CX Insights
When AI optimizes the wrong thing
Partners from Bain reflect on the 2026 Qualtrics X4 conference, sharing that brands have invested in gathering customer insights but have not used them to inform decisions that impact how customers experience the brand. Local optimization of different aspects of the customer experience can result in metrics that look fantastic on a report but result in a poor, disjointed customer experience.
The experts advise that the brands that win will be the ones that use AI to strengthen customer relationships, not just reduce costs. To do this, you must determine the best objectives. Too often brands are applying AI to the easiest objectives, or the ones that deliver clear results - not always the best opportunities.
The key: Think big-picture when it comes to AI. Make sure you’re actually augmenting the customer experience with it.
Loyalty programs: don’t overlook aging consumers
EY’s upcoming 2026 Loyalty Market Study finds that consumers age 55 and older join a wide span of loyalty programs at about half the rate of the general population. They shop with a smaller number of brands and stay loyal. That means they’re stable customers and often come with a higher lifetime value, even if younger consumers have more potential time to patronize your brand.
The US population is aging. Even if your brand’s products are primarily used by younger people, older adults have the financial means and may be purchasing on behalf of younger family members for gifts. They may not join your loyalty program, but it doesn’t mean you should discount them. Older consumers may have lower acquisition costs because they’re more likely to engage in more cost-effective marketing methods - a good reason to team up with your cross-functional colleagues in marketing.
What the 1990s got right about customer experience
Nostalgia has hit CX. (Yes, I remember the 90s. A little.)
In our tech-enabled world, it’s helpful to go back to the basics and think about how things used to be. This think piece explores when organizations got more intentional about customer experience and it brings up a lot of great points. One of my favorites:
“Customers do not experience strategies or organizational structures directly. They experience systems.
They encounter digital interfaces, service processes, support interactions and physical environments. These systems shape how customers perceive an organization.
Those systems are created through decisions. Decisions about priorities, investments, trade-offs and ways of working determine how products are built, how services are delivered and how employees interact with customers.”
When paired with this article about the rocky start to AI-based customer experience, it helps provide some context. Customers feel it when brands are using AI to deflect, whether that’s the deeper intention or an unintended consequence of chasing certain metrics and optimizations.
It’s a good reminder that regardless of all of the strategies and technology available to shape the way customers shop and communicate with your brand, the most important thing is to always consider if the decisions you make are aligning with the experience you hope customers have.
Tesla CX leader departs
Tesla is experiencing a talent drain. Jose del Corral, the automaker’s head of product for customer experience, is leaving Tesla after almost eight years. He joins many other senior leaders who have left, taking years of critical institutional knowledge with them - also, a significant amount of the time of Tesla’s operations.
This challenge isn’t unique to Tesla. How is your organization set up to transfer institutional knowledge when employees leave the company?
AI Headlines
Kustomer launches Signals. Signals is a powerful new feature that brings AI-generated customer insights directly to the insights panel. It fundamentally changes how we understand customer context by shifting from manual review to an automatic, intelligent analysis of customer activity.
Nvidia invests $2 billion in Marvell, launches AI partnership. This will address a bottleneck of the current technical limitations of AI.
Microsoft Copilot Cowork Signals Shift to Multi-Step AI Workflows for Enterprise Users. Now, it goes beyond content generation and elevates to task orchestration and execution across enterprise applications.
Hershey applies AI across its supply chain operations. Improving the supply chain is one of the most important but behind-the-scenes ways both consumer goods brands can improve the customer experience.
Apple rethinks its AI strategy, focusing on hardware. Apple isn’t trying to compete in the LLM realm and will be shifting to focus on hardware. iOS 27 Extensions will allow users to install and run other chatbots inside Siri.
