As AI becomes a bigger part of customer experience, the real issue for many consumers may not be the technology itself, but the way brands are choosing to use it.
Francesca Roche sits down with Ali Fazal, Chief Marketing Officer at Gladly, to discuss why AI in customer experience fails when brands put themselves before customers.
Fazal argues that too many AI deployments have been designed around internal convenience, rather than customer value, leaving people with experiences that feel cheaper, colder, and less trustworthy than what came before.
Looking at how AI has entered retail and ecommerce, he says it has often been “implemented with very little thought about how it benefits the consumer.”
That matters because customers are already operating in a low-trust environment, where reviews can feel pay-to-play, social content can be hard to verify, and AI-generated imagery can blur the line between expectation and reality.
For Fazal, the problem becomes more serious when AI is used in ways that visibly serve the brand first, especially when consumers can see that automation has been introduced for “convenience, probably a reduction in cost, probably for the sake of speed and expediency.”
“All it does is annoy me and make me not want to buy their product.”
The bigger CX opportunity, he suggests, is for brands to rethink what great service could look like if personalization, proactive communication, and scale were no longer limited by cost.
Instead of simply automating the same sparse touchpoints customers have always received, brands could use AI to provide more useful updates, answer practical questions faster, and support customers through the channels they actually prefer.
Fazal asks a simple but important question for CX leaders: “How can you make their lives easier?”
That means helping customers find the right product faster, understand delivery timelines with more confidence, access return and exchange information more easily, and get support in a way that feels relevant to their situation.
Yet Fazal is clear that AI should not flatten every customer interaction into automation.
He says “there will always be a place for humans in CX,” particularly in moments that require sensitivity, emotional intelligence, or high levels of consideration.
The strongest brands, he suggests, will be those that know when automation can remove friction and when a human response is the experience customers deserve.
For CX leaders, the challenge is not just adopting AI faster, but proving to customers that AI can give them something better than the service it replaced.
