The most dangerous thing about AI in customer experience isn’t that it gets things wrong. It’s that it gets things right — efficiently, cheaply, at scale — while quietly optimizing away the interactions that create real customer relationships. Think of a river straightened into a concrete aqueduct: the metrics improve, but the ecosystem disappears. That’s the trajectory we’re on with AI-driven CX today, and most organizations won’t notice until the retention numbers start telling a very different story.

In my latest piece on A Future Intense, I dig into what I’m calling the hidden cost of frictionless CX — the flow conversations, the messy-but-valuable human exchanges that don’t fit neatly on an operations dashboard, and what we’re systematically engineering out of existence in the name of containment rates and handle time. The question worth asking isn’t how fast can we resolve this? It’s what are we missing by resolving it so fast? Read the full article →