How should we then redefine our customer care KPIs? How long is it acceptable for a customer to wait on the phone, or receive a response over social media? Should everyone be addressed in their native language? How should customer satisfaction be measured? How long should a phone call take? And should these calls be purely transactional or can AI agents make room for some chit chat conversation with anyone who would enjoy that.

With AI, all of these metrics should make a tenfold improvement. This will be a huge gamechanger for customers, where all their frustrations and all types of friction will be eliminated. They will always immediately be addressed in their own language, by an agent that is not only fast and efficient but also has an infinite amount of patience and will never get mad.

Standing out in a crowd

This is both an infinite opportunity as well as a significant challenge for companies. If every company’s customer care makes a 10X jump in speed, efficiency and even empathy because of AI and automation, how on earth will they differentiate themselves from the competition? If executed right, AI is a great equalizer. But it will also make it so much harder to stand out in a sea of uniformity.

The answer here is trust. Building deep trust is a way that companies will be able to differentiate themselves from the pack. Automation, efficiency and friction removal are the easy parts (well, you know…). The fundaments of great CX will not change: it’s still about building a meaningful relationship with your customers and trust plays a pivotal part in that. But on the other hand, the concept of trust may need to be re-thought as well.

A big part of the redefinition might revolve around these types of value:

• Offering deep transparency
• When in doubt, always prioritizing the customer
• Making sure that premium human service always remains accessible inside your organization
• Always thinking long term on top of your short-term thinking
• Consistent quality and service over and over again
• Proactive communication when something goes wrong

Another interesting way to look at trust, or lack thereof, comes from trust expert Rachel Botsman and her 4 Pillars of Trustworthiness. If there is a trust issue in your relationship (with an individual, an organization or other system), these pillars will help you find out what went wrong:

• Competence: Does someone question your ability to do something?
• Reliability: Does someone question your responsiveness or consistency?
• Integrity: Does someone feel like you might be putting your own interests first?
• Empathy: Does someone feel like you don’t care enough?

Whatever the case, trust will come to play an immensely important role in CX (more than it already did in the past) over the coming years, especially at a time where it’s increasingly difficult to control our own data and to grasp the line between reality and misinformation.

For instance, according to a Forrester report from the beginning of this year, consumers lack trust in GenAI driven products and services in two main domains:

1. the accuracy of the results that the technology produces
2. the ways that companies use the technology and data that consumers enter.

Only 29% agreed that they would trust information from GenAI. 73% agreed that companies should disclose when they use GenAI technology to interact with them. Another recent study by the University of Zurich uncovered that people view headlines labeled as “AI-generated” as less trustworthy and are less likely to share them – even if the content is accurate or was created by humans. Washington State University researchers found that products described as using AI were less popular among consumers. And that mentioning AI in product descriptions tends to lower emotional trust, which in turn decreases purchase intentions, especially for “high-risk” products like expensive electronics or medical devices.

That’s why I truly believe that deep trust will become a real differentiator for customers, in a market where the technology layer of CX will become increasingly uniform.

4. Redefine the Human magic

Another huge differentiator in an increasingly friction free and automated world – that is deeply connected with the trust trend above – is having access to humans, especially in the physical realm. You are starting to see how some companies are re-investing in their physical presence to create confidence among their clientele.

Bank of America (BofA), for instance, has been opening more branches this year – 165, to be exact, across 63 markets – instead of closing them, like many other are. Weirdly enough, BofA admitted that more than 95% of client interactions take place on its digital platforms. But they also understand that those 5% of live human contacts are essential because they are about finding support with our more complex financial needs or receiving advice on our life priorities and financial goals.

Amazon, then, recently announced that it would be closing its futuristic cashierless convenience stores with their once revolutionary “just walk out” technology and it will be launching mini Whole Foods stores instead that are comparatively low tech. The US bookstore chain Barnes & Noble, then, plans to open 60 extra bookstores. Even Meta launched a pop-up experiential retail space for its Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses in Los Angeles.

When it comes to deeply understanding the value of human touchpoints – be it physical or digital – I always have to think about Hubert Joly who was CEO at Best Buy from 2012 to 2019. He came aboard the company at a moment where “everybody thought [they] were going to die”. They advised him to “cut, cut, cut, close stores, fire a lot of people”, which is the traditional tactic for these types of situations.

Joly did the exact opposite and focused on a people-centric turnaround. In fact, those weren’t just nice words in a fancy PowerPoint. Joly spent his first week in a store, wearing the same uniform as his coworkers, and a badge that said “CEO in Training” to just listen to the front liners. Because he believed that they knew so much more than him and he was strong enough to admit that he did not have all the answers. This field tour allowed him to find solutions that didn’t involve people losing their jobs.

Do we want humans to become a premium?

Joly truly believes that humans are not a resource. They are the creative engine of innovation and change that companies urgently need. Identifying the passions and motivations of your coworkers, and then freeing them up and empowering them to pursue them, creates what Joly calls “human magic.” And the latter is exactly what CX leaders need today to cultivate unique experiences in an era of increased automation and decrease of trust.

In this increasingly automated world, the danger might be that human service will become scarce, a premium even. And the Big question here is: “do we want humans to become a premium?”. Should human contact not just be accessible to everyone, whenever they need it? You know that I’m a big fan of technology, but above all, I value brands that think about their customers first, before things like operational efficiency and budget optimization.

If technology can help the customer, that’s fantastic. But please make sure that “human magic” remains an option. In the coming years, closeness to the customer will become a powerful differentiator. And that’s actually not surprising if you realize how close many love brands like Nike, Sephora, Starbucks and Apple are to their customers.

5. The Rise of the CX Leader

CX is not something that you can encapsulate in neat little silos in your organization in times of exponential automation. Every layer of your company should be obsessed with your customers. Just like every business leader should understand about technology, they should also master a CX mindset. In fact, customer culture should be on every leader’s agenda these days. Not once every few months, when they give an “inspiring” presentation to their teams, but structurally.

These are some of the most striking characteristics of leaders who understand the importance of CX and customer culture throughout their entire organization:

1. They lead by example
2. They make customer focus everyone’s job, not just customer service
3. They empower employees to solve customer problems
4. They spend time directly interacting with customers
5. They create systems and processes that prioritize CX – and develop structural solutions when things go wrong
6. They’re willing to sacrifice short-term profits for long-term customer relationships

Sumit Singh, CEO of Chewy, an American online retailer of pet food and other pet-related products. His approach to CX is a very human and almost emotional one, which he likes to compare to Disney and the best hospitality resorts in the world. The strategic and long-term oriented attention he pays to customer culture is excessive. Just like Disney calls their employees “cast members” to trigger a little magic and Singh, calls dog owners “dog parents”. That might seem trivial, but it shows a deep understanding into the emotional relationship that pet parents have with their animals. He also saw that pet parents were in need of holistic services: not just looking for a partner to help with basics like food, shelter or toys but also with insurance or healthcare.

Chewy employees are also allowed to bring their own pets to work, which may seem a little chaotic for an office, but is also 100% coherent with their mission. I also love the attention that Singh pays to what he calls “surprise and delight moments” for customers. They send flowers, cards and even pet portraits from local artists for special moments in the life of pets and their parents, always showing empathy. And Singh himself is very accessible, customer scan send him a LinkedIn message with questions or complaints and he will be more than happy to reply himself.

Zombie killing

Another characteristic of great customer culture driven leaders is attention to structural improvements. Singh talks about“zombie killing”. When customer care receives recurrent questions about the same topic, he wants his employees not just to answer, but to make sure that these issues become solved in a structural manner.

Great CX driven leaders also understand the importance of being in the field. Jørgen Vig Knudstorp of Lego, for instance, likes to talk about ‘managing at eye level”, which is the literal translation of a Danish expression. What is means it that he too is close to people on the factory floor, to engineers, to marketers, what he calls “being at home with everyone” so that he can hear about challenges on the floor and can establish a relation of trust with his team. Walmart’s Sam Walton, too, made a point to listen to and learn from his employees. He was known to visit store locations frequently, checking in and communicating with workers, asking them about their day-to-day duties and their opinion on the way things were being run, and getting their perspective on the customer experience.

Long gone are the days that CX was the sole responsibility of the marketing leadership and team. Those companies that want to thrive in an increasingly automated world, will need to firmly grasp human nature and the human relationships with their customers, teams, and partners.

So, in a nutshell, this is my forecast for all things CX in 2025: we are experiencing an incredible evolution in AI and automation that will redefine CX on so many levels: from interaction and interfaces, to authenticity, customer care, trust and much more. A big pitfall here is that companies will use AI to optimize, to drive productivity, efficiency and speed. And that this will lead to far reaching uniformization where all services and products will become commoditized. The Big opportunity here is to use “human magic”: to differentiate yourself and keep delighting your customers so they can experience joy, positivity, proximity and – above all – deep trust.