Joel Neeb, Chief Transformation and Business Operations Officer at 8×8, shares valuable insights on the evolving relationship between artificial intelligence and customer experience.
Rather than replacing human agents, Neeb emphasizes that AI serves as a powerful augmentation tool – providing context summaries, coaching prompts, and brand-aligned response suggestions that help agents deliver more empathetic, personalized service.
“Investing in AI to reduce headcount at this point is potentially misguided,” Neeb explains. “You’re probably going to miss out on some of the nuances and the truer understanding and depth that your employees have.”
When implementing AI in customer service, it’s important to categorize use cases into three buckets:
- Augment: enhancing human decision-making
- Automate: high-impact, high-effort, low-risk tasks
- Simulate: testing scenarios in safe environments
He stresses the importance of optimizing processes before automating them to avoid “automating inefficiencies.”
As states like Virginia move to regulate high-risk AI applications in customer service, Neeb welcomes the development of clear frameworks for automation decisions while highlighting the need for proper governance and oversight.
The conversation acknowledges consumer hesitation about AI interactions but notes growing acceptance as experiences improve. Ultimately, the future of CX lies not in choosing between human and artificial intelligence, but in finding the optimal integration of both.
