CXWeekly Update | AI's Impact On Customer & Employee Experience

Hey CX Nation,

In this CXWeekly Update episode #277 we walk through ideas, goals & CTAs the team at CXC has been focused on, not only internally but from the learnings we're being exposed to from clients & strategic partners on a regular basis. 

In this episode we walk through a few emerging trends around how AI is impacting the future of Sales, CX, Customer Success & Support + the future of work. 

Thanks to our friends at GoTo, Intercom & TriNet for supplying some amazing market reports that fuel this week's episodes. They collectively went out & interviewed & surveyed thousands of business leaders from across the world to see where they are in their AI foundation building efforts. 

Click here for GoTo Pulse of Work Report 2025

Click here for Intercom Customer Service Transformation Report 2026

Click here for Tri-Net State of Workplace Report 2025

Don't worry we have a ton of amazing brand new guest interviews & episodes coming down the pipeline.

We're also working on new forms & mediums of customer focused business content -- including my 2nd book "Make Happiness A Habit" that we are launching in the New Year. 

We've also been building a few new podcasts behind the scenes to take all that we've learned with CXCP & start finding other podcast areas ripe for more content. 

A big part of CXC's mission is to continue creating valuable customer & employee focused business leader content, including CXWeekly updates like this that are digestible, actionable & most importantly entertaining. 

The CXChronicles Podcast is approaching a huge milestone in the upcoming months that most podcasts will never achieve. We closing in on 300+ episodes of customer focused business content from incredible Founders & Executives from all over the world. 

CXC is partnered with several leading software & technology providers including Hubspot, Intercom, Freshworks, & several others who might be the difference in your CX/EX performance moving forward. 

We provide our clients with audits, assessments & scorecards and we provide custom CTAs centered around your content engine to drive CX/EX health, utilization & health performance for our partner solutions (Hubspot, Intercom, Freshworks), & on-demand managed services (partner led implementation, utilization performance & training for several of our partner solutions).

If you enjoy The CXChronicles Podcast, stop by your favorite podcast player and leave us a review today.

You know what would be even better?

Go tell one of your friends or teammates about CXC's content, CX/CS/RevOps services, our customer & employee focused community & invite them to join the CX Nation!

For you non-readers, go check out the CXChronicles Youtube channel to see our customer & employee focused video content & short-reel CTAs to improve your CX/CS/RevOps performance today (politely go smash that subscribe button).

Contact us anytime to learn more about CXC at INFO@cxchronicles.com and ask us about how we can help your business & team make customer happiness a habit now!

Transcript

Adrian Brady-Cesana (00:00.814)
Hey guys, how we doing? I'm Adrian British-Gonzalez, founder and CEO of CX Chronicles and host of the CX Chronicles podcast. And this is a CX Weekly Update. So, number one, guys, super excited for today. There's all of this talk and all of this debate and all of this conversation and yammering right now around a couple different things. Number one, obviously, our good little buddy AI. And if you're not already playing with it, if you don't already have your short...

list of tools that you're becoming an expert at, get after it, you're gonna be getting left behind. But really, we're talking about AI, we're talking about the pulse of work. We're thinking about how does that relate and impact customer experience, customer success, customer support. And as always, like we do in the show, trying to tie together what some of the different market views that are out there.

are seeing and feeling and what are different companies, what do they care about, what are they investing in? So we have a couple of really interesting reports today from some of our partners that I'm going to kind of base today's Seeks Weekly update off of. The first one is going to be the Pulse of Work in 2025 survey from our friends at GoTo. They do this every single year. They do an incredible job of building and aggregating all this information and going out and talking with

you know, thousands of different businesses and customers to understand really kind of what's happening out there and really kind of understanding where some of the opportunity lies. So we're going to walk through a couple of different examples from that incredible report. We're definitely going to talk about some of the big things that our friends at Intercom are seeing. They did an incredible job of releasing their 2026 customer service transformation report. And I know that my good friend Declan Ivory over at Intercom.

was a huge part of putting this together. And guys, what they see in aggregate across all the customers that they work with that use Intercom, their insights are extremely valuable. Their insights are probably really clear examples or indicators of where the puck is to go. So I'm gonna get into a couple different big points that our friends at Intercom are really kind of seeing and feeling. And again, they did an incredible job too. They went through and...

Adrian Brady-Cesana (02:19.726)
surveyed 2,400 global support pros across the world, leading SaaS, technology, fintech, e-comm, gaming, gambling, to understand what they're thinking about AI, right? And to understand sort of what their big to-dos are. And then the last big report that we're gonna draw some examples for today, it's Trident. I know it's crazy, like, what the hell are you doing with Trident? But Trident's massive, number one. And number two, they do incredible work chronically and understanding and surveying the state of the workplace, right? So they've got some incredible insights.

and trends around how small and medium businesses are thinking about the state of the workplace and how they're thinking about their employee experiences and thinking about what they're seeing around the EX side of the game. And everyone keeps talking about, know, we're all afraid we're gonna lose our jobs and I don't know if I'm gonna have a job and how fast is this gonna happen tomorrow? And it's an interesting time because we don't know what's gonna happen. And frankly, in the SaaS land, technology land, many of us, we gotta...

If you're not skating towards finding either incredible niche type of opportunities or thinking about how you're going to immediately rebrand and reposition your experiences, it's going to be interesting, man, because there's already a lot of friends, there's a lot of clients, there's a of partners where we have that. The job market is very, very interesting right now. But what's going to happen once this change does go through?

I've been saying it for over a year or two on the show, like, EX has always been important, it's about to become even more important. So with that being said, let's jump into five things that we really need to think about as it relates from how AI is going to position, help, and really part of the disruption and part of the evolution, how it's going to impact CX and CS in today's world. Okay, so number one, from the GoTo Pulse of Work report.

Let's just start off with some brass tacks. Let's just start off with a couple of facts and figures around what people think. Right now, 62 % of employees say that AI has been significantly overhyped. The types of AI tools that employees are using or are beginning to utilize or are beginning to adopt, 53 % of them free tools like ChatGPT, 23 % of them are going to be company.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (04:42.51)
Purchase tools from an external provider. 19 are going to be company developed tools for internal use. And by the way, guys, we've had some of the best episodes and podcasts we've had over the the near 300 episodes, man. A lot of companies will build things internally and then figure out, shit, this thing that we built internally to optimize our business might be a bigger opportunity than the damn thing we're selling anyway. So interesting idea there. And then 12 % tools purchased by employees for their own use.

A lot of us are in that camp. I lot of the people that we meet with at Siege Chronicles, many of our prospects or the people that we're meeting through the content, they're just going out and finding their own tools, bringing it into the business, bringing it into the day job and figuring out how to make that shit work. And then they're going to figure out how they can, over time, do enough tests to understand what type of ROI they're seeing and where some of these benefits are going to lie. a couple of big things that we need to think about. What are the benefits of AI tools?

According to the Pulse of Work report, 83 % of the respondents said increased productivity, which all of us know that. 73 % better customer support, 70 % improved motivation and engagement, and then 64 % more collaborative with coworkers. So that's some positive stuff around where things can actually move. Okay, I talk about it all the time on the show, but companies globally are spending the 1.27 trillion and growing on.

on software as it stands today. According to the Pulse of Work report, $2.9 trillion is the amount US businesses could gain from unlocking AI's potential. Now when I started CX Chronicles five and a half years ago, one of the big problems I thought I was gonna have to set there in the world was...

US companies at that time were collectively losing around 100 billion globally, the number wasn't the trillions, but you start to take due to just poor customer experiences. So if there's almost $3 trillion of opportunity gain here, plus all of the other stuff that most CX and CS and support, executives and experts, people that have been doing this for a long time in a variety of different companies where you already know this, is gonna change a bunch of stuff, it's not gonna change all of it. There's still a ton of...

Adrian Brady-Cesana (07:00.288)
strategic and very deep, thoughtful things that smart people who have gone to work before and done that at scale have to bring to another business. a bunch of really good examples right here from Pulse of Work showing the opportunities that are out there, right? Okay. The next big one that I wanted to jump in, I want to move to the Intercom Report. So one of the big ones that jumped out to me, 87%. So according to senior leaders,

Directors, VPs, C-suite executives. 82 % of organizations invested in AI in 2025. 87 % are planning to invest in this year, 2026. This level of budget commitment suggests everything that we talk about on this show. And not only is AI coming, it's already been here, man. It's been here. Bill Wade, CFO at FICO, this was maybe 50, 60 episodes ago, and I'll put it in the show notes, but.

Companies like Veik though have been using AI machine learning and natural language processing technology for 50, 67 years. But that type of change and that type of immediate investment and finding the budget required in this period of time, that's vast guys. It indicates some of the stuff that I know I talk about a lot on the show and then I push my guests in terms of unpacking, but that's a really big thing to think about. Teams using ARC early wins.

Speed, scale, cost savings. And over three quarters of the intercom respondents say AI is meeting or exceeding their expectations. So what are some granular examples or some granular examples of the benefits that some of the intercom respondents are seeing? So number one, faster response times and resolution times. 53 % of the respondents said faster.

responsive resolution tests. Number two, 24-7 sport coverage. Duh. Like guys, I remember back in the day, whether it was through a BPO or whether it was through having overnight shifts, this is a game changer. get people answering customers every minute of the day. Number three, scaling support without growing head count. Look, I think that the days of unicorns might be gone and we might be moving in the world of venture capital anywhere, in the world of starting things up and building from scratch and finding product market fit.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (09:27.886)
I think the days of unicorns might be something in the past. The days ahead of building companies, whether they're doing 10, 25, 50, 100 million in annual revenue with a fraction of the headcount, that's literally where things are going. cost savings, so sorry, number three, scaling. And then number four, cost savings, reduced cost to serve. So companies are gonna organically be healthier early.

Right? If they're building appropriately and leveraging AI in the right way. And then number five, offering support in multiple languages. I remember years ago we had Vasco Pager, the CEO of Unbabel on the show. Awesome company, she went out of Lisboa. But there are companies and BPO's and major service businesses that have been doing that for decades. And it's a huge, huge spend.

So it's gonna be interesting to see how that changes things. And then lastly, the big thing that I really wanted to kind of highlight and get into was just this idea of thinking about your flywheel. So in the Intercom report, they do a fantastic job of kind of walking through the thin flywheel, but it made me think, any one of us can build our own flywheel situation. And what does that mean? Number one, it's the whole analysis piece or analyzing. Where's all the information? How do you compartmentalize and gather and aggregate all this information? To analyze it.

Then you move on the second step of training. Then you move on to the third test, or the third step of testing. Then you move into this deploying. And there's gonna be a rinse, wash, repeat type of a cycle that happens ahead. So last thing, what are companies prioritizing for 26? In this report, 38 % of them AI agents to automatically answer customer queries. 35 % of them AI co-pilot to help human agents work more efficiently.

34 % AI powered phone and voice support. So you're have a whole other change on the CX side of the game there guys. And then lastly, 32 % AI agent to handle complex and multi-step tasks. So we're getting there really, really close. All right, and finishing guys, so to wrap up the last example I want to get to, in the TriNet state of the workplace, employers think that workloads are manageable, but yet 23 % of millennials disagree, saying they work too many hours. So we're gonna also see this whole part.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (11:54.282)
of AIs here, what can AI do? How will AI change a business? How will AI change performance? We still have humans involved for now anyway, right? Until Terminator shows up, we still have humans involved. This does still matter. So understanding on the EX side, what your people think about what's happening or, you know, whether a place is happy or whether a company is good at retaining their place, we're going to see a bunch of changes here.

And then the second big thing in the Trident Report was this idea of working outside of hours is driven by personal choice, but also burnout factors such as manageable pressure and too much work. So it presents this interesting idea of like, what will be the expectations of future business people in terms of if you're burnt out or if you work too much or if you can't get the workload or the job done without getting to that place? Are you?

one of the future leaders that from a Darwinian perspective is going to make this cut. And I know I've been talking about the Pareto of 20 % in most subject matter expert areas are likely going to be the people that stay or the humans that stay that are driving, deploying, managing and quality controlling all this AI. I don't know what happens to the other 80%, but it really does mean that there's going to be this huge, huge need for EX.

Last example from the Treader Pro, only 1 in 3 Gen Z employees are extremely engaged in their jobs. Nearly 1 in 5 employees plan to switch jobs within 3 months. And employers? They're looking at all this AI side stuff. They're still gonna need the smart people. We're in an interesting time. that's today's CX Weekly Update.

Hope you guys enjoyed some of the examples we will share in the show notes, the reports from our friends at Goto, Intercom, and Try It Up. And we have a bunch of awesome content coming down the pipeline, But remember to make happiness a habit, and huge thank you, as always, for being a part of the CX Nation. Appreciate you guys. Thank you.