Customer Experience & AI

The recent turmoil in India’s airline industry made me interact with multiple customer-care representatives across airlines and related services. Not surprisingly, every single conversation I had was with an AI-driven customer service system - no human intervention at all.

The engineer in me felt proud. But as a consumer, I was reminded of the critical importance of Customer Experience - and why, in the rush to adopt AI, we cannot afford to lose sight of the customer’s real problem.

Across industries, organizations want to move beyond using AI merely as a productivity tool. They now want AI to be the solution and in many cases, it is getting there. But as companies adopt AI as a solution, they must remember to anchor themselves with the fundamentals.

Understand the Customer Need and is AI solving it

• AI can recognise patterns at scale, but one universal truth remains unchanged: Customer Need and Empathy is the centre.

• Reducing operational cost is often mistaken for improving customer experience and they are not the same.

• Companies are trying to use AI to address the heterogeneity and variability of the consumer base without having the right foundation.

The Indian market is a classic example of extreme variability. With its linguistic, cultural, economic, and digital-literacy differences, a “single AI solution” without human support often falls short.

A large portion of India still:

• does not fully understand the new age of “agentic systems,” and

• engages with companies whose data infrastructure is not yet mature enough to deliver a perfect AI-driven “agentic” experience.

While addressing the Indian consumer base, this plays a critical role. AI is powerful. It is inevitable. It is transformative. But AI without human empathy is incomplete.

As organizations embrace AI, they must ensure they don’t lose the human touch. Customer trust and satisfaction cannot be automated away.