How AI Flattens Customer Journeys And What To Do Instead

AI is about to make “great customer service” normal and cheap, and that should worry every leader who thinks a chatbot equals customer experience. I’m joined by Steven Van Belleghem, a global authority on customer experience and AI, to explore what happens when large language models become the portal of our lives and customers no longer visit your website, browse your journeys, or even choose your brand directly.

We get practical and provocative. Steven argues that automation can widen the gap between companies and the people they serve, because employees stop feeling real customer emotion and start managing graphs instead. We talk about why “authenticity” is overrated, why intention over perfection creates trust, and how the most memorable experiences are often carefully orchestrated rather than spontaneous.

From there we map a path out of the efficiency trap. Steven shares IKEA’s standout approach to AI and reskilling, then introduces his three layers of loyalty: transactional convenience, transformational relevance, and deep belonging. We also dig into brand commoditisation, short-term marketing dopamine, AI advertising models, and even the next frontier of customer experience through humanoid robots. If you care about customer experience strategy, employee experience, brand differentiation, and the future of work, this one will give you frameworks to test immediately.

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You can get tickets for the Future Of Work event in Brussels on the 18th June 2026 at https://future-of-work.eu/

Transcript

Welcome And Guest Introduction

Marc Curtis 0:00

Welcome to the Pioneers Podcast. I'm Mark Curtis. Today I'm going to be speaking to Stephen Van Belleghem. I will ask him to give a little bit more information about his background, but suffice to say, Steven is an exceptional speaker, and we're really looking forward to having him as part of the future work programme on the 18th of June in Brussels. So, without further ado, let's hear from my conversation with Steven.

Marc Curtis 0:24

Hello, Steven. Thank you so much for taking the time to uh talk to me today on the Pioneers Podcast. To introduce you very briefly, you are a Belgian-born global authority on customer experience and AI, which is quite a claim. You have six international bestsellers under your authorship, the most recent of which is uh Diamond in the Rough, which apparently Forbes said was a number one must-read business book in 2024. So you've you haven't done anything for two years, is what I'm reading from that. You are the co-founder of Nextworks, and you are a professor at uh is it Vleric Business School? Yes, yes. I don't want to uh mangle up the pronunciations. And and I think for me one of the most interesting things, and I'll and I'll hand over to you, is your one of your central theses that basically almost every company talks about how they are customer focused or experience focused or CX is incredibly important to them, but actually very few of them are actually really getting that right, or at least in the execution of it, they're not really getting it right. But anyway, thank you, Stephen. Really nice to meet you, and maybe you can you can you can fill in the gaps a little bit on on what I've just said and give us a bit of a an outline of how you are where you are today.

Steven Van Belleghem 1:39

Yeah, uh thank you very much, Mark, and and thank you for having me. And this was a very warm introduction, so I appreciate that.

Marc Curtis 1:47

I'm not combative. I'm not gonna uh I'm not gonna try and trip you up. I think it's the other way around, if anything.

Growing Up With Customer Centricity

Steven Van Belleghem 1:52

That's good. That's good to that's good to hear. Yeah, how how did I end up where I am? I think there are two main things that happened in my childhood, in my teenage years, that were very important to get me where I am today. First one is my parents. They owned a photography store in a small town in Belgium. And looking back to how they did their business, they were super customer-centric. They were always talking about customers. We were having lunch and dinner together, they were always thinking about how we can do more, what should we do, how do we invest in our customers. And that's what I heard every single day. And for me, it was like a natural thing. I thought that's how you run a business. It's only later on, when I actually became part of the real business world, that I learned that that was really exceptional, how they did that. So I got injected with customer centricity in my DNA, I think. That that's one thing. The second thing is that I was very fortunate that my father's sister, she married with an American and they live in Silicon Valley, very close to San Francisco. And ever since the age of 14, I spent my summers at their house. So I had the opportunity to spend a year and a half in total in Silicon Valley living in the home of my relatives, feeling the positive energy, feeling the can-do mentality, getting to know people from Silicon Valley. I had the opportunity to go to school there during summer. I did my research for my thesis there. So I interviewed senior leaders at Autodesk and Intel back then, they're the really cool companies. So I learned a lot about technology and the positivity and the positive effects of technology. So that combination, if I think back to it, that's what I'm doing today. And I think that's because of what happened when I was a teenager.

Marc Curtis 3:39

And uh it sounds like you were there in the real golden age of this kind of reputation that American had at that time of being incredibly polite and you know giving to customers, right? You know, it was almost certainly coming from the UK, which I think is a bit similar to Belgian in that respect, that we have a slightly more, you know, standoffish approach to customer experience. And and we always look at America as being almost OTT in in how they, you know, go out of their way to respond to customer needs. Do you think that's still the case now in America or or you know, have things kind of leveled out a little bit?

Steven Van Belleghem 4:13

It's double. I I I still love going to the US. I think it's especially as a tourist, it's actually a fantastic country to travel. People are taking care of you in a good way. On the other hand, they are sometimes really stuck to processes, is what I feel. I do often business in the US. We take tours or we do tours with European executives, we take them to Silicon Valley or New York or Boston to let them feel the innovation that's happening right there, and then we go to hotels and restaurants, usually nice places. But then sometimes we uh come in a restaurant and we decided up front which wines we want to have. But sometimes I'm in a good mood, and then I'm like, I want to have better wines than the ones that we booked. And our group is into it, so can I see the wine list and we're gonna upgrade this a little bit? And in half of the cases, I can't do that. They're saying, sorry, this is what you booked up front. Uh, we cannot change that. And then I'm like, yeah, but you're gonna make more money and we're gonna be happier customers. I said, no, sorry, that's what's in the contract, so we're gonna stick to it. So they're they're super customer friendly, but very process-driven and very rigid in the process. That's my experience. At least I think in Europe we have less of a customer-centric DNA, but we are more flexible. I think with the European, you can say, this is new, but I would really love this, and then maybe we're gonna be a little bit upset first, but at the end of the day, we're gonna make sure that that things get done. And that's that's a quality I think that that we underestimate. And if we would inject a little bit more of that positive customer-centric mindset and combine that with our flexibility that we have in Europe, I think we would we would do really well.

Marc Curtis 5:52

Do you think that that scales up to your experience of some of the corporates that you work with in terms of how they are because it's interesting, I think, when we talk when we think about customers, I think people immediately have an image in their mind of what a customer is. And I think if you work in a retail environment, for example, you know, your customer is the person who walks in through the door and you're handing them a coffee or or a bag. In a corporate environment, your customer is quite often another business, or it could be an end user, and and and and that comes with a whole different set of demands and challenges. But do you think that there is a space in the in the corporate world, in the B2B customer experience world for that kind of flexibility, or or do you feel that maybe we're we're we're following more the the rigid kind of process-driven approach for that?

Steven Van Belleghem 6:38

Yeah, when I said we're flexible uh in Europe and we're trying to move forward, I was talking probably about small business owners, about the hospitality world, more like my parents, more like when you have physical day-to-day contact with your customers. In in some of the large corporates, it's it's it's different, obviously. It's also pretty rigid, stick, stick to certain processes. I I still believe that one of the big issues in corporates is that most people never see a client in real life. Most people don't hear the oohs and the ahs from the customer feedback directly. They see a report, they see an Excel sheet, they see a graph, they see a score, but that's something rational. Whereas if a customer is really upset, or if a customer is really excited, you have to feel that. It's like when when I'm I'm a fan of Club Roach here in Belgium, and when I go to a big game and we won, I come home and I'm super excited, and then my my wife is at home watching TV, and when I come home, she was, how was the game? I said, Wow, we won, I was 2-1, it was a last-minute goal, and it was insane. Then she's like, Oh, I'm happy for you.

Marc Curtis 7:49

Because it's secondhand, secondhand enjoyment.

Steven Van Belleghem 7:52

It's second hand. You need to feel the energy, positive or negative, yourself, and that is the main driver to become more customer-centric. And I'm still surprised, I mean, everyone understands that principle, but I'm still surprised that only a handful of companies actually have programs where everyone in their organization, no matter what your job is, actually sees, hears, and meets clients. It's super valuable.

AI Makes Distance Worse

Marc Curtis 8:15

No, absolutely. And I think there are so many companies where those client relationships are mediated through either a Salesforce or through account management. But that doesn't necessarily give you the whole story. And I think, especially in in potentially the B2B world where you still have customers and end users, but there are extra steps. So the the actual users of your products will probably not be the same as your customer necessarily. And therefore the delight or the the experience that they're having using your products or navigating your your systems is is second or even third hand. Do you think that well I was gonna say I was just I was just wondering, just to bring in the AI thing a little bit, do you think that the use of these new technologies is gonna help us join up some of these these dots? Or or do you think it's uh potentially driving an even bigger wedge between customers and uh companies?

Steven Van Belleghem 9:05

No, it's gonna drive a bigger wedge without any doubt for multiple reasons. First of all, you have the power of the LLMs. First I thought they want to be the gateway of the internet, the new gateway of the internet. If you go online, that your first stop is Claude or ChatGPT because it's so good, it's so efficient, they do everything for us. I redefined that now. I think they want to be the portals of our lives. That any question, anything that we want to do in our lives, our first stop is one of those large language models because it will be so easy, it will save us time, we can outsource it to our personal assistant. So that means for many industries that I will not end up on their website, I will not search for them, I will let the LLM figure out where I should buy and then tell the LLM go out and buy it for me. So it will become harder to have contact with your customers. That's one thing. Second thing is AI in corporates is really good in commoditizing great customer service. So great customer service is gonna be accessible for everyone, it's gonna be available 24-7 in your own language, always on limited time that you invest. So it's gonna become cheaper for your companies, it's gonna be easier for us as customers. Because of that, the incentive to improve small structural processes in your organization will drop. Because today, imagine that you have a structural problem in a certain journey and people call. You got 100 calls a day, and then it's an easy fix, but still it's 100 calls a day. If that is costing you money, you say, All right, let's let's solve this structural issue so that we don't get those 100 calls anymore. But if the monetary value or the cost of those 100 calls drops to zero because of AI, then you lose the incentive to structurally solve other issues that you have in the journey. And when you lose that financial incentive, companies will not pay attention to it anymore. So I think because of automation, because of this LLMs and and the easiness of solving issues, that we're going to become less customer-centric.

Marc Curtis 11:13

I suppose as well, it it underlines the point that customer service is not customer experience. It's an aspect of customer experience. And and and and if you the customer service element of it is just one step in a very long journey, but actually if you if you outsource effectively that journey to an AI, you you effectively it becomes invisible or opaque to the business. Exactly. What those conversations are Imagine, Mark.

Steven Van Belleghem 11:36

Imagine that five to ten years from now, there are no customer journeys anymore. Today, very often, customer experience teams they are focused on improving the customer journey. What if you don't have a journey anymore? Today, customer journeys they're like a heartbeat, right? It goes up and down, and sometimes it's great, sometimes it's bad, sometimes it's exciting. What if that flatlines? That it's always the same, that it's frictionless, you will not have any memory of it anymore as a customer. You will not have any emotion linked to it. It's just a flatline. So I'm convinced that if we want to boost that customer experience in this age of AI, that we will have to invest in deeper relationships that almost have nothing to do with automation and efficiency. I think that if all parts of the customer journey become super scalable, super efficient, that the value will be in doing non-scalable efforts towards your customers because that's something that a machine cannot do, and that will create memorable moments, memorable experiences that will no longer be found in the traditional customer journey. That's my prediction.

Marc Curtis 12:39

So I I'm I'm interested in that because you've previously uh had this rather provocative statement that you consider authenticity to be overrated when it comes to AI. But actually what it sounds to me like is that maybe you're you're tending towards maybe not characterizing it as authenticity, but but real moments of connection, which are by definition authentic, but actually it it's maybe the value because of the scarcity of those moments that actually becomes you know becomes the main point of it rather than rather than creating you know more authentic conversations at scale.

Steven Van Belleghem 13:11

Exactly. But I I still think that authenticity is overrated. Authenticity is is not by definition a good thing. Donald Trump is very authentic, in my opinion.

Marc Curtis 13:22

Well, I think previously you've used you used the you used Lenin as an example, but I'm glad to see that um that Trump is Trump is Trump is the new example.

Steven Van Belleghem 13:30

And they're super I mean, a lot of the things that people really value are not authentic like all. Like one of the most successful concerts is Taylor Swift, right? Or Coldplay. People love it, but it's not authentic. It's human, but it's not authentic. It's super well orchestrated, it's a machine, and because that machine runs so well, people have a great experience. So authenticity is not by definition good, it's not by definition necessary. I think that those unique personal moments, I think you can organize that as an organization and still make it feel unique and deep. I think if you don't organize it, and if you I'm a little bit scared of the word authenticity in an organization because then people say we will do it in an authentic way. When we feel that there's an opportunity to do something, we will do something. In reality, you do it once, and then people forget about it. So I've only seen it work if it's part of a structure and a machinery that feels authentic and real and unique to the human, but behind the scenes, there's machinery that is actually orchestrating things in a fantastic way.

Marc Curtis 14:36

Maybe the authenticity in that case. Because I could by the way, I completely understand what you're saying. I mean, you know, to have moments of you know genuinely great experiences, that takes work, right? That takes work. These people aren't coming out there on stage and just making it up as they go along. It's you know, there's millions of preparation. Yeah, absolutely. So maybe the maybe the authenticity is less about the content, but more about the intention. So the the the authenticity of uh Taylor Swift is because she intentionally wants to give everybody an amazing experience. Yes. That's really maybe the companies who focus less on that are the ones who either don't see the value in investing in the experience or simply don't care, although I think most companies wouldn't say they don't care, but but maybe they they think that there are other routes to it, which again goes back to Yeah.

Steven Van Belleghem 15:26

I love that idea. It's intention over perfection. I think that's people understand that you cannot be perfect, but they have a hard time if you don't have the intention to to do a good job. I love that conclusion. Yeah, intention is really good.

Human Contact As A Premium

Marc Curtis 15:38

Well that's good. I said something intelligent. I think I should probably stop the podcast here and uh and call it a day. I'm quite interested in digging into this idea of human contact as a premium, and this is something you've talked about as well before.

Steven Van Belleghem 15:51

Yes.

Marc Curtis 15:52

Do you think that if human interaction becomes almost like the scarce resource, the luxury item effectively, and both in customer and workplace context, does it does it risk creating a two-tier kind of experience? Um you know, especially I'll finish off by saying obviously you speak a lot about customer experience, but coming from a B2B background, I think a lot about employee experience. I think the two can be quite similar. But but if you're trying to work at scale with large amounts of employees or large amounts of of customers, do only a very few of them get to benefit from this scarcity, or or is there a way of scaling that as well?

Steven Van Belleghem 16:28

It's a very good question. I know one example of a company who who did something really cool there, and that's IKEA. Already in I think 2021 or so they launched their chatbot called Billy, because IKEA gets a lot of repetitive, easy-to-solve questions. So it's it's a perfect environment for an AI chatbot. Reality was that it it worked really well, and because of that, 1500 people were theoretically out of a job. But IKEA did not fire them, they reskilled them and they turned them into interior design advisors, and they created a new service line where you could book a video call with an interior design advisor before you went to the store to look at your kitchen, your living space, your bedroom, whatever. And you could talk with an expert who was retrained by IKEA, but that was someone who had the ability to listen and to have a conversation with customers, and that was a paid service. So people had to pay, I think, 25 pounds or something like that. And if you wanted to have a 3D sketch, it was 150 pounds. And all of those people started to do that. They created a revenue two or three years later out of that that was higher than 1 billion. So I love this idea where they say, okay, we have 8,500 people that we actually don't need anymore. A lot of companies would say we're gonna let them go and increase our our profits. IKEA thought, hey, can we use them to create more value for customers and the organization? And I love this example, how you you know completely reskill this entire group of people, thousands of people, and then make a new business line out of it that people are willing to pay for, and people are also happy with this new service. But I I don't know if you ask me for a second example, I don't know a second example in this. So it's quite exceptional.

Escaping The Efficiency Only Mindset

Marc Curtis 18:12

I would agree. I think it's and and funnily enough, I was I'm happy to hear you talking about it because I wasn't aware of it, and I I interviewed somebody else for this podcast uh a couple of weeks ago, and they cited the same example, and uh and I've been Okay. No, but it's it's it's great that you mentioned it because I've been absolutely raving about it, because it's such it's such a clear example of AI efficiency done right. And I'll talk about this your you know, because I think you've spoken about the efficiency trap in the past. But I think the challenge is exactly what you say, which is whenever we talk about things like this, we always end up talking about the same handful of companies, you know, like here, Patagonia, you know, or whoever, who who are the the absolute outliers, you know, who are who are doing these things in a way that most companies uh haven't got the bravery to do or they don't have the mandate to do for whatever reason from from their hierarchies. But I think one of the things you do touch upon, and I think it's worth diving into a little bit, is is how a lot of corporates especially get very hung up on the efficiency side of AI rather than improving experience. And obviously IKEA is a really good example of that. But maybe you could talk a little bit more about why is it? Why is it companies, why is that the thing that they're honing in on? I mean, I guess it could be obvious, but is there something a little deeper behind it?

Steven Van Belleghem 19:23

I think it's it's our addiction to higher Ibidah and and cost cutting in in times where you know it's it's it's not so easy to do business. Suddenly you have a certain superpower that allows you to save money. People jump on that opportunity and they see business cases that they see, oh, minus 13% costs here, minus 30 here. Let's let's do that as soon as possible. So people get overexcited about it, and I understand that. And I think it's important. But the problem is if you only focus on that efficiency part, you're gonna end up with a very transactional kind of customer relationship. And a transactional relationship is necessary because in these times you want to deliver great, easy to work with tools, but it's also very fragile because people don't become loyal to the brand, they become loyal to the system. Right now, you see a big migration of people moving from ChatGPT to cloud for a number of reasons, because it's better and because of the whole Pentagon case. Uh so people move to Cloud like this. That shows that no one really loved the brand ChatGPT. We had zero connection with it. We loved the functionality of the system, we were loyal to the system. The second that we find a system that is better, we migrate without any doubt. And if tomorrow Gemini would be better than Cloud, then we're gonna see the same migration. There's no connection, it's just transactional loyalty, loyal to a system, not to a brand. And that's the that's the danger, in my opinion, because you we're gonna end up with a downward spiral if we only focus on efficiency, because that will destroy the differentiation power of your organization. But we can also, or we should also take into account that our customers, they also have a superpower with AI, they will have the possibility to look for an alternative, a cheaper alternative, without any effort whatsoever. The the search to find an alternative will drop to zero for the customer. So why not use a few AI bots that while I'm sleeping, look for a cheaper airline ticket or find me a better telco contract? I don't put any efforts in it, but I save money. And if I don't explicitly say I want my telco subscription to be with this company, then the AI will choose for me. So I'm afraid that by being so focused on the efficiency part that a lot of organizations three years from now will find out that they will have problems differentiating and that they will have problems asking premium prices.

Marc Curtis 21:56

Yeah, I I I completely agree. And I think it puts me in mind of Amazon actually. People always cite Amazon as being, you know, this this amazing experience. And it is. But there is nothing about that platform that that draws you to it because you're in love with their stance or their brand or their or their their uniqueness. And in point of fact, if there was another platform that tomorrow appeared that had the same range of products and maybe was slightly slightly cheaper or or whatever and didn't require you to go through the process of opening up an account and blah blah blah blah blah, I think most people would have no no hesitation in, as you say, just switching to another one. Yeah, like just like that. And I and I guess the other challenge is, as you say, if people are then creating their own agents, you know, whatever the consumer version of Agentic AI begins to look like, and it almost certainly will, then really all this stuff is just happening in the background and we're just we're just getting a package delivered and it's almost irrelevant who's delivering that package. So what's the what's the sweet spot then? Because clearly cu companies need to you you need to make the most of efficiency savings because this this will enable them to remain competitive in pricing and profitability against their competitors. But but where's the line? Where's where's the where's the where's the perfect kind of union of the two?

Steven Van Belleghem 23:20

I'm I'm working on a new book and I'm working with three layers of uh customer loyalty at the core transactional loyalty. I buy from you because it's so easy. There the goal is to reinvent convenience. The second layer that goes deeper is transformational loyalty. I buy from you because you add value to my life. Here you have to reinvent relevance, and then a little bit deeper is deep loyalty. I buy from you because I want to belong to your brand and your community community because I identify myself with your organization. And here you need to reinvent belonging. And the transactional loyalty part is very fragile, deep loyalty is super, super strong. So the question is how can you grow into those circles of loyalty? What is the maturity of your industry versus your organization? And how can you create value for your customers that goes beyond the automation part? Those are for me fundamental questions right now.

Brand Building Versus Short Term Dopamine

Marc Curtis 24:23

No, absolutely. Yeah, I mean I again I couldn't agree more. I guess I guess the challenge is that you know how meaningful it is for the broad sweep of consumers. I I think I mean it's a slightly off-topic conversation, I guess, but when you look at politics, for example, we want a certain relationship with our politicians. We want to believe that what they're telling us is correct, we want to understand that their their policies are unique and and give greater value than the people that they're asking us not to vote for. But then actually the vast majority of people are completely disengaged politically and actually will just vote for whoever they've done in the past or or won't vote at all. So and I feel like the same could almost be true for customers and for businesses who who have already developed a very transactional relationship with the with with the brands. They don't even necessarily recognise the brands and you know, even as brands anymore. It's just the thing that they get. Do you feel that that that things are are moving back around to you know it the more that the more that everything becomes ubiquitous and and and sounds a bit like Jack GPT, the more we actually start to seek out better experiences. That that almost it's the unintended consequence is pushing us back in the other direction, perhaps.

Steven Van Belleghem 25:37

Yeah, we're gonna have an acceleration of average quality. Everything will look the same, everything will sound the same, and we will disconnect, we will just look at it from a functional point of view. That's why today is the moment as an organization that you have to invest in a deeper kind of relationship with your customers. I think one of the problems of where we are today is that most organizations have built their business on Google AdWords and on social media advertising, which is super, super short-term thinking. And we became addicted to all the statistics and the impact of measurement, right? It's measurement. And we all know, every study tells us the same, tells the marketing community the same that investing in your brand, differentiation in your brand in the long run brings in more value than just going for short-term activation. But in the short run, the short-term activation brings in more money than the branding part. And most marketing managers they don't stay on the same seat long enough to benefit for the long-term gain. So they go all in on short-term, make business cases, win awards with it, and then they leave and go to the next one. And the next one on that chair does exactly the same. And because of that, we have more commoditized brands than ever before. I mean, in in almost every industry, we have commoditized brands. There are a few exceptions, but people don't see the difference anymore.

Marc Curtis 27:06

Well, then I I think going back to the IKEA and the Patagonia outliers, you've got two companies there who who have legitimately and overtly taken a long-term view on their position and what they want to achieve. And it's probably also to do with the way that the companies are owned and structured as well. And I think when you have companies who are either, you know, in public ownership, so therefore they need to demonstrate something, or as you say, I think, and I think it you know, I've I've had these conversations before, I think the short-termism of marketing directors and marketing, you know, chief marketing officers, I think is is absolutely a part in this. They need to deliver something within the 18 months they're going to be there so that they can put it into their LinkedIn profile for the next one.

Steven Van Belleghem 27:47

Yeah, yeah, I agree. It's the dopamine of short-term results and measurements that is now creating a crisis because someone will get in between us and our brands.

Marc Curtis 27:59

Yeah. And and and and it's very, very easy, I think, to as a commercial organization who is specifically their their metric of success is P ⁇ L and margin to only look at P ⁇ L and margin. Because frankly, brand and this has always been, I think, the problem of marketing and and brand marketing as well, is that it's it's it takes a lot to be able to demonstrate the value. You can do a five-year brand awareness campaign, and at the end of it, when your sales do finally get that uplift, the sales director will say, Well, that's because my sales team have been doing a better job rather than you know, the m marketing tends not to get the not tend tends not to get rewarded, it tends to get blamed. Yeah.

Steven Van Belleghem 28:42

That's true.

Marc Curtis 28:43

But and I I wonder so I I suppose taking it back to the to the technology side of things and the AI side of things, again Is there a danger that we just go down the same route as AdWords and and measure you know, we're able to measure it, we're able to see the the short-term dopamine gains. Or is there a is there a a world or a or an option for companies to implement this kind of technology in a way that does play a longer game, you know, that does enable companies to sit back and say, okay, we trust you, we you've got us on this, you know, let's let's develop the brand.

Steven Van Belleghem 29:19

Well, it a lot will depend on the strategy of the LLMs. Uh like ChatGPT starts with advertising. They want to make 25 billion out of their advertising revenues. That that's a lot of money, so they will have to become pretty aggressive in their sales and in their offerings. So a question will be what will the new ChatGPT experience look like when ads come in that platform? On the other hand, you have Claude that advertised on the Super Bowl saying ads are coming to AI, not on Claude. We are not interested in that. So we're gonna have to do it.

Marc Curtis 29:55

They're very good.

Steven Van Belleghem 29:55

They're very good in brand building. They had this very fortunate event with the Pentagon that really showed what their where their values were. I mean, if you have an existential threat and you stick to your values, then people think that you're pretty credible. So that's very attractive, and then they're saying we're not going into advertising and we're the best performer in the market, migration. So they will play a vital role in what will happen. If all of them go into advertising, then we're gonna see the same thing again, I think, as we saw on Google AdWords. I truly hope that we're not gonna end up there because advertising ruined the internet experience a bit for all of us. The internet used to be good until Facebook had a billion users and Google had a billion users, and suddenly they made a lot of money in the easiest way possible. That ruined the the experience for us. So let's hope that doesn't happen with all the AI platforms.

Marc Curtis 30:57

And this is this is always the challenge, right? In order to scale at a rate that is meaningful in the tech world, and I remember how um how quickly people signed up for open AI when that first suddenly appeared and it you outstripped everything, you know, 100 million users in a week or something, whatever it was. The only way to sustain that is with serious VC, right, with with serious capital investment. And then all of a sudden you you you're on a timeline, right? And this is what happened with Facebook and and to a certain extent X, Twitter, whatever you want to call it. They had to demonstrate that there was a there was a business model that could ultimately return revenues. And the more that there was invested, the shorter the time span on getting their money back had to become, and and and then the more aggressive the the the situation. And then you end up with a situation where algorithmically everything is rage bait and and exactly and clickbait.

Steven Van Belleghem 31:48

It's usually when they when they get to a billion users, that's a dangerous point. Right. Because then have the the volume to to make money out of it.

Marc Curtis 31:56

So yeah, it's gonna be interesting to see how this uh That's the point at which Google stopped saying um that their motto was don't be evil, right? Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Well they got rid of that, didn't they? Yeah, they I'm fascinated by the idea of AI and advertising and algorithmic bias, because I think that's potentially from a consumer perspective, I think consumers are aware that they are at risk of that, even if they don't necessarily think it's affecting them. I think everybody feels that it's something that happens to everybody else but they're okay. I wonder though, in a business environment or a commercial environment how much these biases are gonna shape the kind of ways that companies are beginning to communicate or or even strategize for sales or product development with their customers. Because going back to your point about everything just becomes average and mediocre, some of that's gonna start to infect back into the companies as well, right? Because because because as you said right at the beginning, if you if you introduce AI, you lose touch with your customers, that the their experience becomes very flat. And I guess all that happens is that the the the customer experience director will just ask their LNM to give them an update on how the customers are feeling, which will be passed algorithmically through the biases. Do you know what I mean? And the whole thing becomes a ridiculous doom loop of everything becoming a little bit shittier over time.

Steven Van Belleghem 33:23

Yeah.

Humanoid Robots As New Channels

Marc Curtis 33:24

I don't know whether you've seen that video, the I think it's En shittification from the video. I saw it, yeah. I I was pissed. I loved it. No, it it's it's it's it's the video of the month, I think. And it there was what was it? Oh, that was it. I was reminded of it literally yesterday. I saw a thing pop up on Reddit that said that um gosh, I can't remember what brand now, it's not Samsung Smart TVs, but one of the big brands of smart TVs is now introducing adverts whenever you switch inputs. So when you go from HDMI 1 to HDMI 2 to Netflix, it will give you a 30-second advert on your TV that you cannot get rid of in shittification. So in terms of in terms of personalization and frictionless service, do you see any any other sort of uh areas of our lives that that that that kind of consumer effect is gonna is gonna bubble up to the surface as well? Is there anywhere else that we're not thinking about now that maybe we should be aware of that's gonna change radically? It's it's kind of you can sort of imagine the consumer experience changing, but but what other areas in business do you think might be affected?

Steven Van Belleghem 34:33

I had this wonderful conversation uh two weeks ago with Jeremiah Oyang. He's one of the AI leaders, uh thought leaders in Silicon Valley. I've been working with him for 15 years, and we were talking about humanoid robots. How would they change experiences? And he came up with an idea that I never thought of. He said, Everyone thinks about the humanoid robot who walks into your house, empties the dishes, and cleans up everything. But what if you could download brand features on your humanoid robot for money? What if you are, for instance, a three-star Michelin chef and you offer a service that I can download on my humanoid, the menu from that three-star Michelin chef that my robot can prepare that with the greatest detail. The robot can order all the ingredients, and then I pay 100 euros and I have that three-star Michelin dish at my home. I have a top experience, and that 3-star Michelin chef is making money through the distribution channel of robots. And I thought that was a mind-blowing idea. What if you start to sell brand experiences through humanoid robots? What if you create brand companions physically with the robots or virtually on our on our phones or whatever device that we will use? I think that could become a next frontier of customer experience and a new frontier of business models.

Marc Curtis 35:55

It's really interesting that you talk about the robots actually, because for some reason that seems to have dropped off the public consciousness to a certain extent at the moment. Which is weird, right? Because it's weird, yeah. Because because actually the things are moving really, really fast in that area. And actually when when you when you start to think about putting generative AI into a robot, you then which people are obviously already doing. I wonder why that is. I wonder why I wonder why we're focusing more on the AI side of it now than and meanwhile you've got all these various different companies racing to get humanoids into our houses.

Steven Van Belleghem 36:28

I think we we still need a ChatGPT moment for humanoid robots where suddenly something pop up pops up, it's affordable, and it's like wow, and it's not still shaky. But I think we need to go to China to see the power of humanoid robots. I mean, that's a different league than what we see in the West in terms of development and and making progress there.

Trust Proof And Watermarks

Marc Curtis 36:47

I've seen a few of those videos, and and I have to say initially, and this is a whole other subject by the way, but initially my my immediate first thought was, well, that's AI. And and then I started to see it a few times and with human beings in the foreground saying, This is literally not AI, I'm standing in front of this stuff. I think that's in a way that takes me on to a another really interesting moment that we're at with the LLM sort of moment, as you call it, which is and it goes back to the authenticity question as well. Whilst I accept the fact that maybe authenticity is overrated, we are at this weird point in human history where whenever we see something now, our default position has suddenly become is it real? Rather than Wow. Yeah, exactly. I mean it's it's lit I mean that's literally flipped in the course of it. It's gone.

Steven Van Belleghem 37:35

If you see a video and you see a human doing something exceptional, you used to think, wow, that's insane. Today you think, I want to make sure this is real. So we lost our wow moment in life. It's it's very sad.

Marc Curtis 37:47

So how do we get that back again? How do we given that trust trust and authenticity I'll stop using the word authenticity because I think we've I think I've overused it. I think I've I think I've used up my my 200 authenticity moments in the in the thing. But how do we how do we re-establish trust? And again, going back to that customer experience thing, I mean, you know, more and more and my son says, I've got a twelve-year-old son. Of course he watches YouTube. And I'm noticing more and more that, you know, especially with fast food commercials on YouTube and whatever, uh a lot of them do see to be seem to be if not CGI than than than AI generated. There's that feel you get from it that's AI generated. And I know that's probably won't even be there in a year's time, we won't be able to differentiate at all, but is that a problem? Does it matter that the thing that we're being sold is an imagination of what that thing is? Has that always been the case? I mean food food famously is not food when you see it on a in an advert, it's it's quite often something else. So do we need things to get dirtier and more real again?

Steven Van Belleghem 38:54

Number of things. Uh first of all, there's there's gonna be an increase in value of something that is proven to be human-made. I I just saw a video this weekend of the new of the creation of the new Apple TV logo.

Marc Curtis 39:09

Right.

Steven Van Belleghem 39:10

And when you see it on Apple TV, it looks like it's AI generated, but it's not. They made a making of video, and it's extremely cool how they made it and how much effort they put into it, and they want to make a statement and saying, not not everything should be AI, this is human art, and everyone is like, oh wow, that's that's cool. So you're gonna have this premium on proven human-created art or experiences or qualities. Second thing is, I think we're gonna get used to the fact that more and more things are now AI generated, and we're gonna start to appreciate it more if it's done really well. It's like when we watch Mission, yeah, Mission Impossible is a bad example because Tom Cruise does all the stunts himself. If you watch Star Wars, you also know that those spaceships don't really exist, but if it's done well, you appreciate it. If it's crappy, you're not gonna watch it anymore. And then the third thing is I think we need to figure out a system to make sure that everyone who films something or creates something can prove that it's real.

Marc Curtis 40:09

And it's gonna be that there needs to be a standard, doesn't it?

Steven Van Belleghem 40:12

Yeah, it needs to be a standard, and I think it's impossible to prove what is false, but it's gonna be easy to prove what is real. For instance, in our phones, what if there's some invisible watermark that they integrate into it? That every picture that you take, every video that you make, that it's actually watermarked and linked to my device, and that you can know this is a real video or a real picture. And if you want to see the origin of a certain video, that you click on an information link that is integrated in it, and you can see, oh, it's mark it's made with Mark's iPhone, it's this number. It's proven to be valid and real. I think it's easier to prove what is real than to prove what is false.

Marc Curtis 40:58

Yeah. Yeah, I think it is a challenge, but it then also raises it raises privacy issues, right? Because on the one hand, you want to be able to s to you know retain ownership over photos. I mean again, it's a whole other topic, but I have effectively I've used Google Photos now for the last 15, well, ten years certainly, for storing all of my images. At some point, Google will probably do a bad thing and sell it all to ChatGPT if they haven't done already. You know, having something in there that that links it indelibly back to me is is presumably a good thing, but on the flip side of that, everything is linked back to me, right? So That's right, yeah. But then there's never an easy answer to anything, I suppose. No, no, it's a very complex uh I don't think we're gonna fix it I don't think we're gonna fix it right here.

Event Details Pioneer And Marketing Future

Steven Van Belleghem 41:44

Not to me in the We could just drop some ideas and maybe someone can hear something and actually do something with it, yeah.

Marc Curtis 41:50

Weirdly, we've been speaking uh for about 40 minutes, which um is is feels like not nearly enough time. And and I think that there are a lot of questions I would love to hear more about. I mean, without giving too much away, you're speaking at our future of work event in June. It's still a long way off. A lot can happen in the world of AI and a lot can happen in the world of customer experience. Broadly speaking, what do you want our audience to come away with in terms of you know the the kind of questions that you want them to be asking or the kind of insights maybe that they without without giving anything away about the the talk that you're gonna be delivering for us?

Steven Van Belleghem 42:26

Well, I'm looking forward to the event and and thank you for having me. I think a lot of the topics that I will discuss are are similar to what we talked about now. I'm gonna talk about these three levels of loyalty: transactional, transformational, and deep loyalty, and make that real, make it tangible. I have examples and cases and ideas and frameworks of each of these levels on how you can grow into it, and I think you can use them both towards customers, as to employees, as you mentioned, Mark, when it's B2B. I mean it's very similar. You can use the techniques and the philosophy on both on both groups. So that's gonna be my central theme. I'm gonna talk about why efficiency is super important, but I'm also gonna invite people to think beyond efficiency and create real value for the humans that they work with.

Marc Curtis 43:10

Excellent. Well, that I'm genuinely really looking forward to it. And I think you're you're on in the morning, so you'll be able to give everybody a I think it's the morning. I need to check the schedule.

Steven Van Belleghem 43:18

So final question What's the date again, Mark? What's the date again? So we can tell that to our uh listeners.

Marc Curtis 43:24

18th of June. I think I talk about it briefly in the in the prelude to this, but 18th of June in Brussels.

Steven Van Belleghem 43:29

The egg in Brussels is what's my calendar. Yeah.

Marc Curtis 43:32

Yes, absolutely. And it promises to be a fantastic event. You've we've got some. I mean, I hope you'll be able to stick around for some of the other speakers as well, because genuinely we've got a really amazing mix of people who are going to be talking about a whole range of different topics. Final question for you, and this is something I ask everybody it's a format point. Let's call it a format point because we like a format point. So I asked this to everybody that that comes on the the Pioneers podcast. If you look back, and you and a lot of people also say they're parents as well and I think given given yourself. Yeah, no, but that's absolutely fine because you know respect to that. I mean I y you know the the the question is what one person organization has really for you been a pioneer and a leader in your life that's led you to some of the big decisions or some of the directions that you've taken? Obviously you've spoken about your parents running the the photographic shop and and I would talk about my father as well. You know his attitude to life has very much inspired the way that I deal with it. But is there is is there anybody else is there any other person, you know, living or dead or company that that has inspired you?

Steven Van Belleghem 44:36

Yeah absolutely I think the the start of my professional life was very important. I had the pleasure to work with my marketing professor that I was a student from in university and he hired me as his research assistant when I graduated and I worked with him for two years. His name is Rudy Munart he's uh still a good friend of mine but he was the one that uh threw me in the deep and he said you need to present now for this group of executives and I just finished school uh for two weeks and suddenly had to speak to the leadership team of M and I wasn't ready for that at all but he said we're gonna jump in the deep and I'm gonna help you to make it across and I'm gonna train you and by the time that we've been working together for two years I'll make sure that you can speak for audiences and that you can do that in a confident way and that you know how to structure your research in a credible way. And he he launched me he gave me that confidence he gave me trust he had my back and he was and still is always an inspiration for me. Yeah and I'm I'm a big fan of his LinkedIn posts he's a very sharp writer he doesn't use AI and you can see and feel that so um yeah and we still see each other a lot and we almost WhatsApp every single day so that that that was the launch of my career.

Marc Curtis 45:49

I might have to get it might ask for an introduction he sounds like the sort of person we should speak to on the on the podcast. Absolutely absolutely genuine genuine question. I'm asking for my wife as much as anybody else because my wife is a is a marketing professional as well and we were talk and we d we're a very boring couple. We talk we talk about the future of marketing more than probably is healthy in any relationship. Do do you think and this was sorry this was born out of the fact that one of my sons they've just done a career day at school so they filled in this probably AI generated form and they were all told what their future career would be. Which probably is a bit more scientific than what I was told. I was told I was going to be a dustman and my son got told inexplicably that he's gonna be a chemical engineer. Don't even get me started on that but his friend was told that she was going to have a a career in marketing and my my wife was talking to her mother and said but marketing's not going to exist really not in the way that we think it does in five years' time so much of what marketers do now will be delivered by AI. Just as a final thought and sorry for adding in an extra extra question where do you where do you see marketing going?

Steven Van Belleghem 46:56

I think marketing will will end up where it's supposed to to be much more strategic thinking about how you can create value for customers in the long run. I think that that is what marketing will do. Marketing became a communication department very operational very tactical whereas marketing is more than communication marketing is about delivering the strategy that creates value for customers and that's where that's where marketing will evolve because all that operational tactical stuff that will be done by AI That's a great question.

Marc Curtis 47:27

There you go Laura I hope that answers your question. It's almost like we're doing phonons Stephen thank you so much for for taking the time genuinely grateful to you and and really really looking forward to June the 18th in Brussels to to hear your keynote in the morning and really excited to see other people's reaction as well because I I love talking to you about this stuff and and I think you're a very engaging speaker.

Steven Van Belleghem 47:48

So thank you thank you so much uh Mark it was a pleasure you were a great interviewer and thank you for having me at your event and we're gonna make that an an amazing day I'm super happy I can I can uh join in that adventure more than welcome thanks so much Stephen thank you very much so that was Stephen Van Bellegam talking to me on Pioneers Podcast.

Marc Curtis 48:08

I'm really grateful to him for spending the time with me a really fascinating conversation and and I think super interesting to look at the role of AI from a customer experience perspective and also how it's going to impact our relationship with employees as well and these are things that quite often I think bigger businesses sometimes overlook is not just the customer service element of what new technology can bring through chatbots and what have you but but how does that fit into the overall customer experience. Really liked the idea about how human scarcity and created by humans is actually going to become the thing of value for us in the future and and what I'm beginning to see through a lot of the conversations that I'm having for this podcast and also outside as well is that that seems to be where we're landing at the moment the scarcity of something that's been created by human hands or you know an experience or a moment that even if it's even if it's contrived and still delivered or has that kind of feeling of authenticity this is where the this is where the future of the human connection in a month it's it's an amazing AI revolution that we're experiencing at the moment that that's where that's going to fit in. If you want to hear more about um topics like this if you want to see Steven and all the other amazing speakers we have at the future of work speaking please go to the website it's um the the the link will be in the show notes it will be in the podcast notes and go along see if you can get a ticket if you're a Lyrico customer there's a very good chance that you can get a free ticket to the event if not there are other ways you can get tickets and they're not very expensive I promise you sign up come and see what we're doing on the 18th of June in Brussels you will not be disappointed I guarantee you that. Until next time though thank you so much for listening